Caitlin Winner

"You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your..."

Fri, 25 May 2012 06:40:53 -0400

“You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.””

- How To Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon

nevver: My cultural references

Mon, 21 May 2012 05:12:00 -0400

nevver:

My cultural references

"And so, if we can hang on, it will be in the twenty-fifties that the manners and meanings of the..."

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:40:58 -0400

“And so, if we can hang on, it will be in the twenty-fifties that the manners and meanings of the Obama era will be truly revealed: only then will we know our own essence. A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and sounds of this era: Michelle’s upper arms, the baritone crooning sound of NPR, people sipping lattes (which a later decade will know as poison) at 10 A.M.—manners as strange and beautiful as smoking in restaurants and drinking Scotch at 3 P.M. seem to us. A series or a movie must already be simmering in her head, with its characters showing off their iPads and staring at their flat screens: absurdly antiquated and dated, they will seem, but so touching in their aspiration to the absolutely modern. Forty years from now, we’ll know, at last, how we looked and sounded and made love, and who we really were. It will be those stroller children’s return on our investment, and, also, of course, a revenge taken on their time.”

- Adam Gopnik, The 40 Year Itch

Jars, Pencils and LemonOil on Linen

Tue, 08 May 2012 12:01:29 -0400

Jars, Pencils and Lemon
Oil on Linen

Goodbye TXL :(

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:01:27 -0400

The last airport in the world where taxi and airplane are separated by about 100 feet.

“Airport architecture is always metaphorical architecture, Tegel looks like a spaceship — like the building itself might take off at any moment. The euphoria of the space age is inscribed in the architecture. You can argue that the new [airport] reflects our time in that it looks more or less like a shopping mall, with some airplanes added in back.”

- Berlin is Getting a New Airport New York Times

Still life with glass and plateOil on Linen

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:39:00 -0400

Still life with glass and plate
Oil on Linen

"Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white..."

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:31:59 -0400

“Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.”

- John Steinbeck on messy reading

Still life with yellow book

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 08:58:54 -0400

Still life with yellow book

The Glory

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 09:50:52 -0400

You know those moments. When your senses sharpen and your belly warms and something, either you, or the earth or both are shaking and you are indescribably delighted to be alive.

I just came across a passage in Steinbeck’s East of Eden describing such a feeling and it reminded me a similarly visceral experience reported by a character in one of Saul Bellows novels. Both texts below:

John Steinbeck in East of Eden:
“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then -the glory- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. ”

Saul Bellow in Henderson The Rain King:
”I began to feel the sensation in my gums warning of something lovely, and with it a close or painful feeling in the chest. People allergic to feathers or pollen will know what I’m talking about; they become aware of their presence with the most gradual subtlety. In my case the cause that morning was the color of the wall with the sunrise on it, and when it became deeper I had to put down the baked yam I was chewing and support myself with my hands on the ground, for I felt the world sway under me and would have reached, if I were on a horse, for the horn of the saddle. Some powerful magnificence not human seemed under me . And it was this same mild pink color, like the water of watermelon, that did it. At once I recognized the importance of this, as throughout my life I had known these moments when the dumb begins to speak, when I hear the voices of objects and colors then the physical universe starts to wrinkle and change and heave and rise and smooth, so it seem that even the dogs have to lean against a tree, shivering.”

Three C's of Content

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 21:06:00 -0400

I’ve been collecting thoughts about creating, consuming and curating content online. Provoking, if a bit despondent:

“The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from ‘Why publish this?’ to ‘Why not?“
- Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

“People are ignorant, not through a lack of information but through an over consumption of bad information.“
- Clay Johnson, The Information Diet

-Robin Sloan, Fish: A Tap Essay

Onion painting in progress (loops 3 times).

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:41:23 -0400

Onion painting in progress (loops 3 times).

Communities within Communities

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:03:46 -0400

Yesterday we released a new version of Amen. We added support for music, pictures, Facebook friend referencing and much more. We also made adjustments to the core service based on what we’ve learned over the last six months of activity on Amen while watching our community develop and grow.

Specifically, we saw one group of people come together from all over the world that had met each other on Amen. They used Amen in a way that was unique to their club, in a coded but highly conversational way. Because of the way the system was built the activities of this group were visible to almost everyone on the platform. Of course there is no wrong way to use a social service but we felt that they were posting to Amen at the expense of the broader community.

So we changed a few things in an attempt to remedy the situation:

First, we added a comments feature in the hopes that users would be able to express themselves through comments and without polluting lists.

Secondly, we removed the New Feed. This was essentially a fire hose of all opinions, and allowed anyone to interact with anyone else. In one regard a fire hose is great because it can lead to new discoveries. But while activity is great, hyperinflation isn’t – and we had to make sure that no single individual had the power to Amen every opinion in the system.

