There is a theory that when you arent looking at something it doesnt exist.

A situation obliquely
analogous to a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isnt there. Certainly when
I look at something, then shut my eyes, I cant see whatever it is- so cant be sure that its still
there. I could give it a kick to reassure myself like Samuel Johnson who, on hearing Bishop
Berkeley declare that reality was only a state of mind, kicked a rock to disprove him. But what I
kick might be something else, so all I know is that when I open my eyes- its come back again.
Im reminded of the Lennon-McCartney lyric which asks: What do you see when you turn out
the light? - I cant tell you, but I know its mine.

Every object has two aspects, the common aspect, which is the one we generally see and the
one which is seen by everyone, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare
individuals see at moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical meditation. -de Chirico

There was a fence with spaces you could look through if you wanted to. An architect who saw
this thing stood there one summer evening. Took out the spaces with great care and built a
castle in the air. The fence was utterly dumbfounded, each post stood there with nothing round
it.

This was a scientific paper which debunked the myth that the Inuit (Eskimo) have a hundred or
more words for snow - actually they have no more than the English do for rain. A similar
misconception was propagated by William Gladstone, who thought Homer was color blind
because of his meagre use of color words. Some ethnologists extended his conclusion to the
entire Greek population of that time. They were both wrong.
Names for colors enter language slowly. The ancient Greeks had no word for blue and even in
the Middle Ages there was still no English word for orange. Chaucer referred to it as bitwixe
yelow and reed. Orange has always suffered an identity crisis. Today, although we can
differentiate millions of shades, our vocabulary still only has about thirty color words.
All languages have black and white.
If there are three words, the third is red.
If there are four, then it is green or yellow.
If five then whichever didnt make four, yellow or green.
If six, it is blue.
If seven, it is brown.
If eight or more, then purple, pink, orange, and grey are added in any order.
However, it is not quite this neat. An African desert tribe has no word for green, but six for red.
Italian has three words for blue: celeste, azzurro and blu. Swahili doesnt have any, so coined
bulu from English. Creek and Natchez Indians use the same name for yellow and green, as do
the Highland Scots for blue and green. French has two words for brown: brun and marron,
but there isnt one in Chinese, Japanese, Welsh, or (less surprisingly) Inuit. These, despite the
hoax, do have at least seven words for white.
And a primitive tribe in the New Guinea Highlands still speak a black and white language and
distinguish colors in terms of brightness.
There was a man who became so intrigued with watching salamanders, that he ended up as a
salamander watching the man he was. -Julio Cortazar

A lady visited Matisse in his studio. Inspecting one of his latest works, she unwisely said: But,
surely the arm of this woman is much too long.
Madame, the artist politely replied, you are mistaken. This is not a woman, this is a picture.

I like work - it fascinates me - I can sit and look at it for hours. -Jerome K. Jerome

Blue Skies and Grey Boxes

Basically there are two kinds of designer:
Helicopters and vending machines.
The helicopters fly around the landscape,
zooming in to investigate, backing off to get a better panoramic view.
On the other hand vending machines tend to be inert
until someone shoves money in the slot.
They then produce a lot of buzzing, whirring and clanking
until out pops a product.
It is invariably the same as the previous one, and will be the same as the next.
The only difference is the next is usually staler.

According to designer Bruce Archers great aunt the catchy phrase the three Rs (reading,
writing, and rithmetic) was coined in the early nineteenth century by an illiterate member of
Parliament speaking on an issue of education. This phrase, the great aunt informed him, was a
misquotation of an earlier aphorism: reading and writing, reckoning and figuring,
wroughting and wrighting. From reading and writing we get LITERACY. From reckoning
and figuring comes NUMERACY. But we have no equivalent term for wroughting and
wrighting - the creation and making of things. At one time back in the 1950s there was an effort
to introduce the term Technics but the only word in current use is Design - spelt with a capital
D. The habit of calling a finished product a Design is convenient but wrong. Design is what you
do, not what youve done.

...exact imitation, item for item, cannot reproduce nature, only equivalents can. It is not by
making volcanoes that sulphur is produced. Retorts are better. Nature is not reconstituted by
imitating animal cries or natural noises, but by writing pastoral symphonies. To imitate
something is merely to stuff it. -Amedee Ozenfant

Self-awareness and the creative urge distinguish us from other creatures. To create requires
that something can be envisioned before it can be caused. This is called Hellenic Imagination
after Prometheus, the Greek god, credited with the discovery of the magical power of being able
to imagine the future by projecting a horizon of possibilities.

The Five Strategic Arts:

The Situation gives rise to Measurements
Measurements give rise to Estimates
Estimates give rise to Analysis
Analysis gives rise to Balancing
Balance gives rise to Triumph
The Egyptian Hours:
Hour of Watching
Hour of the Broken Pattern
Hour of the Fragments
Hour of the Clue
Hour of the Seal
Hour of the Shroud
Hour of the Garland
The Six Phases:
Enthusiasm
Disillusionment
Panic
Search for the Guilty
Punishment of the Innocent
Praise for the Non-Participants
Gameform of Shibumi:
Fuseki: The opening stage of a game when the entire board is taken into account.
Sabaki: An attempt to dispose of a troublesome situation in a quick and flexible way.
Seki: A neutral position in which neither has the advantage.
Uttegae: A sacrifice play, a gambit.
Shicho: A running attack.
Tsuru No Sugomori: A graceful manoeuvre in which the enemy stones are captured.

