#sign

If my future were black, it was better surely to face it like a man than to attempt to brighten it by mere will-o’-the-wisps of the imagination. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#sherlock-holmes #the-sign-of-four #imagination

I refilled the wineglass and took it with me for a nice long bubble bath, where I settled in with Ambrose's guide for low-voltage outdoor lighting. It wasn't thrilling bubble-bath reading material, but I was impressed by his imagination. You wouldn't know from the writing that he'd never actually seen a low-voltage lighting system in someone's yard, much less installed one himself. His descriptions were clear, colorful, and written with authority. The inscription wasn't bad either: To Natalie, You're a high-voltage system as far as I am concerned. ↗

— Lee Goldberg

#fake #fraudulence #inscription #instruction-manual #instructions

And that's the last chapter of the history of the world: in which we create, through the workings of the imagination, a world that is uncreated: that is the work of no author. A world that imagination cannot thereafter alter, not in its deepest workings and its laws, but only envision in new ways; where our elder brothers and sisters, the things, suffer our childish logomantic games with them and wait for us to grow up, and know better; where we do grow up, and do know better. ↗

— John Crowley

#revelation #imagination

And they talk about their bona fide doctors. They have a list of doctors that signed affidavits from looking at a picture of Terry. That's where they get their information from, by looking at a picture. ↗

— Michael Schiavo

#bona #bona fide #doctors #fide #get

What doesn't hurt - is not life; what doesn't pass - is not happiness. ↗

— Ivo Andrić

#life

Americans are a can-do people, an enthusiastic people, a problem-solving people. And when given a direction and given a plan, they'll sign on. ↗

— Henry Cisneros

#direction #enthusiastic #given #people #plan

It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws. We don't yet know the most fundamental laws, and we can't work out all the consequences of the laws we do know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. We can't predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain, even though we can't always calculate their consequences. I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years. ↗

— Steven Weinberg

#intelligence #design

I gave in to life. I was not defeated but outplayed. ↗

— Ivo Andrić

#life

In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree -- the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence -- antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#gardening #hubris #nature #wild #wilderness

While any software system introduces some kind of formalization of the world, HCI (like AI) deals with formalizations of human cognition and activity. These are the issues that have lay at the heart of philosophical debate for centuries. In some ways, it would be hard to imagine a more philosophical enterprise. ↗

— Paul Dourish

#interaction-design #media-art #art