The Admiration Blog

"If you admire somebody you should go ahead and tell them. People never get the flowers while they..."

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:29:02 -0700

““If you admire somebody you should go ahead and tell them. People never get the flowers while they could still smell them””

"If you are patient in a moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow."

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:13:41 -0700

““If you are patient in a moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.””

- Chinese Proverb

Yellena James (via spaceships)

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 06:00:36 -0700

Yellena James (via spaceships)

Graeme Nicol: Uniformity (Dalian, China) (via spaceships)

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 06:01:11 -0700

Graeme Nicol: Uniformity (Dalian, China) (via spaceships)

Graeme Nicol: Hangzhou, March 2009

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 06:01:13 -0700

Graeme Nicol: Hangzhou, March 2009

David Kelley of IDEO

Sat, 30 May 2009 06:01:49 -0700

David Kelley of IDEO

spaceships: Japan (via Road Rage Bunny)

Fri, 29 May 2009 06:01:11 -0700

spaceships:

Japan (via Road Rage Bunny)

spaceships: Do you mean, why am I frugal? You can’t buy health and you can’t buy love. I’m a member...

Thu, 28 May 2009 06:01:10 -0700

spaceships:

Do you mean, why am I frugal? You can’t buy health and you can’t buy love. I’m a member of every golf club that I want to be a member of. I’m the highest handicap member of Augusta National. I’d rather play golf here with people I like than at the fanciest golf course in the world. I can do anything that I want, and I do. I buy everything I want to have. I’m not interested in cars and my goal is not to make people envious. Don’t confuse the cost of living with the standard of living. Bella Eidenberg was a Polish Jew who was at Auschwitz and some of her family didn’t make it. Twenty years ago she said she was slow to make friends, and that the real question in her mind was always, “Would they hide me?” If you have a lot of people that would hide you, you’ve had a very successful life. That can’t be bought. I know people that have billions of dollars and their children would say, “He’s in the attic.”

— Warren Buffett

spaceships: An old bunker for mineral fertilizers / FLOATING...

Wed, 27 May 2009 06:01:09 -0700

spaceships:

An old bunker for mineral fertilizers / FLOATING CASTLE THINGY in Ukraine.

Commencement Speech by Paul Hawken to the Class of 2009, University of Portland

Mon, 25 May 2009 19:38:57 -0700

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, neked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” Boy, no pressure there. But let’s begin with the startling part. Hey, Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating.
Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades. This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, and don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken.

Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food, but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING.

The earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.

What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description.

Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums. You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen.

Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisher folk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way. There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true.

Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.
Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots.

Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty.

But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals.

The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history. The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy.

We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet.

At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering.

Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich. The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable.

We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it.

In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever be quested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

People who explain complicated concepts in simple terms

Mon, 25 May 2009 06:04:08 -0700

People who explain complicated concepts in simple terms:

List compiled by Phil Gyford from an old MetaFilter thread:

“What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization) for laypeople?”

Ask MetaFilter’s best introductory books

Aeronautics
Mechanics of Flight by AC Kermode

Animation
The Illusion of Life

Timing for Animation

Archaeology
Archaeology

Architecture
Ching’s Building Construction Illustrated

How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand

A Pattern Language

Canadian Wood-Frame House Construction

Astronomy
The Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy

Astrophyiscs
Our Cosmic Habitat by Martin Rees

Biology
Biology

Macrobiology
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Fluid Mechanics
Life in moving fluids

Population Biology
A Primer of Ecology by Nicholas Gotelli

Stream ecology
Stream Ecology: Structure and Function of Running Waters by Dave Allan

Blacksmithing
The Complete Modern Blacksmith

Computer science
The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

The Little Lisper

The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg

Code

Cognitive Neuropsychiatry
Phantoms in the Brain by VS Ramachandran

Consciousness
The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness by David Chalmers

Cooking
Pastry
The Professional Pastry Chef: Fundamentals of Baking and Pastry by Bo Friedman

Economics
The Age of Diminished Expectations by Paul Krugman

Economics in One Lesson

Electrical engineering
The Art of Electronics

Engineering
To Engineer Is Human by Henry Petroski

Film making
In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch

Film Directing Shot by Shot by Katz

The Grammar of the Shot by Roy Thompson

Game design
Rules of Play

Gynaecology
Gynaecology by Ten Teachers

History
Middle Ages
The Making of the Middle Ages by Richard Southern

Ancient Egypt
The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt

Hunting
Hunter Seat Equitation by George Morris

Internet history
Where Wizards Stay Up Late

Investigation
Practical Homicide Investigation by Vernon Geberth

Practical Crime Scene Processing and Investigation

Investing
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

Law
Introduction to Legal Reasoning by Edward Levi

Learning the Law by Glanville Williams

Law 101: Everything you Need to Know About the American Legal System

Lexicography
Dictionaries, the Art and Craft of Lexicography by Sidney Landau

Linguistics
Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language by David Crystal

Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech by Edward Sapir

Language Myths by Bauer and Trudgill

Literary theory
Literary Theory, An Introduction by Terry Eagleton

Theory of Literature by Wellek and Watson

Logic
Methods of Logic by Quine

Rulebook for Arguments by Weston

Marine ecology
Marine Ecological Processes by Ivan Valiela

Materials science
Made to Measure: New Materials for the 21st Century

Mathematics
What is Mathematics?

Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction by Timothy Gowers

Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Algebra
Elementary And Intermediate Algebra by Timothy Craine

Calculus
The Calculus Tutoring Book by Carol Ash

Trigonometry
Precalculus by Margaret L. Lial

Statistics
How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff

Metalwork
The Complete Metalsmith by Tim McCreight

Microfabrication
Fundamentals of Microfabrication by Marc Madou

Molecular biology
Genes

Molecular Biology of the Cell

Movie business
The Movie Business Book by Jason Squire

Music business
All You Need To Know About The Music Business by Donald Passman

Nursing
Notes on Nursing by Florence Nightingale

Oceanography
Fundamentals of Oceanography by Sverdrup, Duxbury, and Duxbury

Pastoral care
Hearing Beyond the Words: How to Become a Listening Pastor by Emma Justes

Philosophy
The Problem’s of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

The Story of Philosophy by Durant

Learning to Philosophize: A Primer by Del Kiernan-Lewis

17th-19th Century
A Short History of Modern Philosophy by Roger Scruton

Photography
Basic Photography by Langford

Physics
Space and Time in Special Relativity by N David Mermin

Poetry
How to Read a Poem by Terry Eagleton

Poker
The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky

Politics
Rules for Radicals

The Prince by Machiavelli

Psychometrics
Psychological Testing by Anastasi and Urbina

Psychotherapy
On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored by Adam Philiips

The Great Psychotherapy Debate by Bruce Wampold

Radiology
Fundamentals of Radiology by Robert Novelline

Screenwriting
The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri

Screenplay by Syd Field

Story by McKee

Making a Good Script Great by Linda Seger

Studying
The Oxford Guide to Library Research

Sub editing
Essential English for Journalists, Writers and Editors

Teaching
How Children Fail

How Children Learn, by John Holt

Theatre
Backstage Handbook

The Empty Space by Peter Brook

A Practical Handbook for the Actor

Shakespeare
Thinking Shakespeare

Typography
The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst

Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works by Erik Spiekermann and EM Ginger

Urban Planning
Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Writing
Politics and The English Language by George Orwell

Fowler’s Modern English Usage

Elements of Style by Strunk and White

Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern

(via spaceships x binary)

A new addition to the Songs Around the World series from Mark...

Sun, 24 May 2009 06:02:50 -0700

A new addition to the Songs Around the World series from Mark Johnson and Playing For Change: “War, No More Trouble.”

(via spaceships x audiogasm x Bastian Schroeer)

Fri, 22 May 2009 06:02:47 -0700

(via spaceships x audiogasm x Bastian Schroeer)

Anatomy Trains Myofascial Meridians - A Revolution in Soft-Tissue Patterning

Thu, 21 May 2009 06:02:47 -0700

Anatomy Trains Myofascial Meridians - A Revolution in Soft-Tissue Patterning:

Thomas Myers studied with Drs. Ida Rolf, Moshe Feldenkrais, and Buckminster Fuller, and has practiced integrative bodywork for over 30 years in Europe, the UK, and the USA.

"Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without..."

Wed, 20 May 2009 06:02:44 -0700

““Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.”
—Arnold Bennett”

(via spaceships x naviina x j-p-g) (via agi500)

Tue, 19 May 2009 06:02:47 -0700

(via spaceships x naviina x j-p-g) (via agi500)

Michael Bollinger

Mon, 18 May 2009 06:02:00 -0700

Michael Bollinger:

Curator, designgeist.org

(photo of Agyness Deyn by Josh Olins for Love Magazine No. 1)

Silver Scorpio

Sun, 17 May 2009 06:02:44 -0700

Silver Scorpio:

I really like the branding and layout of this India-focused news site. Nice job, S.S., whoever you are.

Marcus Koppen, Hong Kong (via spaceships x behance)

Sat, 16 May 2009 06:02:48 -0700

Marcus Koppen, Hong Kong (via spaceships x behance)

An Essay by Einstein: "The World As I See It"

Fri, 15 May 2009 06:02:44 -0700

Excerpted from the excerpt at aip.org

“My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

“This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”