Salvador Dali on Imitation

Salvador Dali on Imitation

The link

"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing." 
 
~ Salvador Dali

Found in the collection of Dali quotes on Goodreads.

What it is

The quote above is one of many from the ever-eccentric Salvador Dali. It stands out in the linked quote collection as the one appeal to humility in a sea of strangeness.

That said, the top quote on the page is pretty good too:

"Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it."

What it means to me

I used to think that imitation was terrible. Whatever you do, you should always put you own spin on it, change it up, add to the world. This attitude was at the same time lofty and paralyzing: lofty, because the end goal of adding to the world is noble, and paralyzing because it meant I compulsively had to reinvent everything, even if doing myself made it worse. Reinvention is a lot of work; often it was easier to fantasize about a project instead of putting any work in. 

I have had to very consciously abandon perfectionism to get things done.

The quote above, to me, teaches humility. When you start with anything, you're not yet good enough to be original. Study, copy, and get good. When you know your subject, its basics, and its context, then you can develop you own style. A friend of mine paints and used to run an art gallery. He told me it’s easy to see which abstract artists have their (figurative) techniques down and which don't: well-trained abstract artists know what they are abstracting.

"If you have never failed, you have never tried anything new" (often attributed to Albert Einstein, to such a degree that I can't verify it's origin with a google search). This quote is plastered all over social media, but that doesn't make it less true. Reality is messy. Abandon your hope for perfection, abandon the illusion that you’ll get it right the first time, and get your hands dirty (or get them on a keyboard, if you will).

Get over yourself and create, just for five minutes. Even if that means, that you create a blog, then find out half a year later that the sidebar you built never shows up, and that half the tags only link to a single page. Then you have to swallow your pride, redo the lay-out and congratulate yourself on another small improvement.

I hope you like the new theme; browsing the blog archive should be easier now. If you greatly like or dislike it please do let me know. 

And feel free to steal it for your own blog.


Leonard

Rands in Repose

Rands in Repose

The link

Rands in Repose website

"Bored people quit", self-explanatory

"Meeting creatures", on meeting stereotypes

A surprisingly humane presentation on firing people at the 2013 CTO summit

What it is

“Rands in Repose” is the blog of Michael Lopp, or “Rands”. Rands writes about management, IT and general ‘tech life’, with a focus on leading teams and on team interactions. Lopp is currently Head of Engineering at Pinterest. When not writing on management, he obsesses over pens, bags and Instagram filters. Rands himself has an excellent introduction to his blog called “Don’t skip this”, which also indexes his 10+ years of content. I fully plan to steal that idea if I make it that far.

What it means to me

Rands never stopped being an engineer when he joined management, and his body of work is the chronicle of his attempt to find out how to make groups of people write software. Rands in Repose doesn’t update very often, and each post has a definite “I’ve found out something new” quality about it. I think he’s at his best when he describes office dynamics, within teams and between teams, because he lays bare processes that take place everywhere, but that are difficult to pinpoint exactly.

I appreciate Rands for being to able to perfectly write down things I have a vague feeling about. Like Information Dashboard Design, his blog has a very high ‘nod along’ factor, in the sense that the situations he sketches are recognizable.

Rands’ quests for perfect tooling are equal parts thorough and hilarious. Thorough because they are meticularly researched, and because the selection criteria ar provided in great detail. Hilarious because Rands is well-aware of how obsessive he is.

There's not much more to be said really, an a lot of material to read - go read some Rands in Repose!


Leonard

Grow

Grow

                   

The link

The Original Grow

Grow Cube, my personal favorite

Grow Valley, made for university

Eyezmaze, the site of the Grow developer

Eyezmaze on Android

What it is

'Grow' is a series of flash-based computer games by a one-man Japanese developer. In each game, you are presented with a mostly empty screen as well as 6-10 buttons with objects you can add (each can be pressed once). When you drop an object, the earlier objects get a chance to interact with it and with each other.

If, for example, you select a little man first, and a ball second, the man might kick the ball. If instead you select the man, then water and then a plant, the man might water the plant, making it grow larger.

