Interesting Things

"In a way, Art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It’s abundantly obvious that one doesn’t know the world around us in detail. What artists have accomplished is realizing that there’s only a small amount of stuff that’s important, and then seeing what it was. So they can do some of my research for me. When you look at early stuff of Van Gogh there are zillions of details that are put into it, there's always an immense amount of information in his paintings. It obviously occurred to him, what is the irreducible amount of this stuff that you have to put in... But to say there’s a piece [of cloud] over here with that much density, and next to it a piece with this much density—to accumulate that much detailed information, I think is wrong. It’s certainly not how a human being perceives those things, it’s not how an artist perceives them. Somewhere the business of writing down partial differential equations is not to have done the work on the problem... Somehow the wondrous promise of the earth is that there are things beautiful in it, things wondrous and alluring, and by virtue of your trade you want to understand them.
I'm really not a very nice person. I can say "I don't care" with a straight face, and really mean it. I happen to believe that not having a kernel debugger forces people to think about their problem on a different level than with a debugger. I think that without a debugger, you don't get into that mindset where you know how it behaves, and then you fix it from there. Without a debugger, you tend to think about problems another way. You want to understand things on a different level. Linus Torvalds
In 1994, Marilou Schultz, an acclaimed Navajo weaver and educator, was commissioned by the Intel corporation in Rio Rancho, New Mexico to weave a replica of a printed circuit board [...] The computer chip weavings, unbeknownst to Schultz, recall the role of Navajo women laborers, employed in the manufacture of integrated circuits, diodes, and other computer component manufacture, in the Fairchild Industries factory in Shiprock, New Mexico that operated from 1965–75 on the Navajo Reservation. In early marketing materials, the company expressed that they saw an analogous relationship between the skills and aesthetics of Navajo weaving—largely practiced by women—and computer chips. —Candice Hopkins, from the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art