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Seth's Blog
Items in motion A frog has no trouble grabbing a fast-moving fly in midair. But the same fly, sitting on a leaf, is...
16 hours ago
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16 hours ago
A frog has no trouble grabbing a fast-moving fly in midair. But the same fly, sitting on a leaf, is save, essentially invisible to the frog. We’re a lot like frogs sometimes. We choose to pay attention to things when they’re changing, not when they feel normal. If you want...
Open Culture
The Technology That Brought Down Medieval Castles and Changed the Middle Ages Civilization moved past the use of castles long ago, but their imagery endures in popular culture....
17 hours ago
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17 hours ago
Civilization moved past the use of castles long ago, but their imagery endures in popular culture. Even young children here in the twenty-twenties have an idea of what castles look like. But why do they look like that? Admittedly, that’s a bit of a trick question: the popular...
Handprinted - Blog
Autumnal Bunting with Speedball Acrylic Screen Printing Ink As the seasons turn we like to have a cosy project on the go. We used orange Speedball Acrylic...
2 days ago
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2 days ago
As the seasons turn we like to have a cosy project on the go. We used orange Speedball Acrylic Screen Printing Ink to create some autumnal themed bunting. Paper bunting in an ideal printing project as it requires multiples! We're making a design from Drawing Fluid and Filler -...
Seth's Blog
Working for advertisers If you’re going to build a conference, a newsletter, a podcast, an AI service or even a tennis...
2 days ago
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2 days ago
If you’re going to build a conference, a newsletter, a podcast, an AI service or even a tennis tournament, please pause before you decide to be ad supported. (Ads are not the same as sponsorship). When you work for advertisers, you’re focused on short-term interactions with...
Open Culture
How Erik Satie Invented Modern Music: A Visual Explanation Once you hear Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, you never forget it. Not that popular culture would let...
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2 days ago
Once you hear Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, you never forget it. Not that popular culture would let you forget it: the piece has been, and continues to be, reinterpreted and sampled by musicians working in a variety of genres from pop to electronic to metal. In versions that...
Seth's Blog
Making a point …might not be the same as making an impact. Making a point doesn’t take very long and it can be...
3 days ago
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3 days ago
…might not be the same as making an impact. Making a point doesn’t take very long and it can be gratifying in the moment. Making an impact happens over time, and rarely brings the same sort of short-term glee.
Open Culture
Discover the 100-Year-Old Self-Playing Violin, One of the Most Complex Music Players Ever Made At the 1910 World’s Exhibition in Brussels, Ludwig Hupfeld unveiled the Phonoliszt-Violina, an...
3 days ago
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At the 1910 World’s Exhibition in Brussels, Ludwig Hupfeld unveiled the Phonoliszt-Violina, an instrument once dubbed “the eighth wonder of the world.” A leading maker of automated instruments in Germany, Hupfeld built a company that produced everything from phonola push-up...
Seth's Blog
Under the circumstances Everyone is always doing their best. Given their situation, priorities, and awareness (the...
4 days ago
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Everyone is always doing their best. Given their situation, priorities, and awareness (the circumstances), people make choices. If we want to change how others respond, we need to change their circumstances and how they see their options.
Open Culture
What an 85-Year-Long Harvard Study Says Is the Real Key to Happiness We’ve long used the French word milieu in English, but not with quite the same range of meanings it...
4 days ago
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We’ve long used the French word milieu in English, but not with quite the same range of meanings it has back in France. For example, French society (and especially the members of its older generations) explicitly recognizes the value of a milieu in the sense of the collected...
Seth's Blog
False scarcity Often, the things we want the most aren’t directly related to the things we need. In fact, they...
5 days ago
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5 days ago
Often, the things we want the most aren’t directly related to the things we need. In fact, they might be very similar to things we already have. Wants are fueled by stories, and stories come from culture and connection and marketing, not from our actual physical or spiritual...
Open Culture
Explore an Online Archive of 12,700 Vintage Cookbooks “Early cookbooks were fit for kings,” writes Henry Notaker at The Atlantic. “The oldest published...
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a week ago
“Early cookbooks were fit for kings,” writes Henry Notaker at The Atlantic. “The oldest published recipe collections” in the 15th and 16th centuries in Western Europe “emanated from the palaces of monarchs, princes, and grand señores.” Cookbooks were more than recipe...
Seth's Blog
Rankings and flavors Here’s a quick tactical riff about how we name things. It’s worth considering that: If you’ve got...
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a week ago
Here’s a quick tactical riff about how we name things. It’s worth considering that: If you’ve got four initiatives going on, numbering or even lettering them can’t help but communicate a priority to others. Considering flavoring them instead. When there’s an orange, a blue and a...
Open Culture
How Egon Schiele Made Enduring Art from His Troubled Life and Times “May you live in interesting times,” goes the apocryphal but nevertheless much-invoked “Chinese...
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“May you live in interesting times,” goes the apocryphal but nevertheless much-invoked “Chinese curse.” Egon Schiele, born in the Austria-Hungary of 1890, certainly did live in interesting times, and his work, as featured in the new Great Art Explained video above, can look like...
