Regruntled.com

Joan of Z made these:

Another great recycled creation! When I found this vintage faux fur coat from the 70’s I knew it had possibilities! I have transformed it into any army of little plush guinea pigs with soft fleece tummies and removable microwavable rice bags inside.

The Machine Learning department at Carnegie-Mellon protests at the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh. You’d think they could make better signs.

JumpSnap is a ropeless jump rope.  I thought it was a spoof, but apparently not.  In a way, this is an interesting idea… no rope to trip on, and you can use it in rooms with low ceilings.  The device makes a snapping sound to simulate the rope.

On the other hand, it seems like a ridiculous over-complication of something simple.  I know this is a radical idea, but if you’re going to pretend to jump rope, why not just pretend to jump rope?  Save $50, make your own snapping sounds.

I’m reading The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron.  Her thesis is that creativity comes from the Creator, and the book’s subtitle is “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity”.  I think this is totally wrong.

It’s true that we use the same word, “creator”, for both artists and gods, but it does not follow that artists and gods do the same sort of thing.  The Genesis story is “Let there be light”.  There are no preliminary sketches, no outlines, no rough drafts, no prototypes, no models… the Creation was definitely not the work of an Artist.

If we focus on the adjective, “creative”, it’s clear that evolution is a much better model of the creative process.  Evolution builds on what has gone before, and introduces new ideas in the form of mutations.  Genetic combination tries out many, many ideas at the same time, and natural selection culls the ones that don’t work.

Artists do the same thing.  They don’t create something from nothing, they build on what has gone before.  They try out new ideas.  They throw out the bad ideas and they keep trying new variations on the good ones.

The book succeeds in part by flattering the reader: what you are doing is god-like.  God as artist implies artist as god.  I confess to enjoying the god-as-mathematician and god-as-programmer versions of this theme, but a flattering analogy is not necessarily an accurate analogy.

 

A Voronoi sudoku with each cell outlined in black.  It turns out that the outline can be added later with Paint.net.