I've been on holiday this week and have been reading stuff, including:
This piece about how magnificent, awful and stupid the B2 bomber is. This quote seemed pertinent about many kinds of technology supplier:
"It is impressive what you can persuade yourself to think you need once a supplier like Northrop perceives that there is no limit to cost."
And this, about the interfaces technology businesses give their 'b2b' users. It applies to entering coordinates into missiles too, it seems:
"The programming-and-confirmation process took hours. Scatter told me, “It’s not like Steve Jobs designed the interface.”"
This was echoed in this, about Crossrail delays.
It's the complexity of these systems and how they work together that could be causing issues for Crossrail. "Trains are more software than hardware these days," Wolmar adds. "The hardware is pretty simple but the software is the real issue. Debugging the software is a massive task."
That seems a more useful thought than 'software is eating the world'. How many things are now more software than hardware?
I like reading about poets, though I almost never read any poetry. I thought this was a good way to get at more interesting questions:
"With this feature, I wanted to give seven poets whose work I greatly admire the opportunity to have a serious discussion about poetry, free from the usual angling of “page vs stage” or “new young star brings poetry out of the dusty library”.
I asked each poet to come up with a question for other poets, then to answer as many of the questions as they wanted to, in whichever way they saw fit. I think you get to know the poets pretty well from a feature formatted in this way and I hope it will encourage readers to reflect on their own creative practices, whatever they may be."
I loved this overview of generative art. I adore blogposts like this. Generous, opinionated, not snarky.
This Vera Molnár from 1974 was a favourite:
This profile of Wolfgang Tillmans was good too. I think I aspire to the balance of niceness and rigour exemplified by these two passages:
"Tillmans is kind and polite. He compels those around him to be punctual, efficient, and prepared not by severity, but by living at a slightly higher standard than most people. When he asks a question, one becomes aware of the difference between feigning knowledge and being knowledgeable. He can explain why the stripes of a zebra are outlined with colors when viewed with binoculars and why eighteenth-century astronomers misinterpreted the transit of Venus. He avoids automatic settings on the tools he uses and dislikes conversational imprecision. Soon after we met, he described to me how he paints the edge of some photographs so that the colors appear to have saturated the paper. He held up a photograph. “I see,” I said. “I mean, you don’t,” he replied."
"Tillmans hangs chromogenic prints with Scotch Magic tape, inkjet prints using binder clips hung on nails, and magazine pages using stainless-steel pins. He specifies lengths of tape to the millimetre, the exact number of binder clips for each print, the angles at which nails are to be hammered into the wall, the kind of nail to use. Tape doesn’t touch a photo’s emulsion, only other pieces of tape stuck to the back. He uses tape dispensers of a specific make (Tesa), which don’t cut with serrated edges, and he signs his work with Cretacolor 7B pencils. Unusually, the gallery lights are installed before he hangs the work. He has standard heights at which the largest photographs are hung from the floor. Such instructions, along with many others, are compiled in a binder for each exhibition that contains international voltage and plug charts, instruction manuals for audiovisual equipment, detailed lists and photographs of the contents of each shipping crate, and illustrated diagrams for how to unpack a photograph from a shipping tube."