Lastly, and most controversially, we deprecated web posting, agreeing, and disputing. There are various reasons for the behavioral split, but ultimately our iPhone users were participating in a way that aligned with our core vision. While only a small fraction of our users were web-only, the majority of chitter chatter was created there. Typing is easier on the desktop than on mobile, of course, but on mobile we are able aid the user with ambient clues from the phone’s sensors (like places nearby based on GPS), which encourages opinions about real life experiences.

This is not to say that we won’t eventually support a full-fledged experience on the web again, but we need to think about how to do it right. Our challenge is to encourage quality over quantity without dampening overall activity.

Already, one day after the changes we have seen positive results: old users returning to higher quality content and lists growing organically based on real opinions rather than conversations. We are happy with the decisions we took and stand by them. We take our stewardship of the Amen community very seriously and are committed to its long-term growth and betterment.

(Full text on the Amen blog)

I went on vacation earlier this month. Highlights included:...

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 06:16:24 -0400

I went on vacation earlier this month. Highlights included: feeding Lemurs (not 8 foot gorillas) on Necker Island and learning how to sail. I also tried my hand at watercolor but need more practice. (Photo by Jonathan Harris)

The Hunger Games

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:40:00 -0400

I just read The Hunger Games. It was fun. Lots of young adult fiction themes, dystopic future, kids fighting against adults and the grownup world, first loves and so on.

There is a deeply creepy side to the story about government instituted surveillance which is edited down into broadcast entertainment for society. Because people enjoy the entertainment they put up with the surveillance (and the horrors of the game). Rather than fiction, this feels suspiciously like a criticism of our social networked times.

Rob Horning puts it nicely:

The creepy voyeurism and exhibitionism of [Facebook, Twitter etc.] it is palpable, no matter how much of a digital native one might be. Still we play along reluctantly with it and believe no one else has any interest in putting a stop to it all… we come to think Facebook must be for all these other people, but we have to keep consuming it too.

Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery. I was really...

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 12:00:05 -0500

Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery. I was really taken with his self portraits.

"Despite a huge knowledge base emerging about how startups work, startups have been able to absorb..."

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 10:55:31 -0500

“Despite a huge knowledge base emerging about how startups work, startups have been able to absorb little more than the basic patterns of how to build a startup. Most founders don’t know what they should be focusing on and consequently dilute their focus or run in the wrong direction. They are regularly bombarded with advice that seems contradictory, which is often paralyzing. And while startups are now gathering way more qualitative and quantitative feedback than they were just a few years ago, their ability to interpret this data and use it to make better product and business decisions is sorely lacking. The primary cause of these problems is that we lack the necessary structure to synthesize our accumulated knowledge on the nature of startups. We are missing a common language and framework to describe and measure entrepreneurship and innovation.”

- The Entrepreneurial Enlightenment - Startup Genome via Jen Carlile

"I do know that no recipe in the world is independent of the tides, the moon, the physical and..."

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:26:48 -0500

“I do know that no recipe in the world is independent of the tides, the moon, the physical and emotional temperatures surrounding its performance.”

- MFK Fisher

People who follow me on Pinterest vs. People I forgot existed

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 03:49:34 -0500

People who follow me on Pinterest vs. People I forgot existed

Darwinian Interlude

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 16:00:00 -0500

Yesterday I ordered a DNA testing kit through a company called 23andme. In six weeks I’ll get a report with information about my genetic ancestry as well potential health risks and inheritable conditions.

Why, you ask? Many smart people are predicting that this century’s scientific and technological advances will be in biogenetics and I want to get a head start. Besides, as my mother said when I asked her if the neighbor boy could teach me how to shoot a .22, knowledge is power.

In preparation for my test results I’ve been reading up on the future of biotechnology and found something interesting in an essay by Freeman Dyson on the topic of evolution.

Long before different kinds of fish began swimming around in the oceans, single cells that comprised the primordial soup were transferring genes horizontally. Meaning, advances made by the most efficient little creatures were shared to all, and life on earth made biological progress in unison.

At some point, millions of years after the birth of this commune, some cells discovered privacy and refused to share. The offspring of the selfish cells became the first species. The relatively brief period that followed was full of different fish, reptiles and birds and is called The Darwinian Interlude. Dyson argues that human beings effectively ended the Darwinian Interlude, and by extension biological evolution, by dominating the biosphere.

What’s interesting to me is the comparison between information transfer over the internet (rapid and accessable to all) to the fluid sharing of genes among those primordial cells. If cultural evolution has replaced Darwinian evolution as Dyson suggests then the internet is the medium through which we will all advance together.

I love you too, Torstr. (via sugarhigh)

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 05:28:20 -0500

I love you too, Torstr. (via sugarhigh)