ROMAN INSCRIPTIONS WERE CARVED IN CAPITAL LETTERS INTO STONE. THE EFFECT
OF THE LIGHT AND SHADE WAS ENHANCED BY RAIN WHICH WASHED DOWN THE
VERTICAL STROKES AND THE DIRT WHICH COLLECTED ALONG THE HORIZONTALS. AS
AN EARLY SCRIBE ELOQUENTLY PUT IT, THE BEAUTY OF THE LAPIDARY LETTER
RESIDES IN A PRINCIPLE AS SIMPLE AS IT IS INSPIRED:
A STROKE OF SHADE, A FLASH OF LIGHT.

Crime is only a left handed form of human endeavour.

Imagination is the active ingredient of thinking.

Imagination jumps from present facts to future possibilities.
Imagination forms mental pictures of things not present.
Imagination conceives of situations not yet in existence.
Imagination conjures up correspondences and analogies.

Driving south through Greece from Patras to Kythira was rather difficult. The Greek alphabet is
an-every-which-way-collation of characters. The road signs were in lower-case letters and, I
soon discovered, those on my road map were in CAPITALS. I lost my way (and temper) several
times. Frustrated at being faced with two unfamiliar and seemingly unrelated sets of characters
it dawned on me that someone unacquainted with the Roman alphabet could be equally
confused. Pursuing this thought - it was a long drive - I realized there arent twenty-six letters in
the alphabet but, since CAPITALS look different from lower-case, there are fifty-two. Even thats
not strictly correct. If one eliminates one from each pair of CAPITAL and lower-case letters those
which are duplicate shapes (such as S and s) and one from those similar (such as Y and y), one
is left with eleven pairs, or twenty-two letters, which bear absolutely no pictorial relationship with
each other. A doesnt look in the least like an a. So, contrary to what we are taught, the alphabet
really has thirty-seven characters. Yet even thats not strictly correct if one considers the
difference in shape between different styles. For example, an a and a, or g and g. The VWXYZ
and vwxyz look the same because they were introduced much later. lower-case letters were
developed from the differing laborious writing styles used in the isolated scriptoria (The Name of
The Rose) of the Dark Ages. Meanwhile carved inscriptions followed the form of Roman
CAPITALS, elegant letters which have scarcely changed up to present times. In consequence,
the alphabet has inherited two sets of characters. One influenced by pen, the other by chisel.

A woman looks down at the camera: hands on hips, smiling, as if to say: is this the way you
want me? It is a confident, intimate picture. She has a strong chin, her hair is in a Victory Roll,
she is wearing a short fitted jacket and is standing in front of a brick wall. When Henrietta Lacks
died of cervical cancer in 1951, cells from her body were taken for research by Johns Hopkins
University. Apparently they proved vital in development of the polio vaccine and in testing the
effects of nuclear radiation. Their ability to multiply was spectacularly successful. Almost too
successful since they have the tendency to contaminate other cell cultures causing problems of
bio-mass there is said to be more of her now than when she was breathing, walking and talking.
Scientists call Henriettas cells the HeLa Line. They are nurtured in a solution of placenta and
hen bone marrow. Placentas arent considered to be part of mother or child, and apparently
hospitals sell them on to laboratories and the cosmetic industry. In the 1960s a test compared
17 cultures of ostensibly different tissue types and found that they were all HeLa. The American
Type Culture Collection, a cell bank I imagine, tested its store of human cells and found that out
of their 34 test lines, 24 were HeLa. In 1972 The Russians supplied American scientists with six
different cancer cells from different parts of the Soviet Union - all turned out to be HeLa. When
in the 1970s her family learnt that bits of their mother were still living - and in several places at
once - they were understandably shocked. I guess the issue is: at what point are you not you?

When I choose a word it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.
-Humpty Dumpty

A pun is two strings of thought tied with an acoustic knot.

Ah, yes! I wrote the Purple Cow. Im sorry, now, I wrote it! But I can tell you anyhow, Ill kill you if
you quote it!
To imagine is like flying a kite. The mind, loosely tethered, is free to be blown about. Usually the
direction it takes just happens but sometimes by tweaking the string ti can arrive at an unlikely
destination. Take Einstein who, struck with the thought of riding on a shaft of light in outer space
while looking at himself in the mirror, interpreted the imagery to come up with the principles of
his Theory of Relativity.
Imagination, an unimaginative person once wrote, is what happens when a drunk loses his
watch and has to get drunk again to find it. Although fantasy and make-believe flourish in
childhood they rapidly atrophy as one is moulded to fit the adults grey consensus of reality. A
child, out on a walk with its mother, suddenly points and cries out, Look, a purple cow. The
mother, perhaps rather tired and domestically harassed, snaps, Dont be silly. And then
delivers the crunch line: Theres no such thing as purple cows.
So the child, a vagabond in the backwoods of rationality, is brought up to see the world in the
prosaic terms of grown-ups and eventually forgets it ever saw a purple cow. Now purple cows
walk around unseen by anyone.
I never saw a purple cow, I never hope to see one; but I can tell you, anyhow, Id rather see
than be one!