("JP")

Anthea often uses metaphors to develop and convey new conceptualizations. This approach is in keeping with studies about the significant role of metaphorical thinking in creative intellectual processes in science and beyond. In Clash of Paradigms: Actors and Analogies Shaping the Investment Treaty System, for instance, she likened the system to a... See more

I’m thinking about how malleable the world is, and how easy it is to forget that. The world has, many times throughout history, reconfigured itself around strong visions.

Our desires, motivations and behaviors are constantly being shaped by incentives and systems we aren’t even aware of. So much genius and money has gone into a metaphor that... See more

Compared with the fragmented, D.I.Y. Web I knew, social media felt strangely predictable. User profiles on new sites like LinkedIn or Flickr were templated and surrounded by ads. They offered preset options from categories and drop-down menus—age, location, institutional affiliation—and quantified influence through friend and follower counts. The... See more

Scott details a pattern of disaster that repeatedly manifests around legibility. His opening example is from the late-18th century discipline of “scientific forestry”.

A natural forest is illegible. A tangle of plants. This is inconvenient from the standpoint of harvesting lumber. How do you quantify yield? Can you even make a meaningful map of this... See more

@gordonbrander Although perhaps a 2x2 makes more sense per @kevin2kelly https://t.co/55uzti2B17

The reason you aren’t living in the present, when all is said and done, is because you don’t feel the present living in you.

Worthy of particular emphasis is Weizman’s reference to a technique called “walking through walls”:

Furthermore, soldiers used none of the streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city, and none of the external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather moved horizontally

... See more