andrea's scrapbook

“The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.”

—Umberto Eco: ‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die’ - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Yhprum's Law →

“Sometimes systems that should not work, work nevertheless.”

orange ?

50: Badges - LA Times Magazine

(via ithinkshesdying)

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”

—William Morris (via swissmiss)

“In some ways, America is a victim of its own success. The economic prosperity provided by its implementation of a market system has provided the upper middle class with leisure time to concoct or adopt half-baked theories. In many ways, the self-described intelligentsia bite the hands that feed them; even as the middle class is the engine of the economy that gives them the cushy jobs decoupled from manual labor, they loathe and attack the middle class mercilessly. Why is this? The main reason leftist yuppie elites hate the middle class is because those who hold down real jobs have a much different view of freedom than the upper-middle class or the lower class. While the middle class simply want freedom of opportunity and the right to self-determination, the upper middle class argue for the universalization of the type of economic freedom they experience; to have pointless, disposable jobs and to buy whatever they want whenever they want. Just like Marxists have no real sense of resource scarcity, neither do urban elites who live luxurious lifestyles.”

—Point/Counterpoint: A Brief Psychosocial Analysis of the Leftist Mentality

Seth Godin on Fake Networking

Blu Mar Ten - Natural History - SoundCloud →