When you have pressed all the buttons, the game scores how well you did in terms of how many objects you upgraded to their maximum level of uses. There’s an optimal selection order where all the objects end at maximum level and you get an impressive ending for your efforts. Recent versions can also have a secret ‘I give up’ ending where everything goes wrong and the world is subsequently rescued by aliens.

Grow is easier to experience than explain. Just follow any of the link and click around in one of the games. You’ll quickly discover how Grow works, and whether it’s something for you or not. All the games are in the left sidebar, the top section are the most polished ones.

All online versions of Grow require Adobe flash. Eyezmaze has also release  unique Android versions.

 

What it means to me

The Grow games are high quality little time wasters. Apart from the fact that I have a soft spot for anything weird and Japanese, I really admire the creativity that goes into these games, as well as the strangely satisfying internal logic.

Each game has up to ten buttons to press, and a lot of interactions between the various objects. Not only are the ‘right’ steps animated, but many of the ‘wrong’ steps are as well, making it difficult to gauge progress just by the animation you get: what you’re seeing may just be an elaborate dead end. I’m impressed not just by the amount of animation, but the amount of planning required to make such a game work.

The beauty of the whimsical animations is that they convey the logic of the game world very well. Many of the interactions that happen make no objective sense (watering plants to turn them into a satellite dish, fish that turn into dragons by eating flowers, a night/day on/off switch), but after a few minutes your brain not only accepts them, but it wants to go deeper and solve the game.

A Grow game with ten buttons has 10! (“ten factorial”) or 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 x 9 x 10 = 3628800 possible combinations. If you do one combination a minute and don’t sleep that’s 7 years of clicking to try them all. Luckily, you’ll have found the optimal one by 3.5 years on average.

The fact that you can instead solve these games in a few hours is a testament to how consistent the bizarre logic of Grow is. The fact that you keep going, to find out what happens, is due to great the animations.

Next time you have spare 15 minutes, fire up a Grow game and see how you like it!

Leonard

Centre Pompidou

Centre Pompidou

                   

The link

Centre Pompidou on Wikipedia

Centre Pompidou official website

Centre Pompidou on Google Maps

What it is

Centre Pompidou, formally named “Centre Georges Pompidou”, after a French president, is a building complex in Paris. It houses, among others, a public library, a center for acoustics research, and the Musée National d'Art Moderne, a large modern art museum.

None of these are as famous as the building itself (although the modern arts museum comes close). Designed in the seventies by architects Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini, it completely does away with any kind of surface covering and wears all its infrastructure on the outside.

Much like the Eiffel tower (with which it shares its ‘naked steel beams’ aesthetic), the building was reviled at first only to be embraced later on.

What it means to me

The first time I visited the Centre Pompidou, I was around eight years old. I decided I liked the building because it had lots of colored tubes and a big transparent escalator, and then went back to watching the portrait artists on the adjoining square.

I really want to write something cute, like “twenty-five years later I still love the building for its tubes and escalator”, but I would be lying. That said, the color coding of the tubes for different functions is really neat (yellow for electricity, green for water, blue for climate control and red for everything safety-related), and the escalator is a prominent part of the Aaron Draplin-like building logo.

What I love about Centre Pompidou these days is the way it shows that reality is messy. A big building complex needs a lot of wiring, control logic and disposal systems, which are usually hidden away as much as possible. Centre Pompidou peels away its skin instead, to force you to recognize how complicated it actually is.

In a way, I am a permanently recovering engineer. I used to have worldview that things around us were perfectly implemented by Adults Who Knew What They Were Doing. The truth is that the vast majority of the world is held together with duct tape, Microsoft Excel and last minute phone calls to the right people. Centre Pompidou is a testament that modern things, be they buildings or iPads, are a complicated mess inside. Their design cost a lot of people a lot of time to figure out, and this is by necessity an exercise in compromises.

Nowhere does this become more obvious than with the previous owners of my house, who seem to think that shoddy, temporarily fixtures are a solution for everything. I have since come to accept that some installation jobs can’t be done cleanly, and that even plumbers make up the piping as they go along.

Final thought for the day: how many wires are hidden behind the screen you’re reading this blog post on?

Leonard