” [...] Every day there are more sounds, and I’m afraid that, some day in the future, every sound that’s possible to make will be in the world at the same time. And since every sound has its opposite, they will cancel each other out, and at the end of the day there’ll be billions of machines with their percussive rhythms, and billions of words in a language that doesn’t work anymore, and billions of people trying to be heard, screaming their lungs out, hurling their impotent noises into a world so saturated with noise that it might as well be deaf, and dumb, and blind.”

Now it’s Astrid’s turn to say nothing.

“All the noises of the world add up to silence,” says Harold. “This world will begin and end in silence.”

Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn’t a C++ programmer.)

It is inspiring. And humbling, very humbling. I sit in my (our!) studio, reading her blog, and daydreaming about writing like that. Writing openly about what’s on my mind, in my heart. That’s so very brave. I mean, somebody could read it! And then there is the Internet Archive and stuff. Sigh.

He didn’t know what to feel. It occurred to him that human emotion had not evolved quickly enough to keep up with what mankind’s scientific capabilities demand of it. Sometimes the tiny components that make up an experience just didn’t fit in to existing emotional receptors, and the result was simply numbness.

Christian Cantrell — Containment

My first sock ever, knitted up as I start reading through Cat Bordhi‘s New Pathways for Sock Knitters. Took me about five hours to complete, in some leftover yellow mercerized cotton. Learned some new techniques, which is always fun.

Concealing the wraps was not as hard to grok as I had feared, but the wrapped stitches do appear to be larger or stretched, which is a little unfortunate. You can even see them in the picture above, at the edges of the heel.

In the past I’ve experimented with having separate blogs for specific topics. I’ve also experimented with funneling the bits of content I generate elsewhere into this site. From those experiments I’ve concluded that: (a) running separate blogs is too much trouble, given how little content I generate; and (b) that funneling things like a tumbleblog into this site has little value, and creates a certain din that I dislike. And I still want to use this site for a personal record of whatever I am interested in recording at the moment.

The reason why I am telling you this is because changes are afoot. In particular, I intend to start posting the occasional note related to my knitting. I was meaning to put those in a (gasp!) paper notebook, but that’s just annoying (guess how many used-up paper notebooks I have lying around?). There is also the hope that if I share my notes on the web, they might be useful to someone else, someday.

I am also going to stop piping the contents of my tumbleblog into here, which means there will be only the occasional entry. Which might or might not be about knitting, the web, or how the cat is super-cute (and I hope to be that cute at her age).

If you are following this blog because you think I am a Silicon Valley programmer and I might post something interesting about that, you are most likely out of luck. Though there’s no telling when you give me a keyboard.

Microsoft sues Motorola over Android – and all the other mobile lawsuits, visually | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Apple’s segmentation strategy, and the folly of conventional wisdom – O’Reilly Radar

Google - Flinstones 50th Anniversary

USSR Pavilion, first floor map (by jericl cat)

Info Window “Google’s World” (by Alejo Malia)

– Samsung Fascinate Lightning Review: When Greedy Carriers Ruin Decent Phones

– Stanford Theatre Movie Guide

– Gender politics in Mexico City: Pink cabs rev up | The Economist

– Scripting News: Proposal: A new kind of blog comment system

– danah boyd | apophenia » social divisions between Orkut & Facebook in Brazil

– Solitude and Leadership: an article by William Deresiewicz | The American Scholar

The 53rd Annual Punctuation Posse Round-up | PassiveAggressiveNotes.com — funny (if not necessarily “passive-aggressive”) notes from pissed-off people

An In-Depth Look at How People Are Using the iPad