Zagula spells trouble

As usual Ludwig comes up with cool stuff

a little ludwig goes a long way: Linkdump -- cool sites and tools

Honestly, I like all these, but especially:
- Blogpulse: basically a great place to search and see what's happening in the blogsphere
- the Blogpulse trendmeter: to see what's hot, not and where its' going
- and the pinball emulators. my kids just playing (although I think they are wrecking the keyboard.)

Die Duckomenta

Boing Boing: Donald Duck remixed with everything Sorry to keep taking stuff right off of BoingBoing, but I just can't help it. They are cool.

Die Documenta is really fun. An exibit in Germany that converts classic and modern mastepieces using Donald Duck and friends. It's from Interduck that does really interesting stuff.

Wenn du deutsch sprichst, dann kannst du das Buch, Die Duckomenta, kaufen (or even if you don't speak German, you might want to buy the book) und auch dieses Blog, CharmingQuark, besuchen.

Eerie, beautiful

Boing Boing: Deserted Japanese island photo gallery

Beautiful pictures from deserted Japanese industrial and war labor island called "Gunkanjima" About the island. More photos.

Dutch Modernism - De Stijl

Although less well known than the Bauhaus, De Stijl was also an early 20th century movement that had immense influence on modern design, art and architecture. The name De Stijl, actually comes from a magazine the group founded in 1917. Artists like Jean Arp, Theo van Doesburg, and, of course, Piet Mondrian, took abrstraction to a whole new level.

Here are some references:
- The best book I know on the topic is De Stijl 1917-1931 by Han Ludwig Jaffe
- There is a great art museum in Holland, the Kröller-Müller Museum, that has an amazing collection of this and other modern dutch art.
- A bunch of that collection is actually coming to the Seattle Art Museum in June
- Cool designer/programmer, Stephen Linhart even has a neat little tool - the Mondrimat - that lets you make your own faux Mondrians
- Here's the Van Doesburg Manefesto written in the magazine

Finally, I love all dutch art. The architecture, painting from the golden and impressionist ages, you name it. So make sure when your there to go to the Rijksmuseum.

Another quote - better to keep yours shut

a little ludwig goes a long way: Quote of the Month

From Ludwig: Currently reading Musashi and came across this gem:
"The human mouth is the gateway to catastrophe."

Boy do I still need to learn that one!

Here's another from Musashi that I just cannot agree with:
"Do nothing which is of no use."

Click to read the whole Book of 5 Rings.

Perpective

Just read a great quote from Will Durant in The Age of Napoleon:

It is good that a philosopher should
remind himself now and then that
he is a particle pontificating on inifinity.

Boy, if that does put things in the proper perspective. He was writing about rationalist French philopher and early psychologist Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis who, in works published after his death, began to ponder the likelihood of a first, divine cause.

Click for more great quotes and thoughts from Durant, who with his wife Ariel wrote some of the most beautiful, comprehensive and easy to enjoy history ever.

Laurie Anderson, eerie, disturbing as ever

close your eyes: O Superman

Troubling observation by Close Your Eyes on the lyrics from what I've always thought was one of the most important songs of its time.

"The lyrics of this song by Laurie Anderson from 1979 still strike me as an amazing startling premonition of 9-11. Just have a look at the middle part:

...Here come the planes.
They're American planes. Made in America.
Smoking or non-smoking?
And the voice said: Neither snow nor rain nor gloom
of night shall stay these couriers from the swift
completion of their appointed rounds.

'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force.
And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi Mom!... "

Mmm, mmm good

Marketing Playbook: Just plain cool - packaging as art as packaging

Awesome Wikipedia

Main Page - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I am just warming up to this whole Wiki thing. But wow is this an terrific tool. The web is still filled with useful, good stuff that's free!!

Marketing Playbook - Our New Marketing Blog

Marketing Playbook: Welcome to the Marketing Playbook

Check it out. This is really the project of my collegue Rich and I. We've both been doing marketing in one form or another for a very long time. The marketing playbook is our new blog that shares a bunch of thinking, tips tools and ideas that we have been using and are seeing all the time. Enjoy!

