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20 February 2002 (Wednesday): linkslinkslinks

It just occurred to me that I'm being dreadfully unfashionable by having such a low link-to-blather ratio here at the last embassy. All the popular people sprinkle their entries with links to all manner of interesting things, with handy little excerpts to get you hooked. It's a conspiracy, I tell you. I'll never get cured of websurfing this way.

Am I being bitterly sarcastic or genuinely fretful? Neither and both, really. Hell, it's just a blog.

But seriously, here's something that's got my brain doing flip-flops (or gigaflops, if I may be geeky), and to which I'd post an article in response if I were more adept at the whole thoughts-to-words transition:

If you mention taste nowadays, a lot of people will tell you that "taste is subjective." They believe this because it really feels that way to them. When they like something, they have no idea why. It could be because it's beautful, or because their mother had one, or because they saw a movie star with one in a magazine, or because they know it's expensive. Their thoughts are a tangle of unexamined impulses.

...

Relativism is fashionable at the moment, and that may hamper you from thinking about taste, even as yours grows. But if you come out of the closet and admit, at least to yourself, that there is such a thing as good and bad design, then you can start to study good design in detail.

In particular:

Good design is often slightly funny. This one may not always be true. But Durer's engravings and Saarinen's womb chair and the Pantheon and the original Porsche 911 all seem to me slightly funny. Godel's incompleteness theorem seems like a practical joke.

I think it's because humor is related to strength. To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to keep one's sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one's sense of humor is to be wounded by them. And so the mark-- or at least the prerogative-- of strength is not to take oneself too seriously.

- Paul Graham, "Taste For Makers"

Not saying I agree wholeheartedly, mind. It just rattled my big jar of assumptions and conclusions up there in the mental pantry. If I weren't such a loner, I'd gather a handful of beret-wearing espresso-swilling friends to argue heatedly about it in a cafe somewhere.

Last time I felt this way was while reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. (Excuse me: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.) I was hanging out at a new acquaintance's house -- one of those cool people who, by tricks of circumstance, somehow never became a friend -- and at some point in the conversation he recommended the book. "It's written so convincingly, and you'll disagree with it violently," he said. Some of the ideas are outmoded now, some 45 years later, and I've seen some unfortunate interpretations of her philosophy, particularly in the anti-environmentalist movement. But I can't shake the fact that it's a compelling book. I walked a little straighter for weeks after finishing it, trying to channel Dagny Taggart.

Oh, I miss school. There's no room for endless circling around Truth in the life of a software engineer. Though there is plenty of need for good design...

posted by enjelani @ 07:35 PM PST