Jan Ove Waldner

Table Tennis has been a favorite sport of mine since school days. The best thing about Table Tennis is the nature of defense and offense and how easily great players switch from one mode to the other. One of the fantastic players of the game is the great Swede Jan Ove Waldner.

Icons of Susan Kare

The Paint Bucket icon for the fill tool and the Lasso icon for the freehand selection tool are now part of everyday computing for millions of people worldwide. Their designer, Susan Kare , according to the Museum of  Modern Art, in New York, is “a pioneering and influential computer iconographer. Since 1983, Kare has designed thousands of icons for the world’s leading software companies. Utilizing a minimalist grid of pixels and constructed with mosaic-like precision, her icons communicate their function immediately and memorably, with wit and style.”

Dreamspaces

Dreamspaces was a brilliant BBC documentary series with high production quality and visually stunning stories. Sadly, the series was of only 12 episodes. It covers great buildings from New York, Helsinki, Puerto Rico, Chicago, Romania, Brazil, Israel and many more international destinations looking at various aspects of design and architecture and their relationship with contemporary living. It is part travel show and part architecture appreciation with emphasis on the appreciation.

Antoni Gaudi

This is the third part in the series Visions of Space that I saw. This is a look at how the works of three remarkable architects of the 20th century shaped our modern world. It examines how each one of them use space to express our response to the power of the corporation (Meiss van der Rohe), the power of the State (Albert Speer), and religion (Antoni Gaudi).

The third part is called God’s Architect.

Aldus Manutius

The late 1400s must have been very similar to current times. This was the tumultuous time when the printed word was changing the fabric of society, much like the digital revolution of the early 21st century. The transition from the bibles of Gutenberg to the widely available paperback type books which created a huge reading class of people sowing the seeds of public participation and democratic ways was a time of confusion and struggle as existing structures came tumbling down.

In the middle of this was Aldus Manutius, venetian printer, publisher and inventor. His legacy lives on today five centuries after him.

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 as an example of a sentence whose grammar (logical form) is correct but whose semantics are nonsensical, and therefore has no meaning to understand. An example of a category mistake, it was used to show inadequacy of the then-popular probabilistic models of grammar, and the need for more structured models.

A poem and an image.

A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken Robinson led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements.

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity.

Meiss van der Rohe

Visions of Space is a riveting BBC documentary series exploring the life and works of three remarkable architects whose vision and work has reshaped the modern world. The powerful, direct, and provocative presentation by the eloquent Robert Hughes makes this a gripping and informative watch. He hobbles around with his walking stick slowly, thoughtfully, majestically and suddenly bursts out into an eloquence which is energetic, passionate, and opinionated.

The first part of this series is called Mies van der Rohe: Less is more

Every time I pick up this book for a read, I end up going through it with the same enthusiasm I felt when I read it for the first time. Despite being a recurring book in my bookshelf for more than a dozen years, this book retains a freshness. The kind of freshness one feels when plunging into reading a new, interesting book. I am not a big fan of philosophical books. Dreary arguments are not the reason I pick it up to read.

There is more to it.

A delightful short movie from Pixar.

Partly Cloudy is a delightful interpretation of the clouds and storks story of where do babies come from…