Paul Kos: one of the most moving conceptual artists

Saw this at the Walker Art Center over 10 years ago. Has never left me.
"In this life-size video rendition of a Gothic stained-glass window in Chartres Cathedral, the passage of light over the period of one day is condensed to twelve minutes. Here Kos adapts late-20th-century technology to the medieval storytelling art of stained glass. On view here is an exhibition copy of the work that is permanently installed, in a chapel-like setting, at the di Rosa Preserve
in Napa, California."

Lots of other cool things like The Sound of Ice Melting and Lots Wife.

Here are some other links:
Wry Faith That's a Bit Slapstick
Zen and Now
ArtFacts
Amazon list of books etc.

What's your Page Rank

Want to know how page ranks works. Well, its complicated, but here"s:

* Google PageRank Calculator Value Report without Toolbar. This tells you waht your rank is exactly.
* "Explanation":http://www.google.com/technology/. Google exaplains what they do for beginners.
* Techies explain it":http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/. Here's a techie explanation.

Submitting a site to search engines

Want to know how to get things indexed by search engines? This used to be incredibly hard, but given there are so few search engines (Rich gets 80% of his hits on "Tongfamily":http://tongfamily.com from google, just click on these links to submit:

* Add your URL to Google. This also gets you AOL which uses Google.
* "Yahoo":http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request. Gets the next set. This is really Overture underneath.
* "MSN":http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm. This actually submits to Inktomi.

These appear to be the most important other search engines since most use these two underlying engines now.

Very nice outdoor furniture

Modern Outdoor. Very cool, simple stuff. Nice wood. Nice site, even if it is too much Flash.

Logical Logic

The second book I ever read on logic was Willard Van Orman Quine's Elementary Logic. I kind of feel like Eric Costello on Glish where he notes one cool and opaque Quine quote "To be is to be the value of a variable" and a quiz on his What There is Article. Woah, big brain, big thoughts. Hurt head.

Was actually chatting about him recently with a friend of Wolf's who took him at Harvard. I was impressed. This stuff is cool and actually the only way I could ever figure out math.

But for a relatively dry academic, Willard has generated a lot of controversy. Some of it about the politics of blogging. Vasant notes "The blogsphere is an example of Willard Quine's coherence theory of truth: that things are true if they agree - or appear to agree - with other things that are held to be true."
Similar on Photodude.

Reasonable Reasoning

The very first logic book I ever read was Reasoning by Micheal Scriven. A great, simple book that played a huge role for me. And a very interesting guy. Here's his bio. Here's his CV, boy is it long and varied. Strange that there are so few blogs on the guy. Here's one that says he is one of the saints of the Universal Church of the Interactive Network. Hmmm..

Anyway, here's a typical great quote and a great, critical way to think about critical thinking:
Critical thinking can be seen as having two components:
1. a set of skills to process and generate information and beliefs, and
2. the habit, based on intellectual commitment, of using those skills to guide behavior.
It is thus to be contrasted with:
1. the mere acquisition and retention of information alone, (because it involves a particular way in which information is sought and treated,)
2. the mere possession of a set of skills, (because it involves the continual use of them,) and
3. the mere use of those skills ("as an exercise") without acceptance of their results. [see this for the whole passage]

Pretty simple. Seems like it would be great if there was a lot more of this thinking going on. In business, in politics, in the US and in the world.

No more? More Noh.

Weez Blog: extreme noh This is hilarious. extreme noh Ping Pong + Matrix + Crazy Japanese dudes = Funny as hell

But there are lots of interesting blogs and links on Noh.

Noh is one of the Japanese traditional theatrical arts, and had been backed by Samurai class till the dawn of the Meiji era. (Other traditional plays, such as Kabuki and Kyogen, were popular among the ordinary people.)

Here's an overview of traditional Noh plays.
Here's a little history.
Another really good reference site.
Here's a modern noh theater in SF called Noh Space.
And also note that Mishima did a bunch of famous modern Noh plays.

Less is more, right?

Minimalism Reading - The Art Weblog - art.weblogsinc.com
Very nice blog entry on Minimalism. Would love to see the MOCA show.

Mizuto Abura: What an amazing performance

Performance Theater
Just saw these guys last night.

Four superlative dancers from Japan. The best modern performance I've seen in years. It was called "Soup"

Part Charlie Chaplin, part Robert Wilson, part mime, comedy, drama, part Noh Play. Awesome.

Tokyo art index has another nice description of Mizuto Abura.