Handprinted - Blog
Meet The Maker: Lorna Rose Hello, I’m Lorna, a self-taught artist working with printmaking and collage based in Devon,...
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Hello, I’m Lorna, a self-taught artist working with printmaking and collage based in Devon, Southwest England. Themes of movement, how we inhabit and speak into public and domestic spaces are threads which regularly run through my work. My wider practice uses creativity as a...
Seth's Blog
The hustle loop When we fall behind, it’s tempting to hustle to catch up. When the competition heats up, it’s...
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When we fall behind, it’s tempting to hustle to catch up. When the competition heats up, it’s imperative we hustle to get ahead. Hustle is a particular kind of shortcut. Hustle is pushing the boundaries of cultural expectation, creating pressure and discomfort to make a sale....
Open Culture
Hear the First Masterpiece of Electronic Music, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge Karlheinz Stockhausen appears, among many other cultural figures, on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s...
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Karlheinz Stockhausen appears, among many other cultural figures, on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. His inclusion was more than a trendy gesture toward the European avant-garde; anyone who knows that pathbreaking electronic composer’s work will notice its...
Seth's Blog
Bringing goodwill to the conversation Education is distinct from learning. Organized education is a form of indoctrination and...
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Education is distinct from learning. Organized education is a form of indoctrination and certification. Sometimes it leads to learning, but not always. You can win at education by figuring out what’s on the test (or what the boss wants) and parroting it back. In fact, that’s the...
Open Culture
How Raphael Became A Master: Watch the Evolution of the Artist Through His Madonna Paintings No artist became a Renaissance master through a single piece of work, though now, half a millennium...
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No artist became a Renaissance master through a single piece of work, though now, half a millennium later, that may be how most of us identify them. Leonardo? Painter of the Mona Lisa. Michelangelo? Painter of the Sistine Chapel ceiling (or, perhaps, the sculptor of the most...
Seth's Blog
Walk away or dance AI and LLMs pose a particularly visceral threat to the typing class. Writers, editors, poets,...
a week ago
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AI and LLMs pose a particularly visceral threat to the typing class. Writers, editors, poets, freelancers, marketing copywriters and others are voicing reasonable (and unreasonable) objections to the pace and impact of tools like Claude, Kimi and ChatGPT. I think we have two...
Open Culture
Empire Without Limit: Watch Mary Beard’s TV Series on Ancient Rome As the founding myth has it, the city of Rome was established by a man named Romulus, one of two...
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As the founding myth has it, the city of Rome was established by a man named Romulus, one of two orphaned twin brothers raised by a she-wolf on the banks of the Tiber river. The legend of Romulus and Remus, which involves the former’s fratricidal slaying of the latter, lends...
Seth's Blog
Possibility vs. certainty It is impossible to make a perpetual motion machine, you’ll waste your time if you try. It is...
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It is impossible to make a perpetual motion machine, you’ll waste your time if you try. It is possible to write a book of poetry that will sell 10 million copies. It is unlikely, it probably won’t happen, but it is possible. Science and innovation and creativity engage with the...
Open Culture
Hear the Long-Lost Chants of English Monks, Revived for the First Time in 500 Years Listening to music, especially live music, can be a religious experience. These days, most of us say...
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Listening to music, especially live music, can be a religious experience. These days, most of us say that figuratively, but for medieval monks, it was the literal truth. Every aspect of life in a monastery was meant to get you that much closer to God, but especially the times...
Seth's Blog
For people who don’t care that much If someone snuck into my closet and switched out one brand of sneakers for a similar model from...
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If someone snuck into my closet and switched out one brand of sneakers for a similar model from another company, it wouldn’t bother me much. Popular cars like the Camry, the Civic and the Elantra don’t have raving fans the way the Mini or the Rivian do. Go to the rental car...
Open Culture
1,000+ Artworks by Vincent Van Gogh Digitized & Put Online by Dutch Museums It gets dark before dinner now in my part of the world, a recipe for seasonal depression. Vincent...
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It gets dark before dinner now in my part of the world, a recipe for seasonal depression. Vincent van Gogh wrote about such low feelings with deep insight. “One feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep dark well, utterly helpless.” Yet, when he...
Handprinted - Blog
Monotype on Fabric using Screen Printing Inks The satisfyingly fuzzy printed lines of a monotype are usually reserved for prints on paper....
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The satisfyingly fuzzy printed lines of a monotype are usually reserved for prints on paper. However, using the method below you can create prints onto fabric with the same texture and line quality, making fast and spontaneous fabric designs to sew up into bags, quilts, or...
Open Culture
Animated Map Shows How the Five Major Religions Spread Across the World (3000 BC — 2000 AD) Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam.… Claims to ancient origin and ultimate authority...
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Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam.… Claims to ancient origin and ultimate authority notwithstanding, the world’s five major religions are all of recent vintage compared to the couple hundred thousand years or more of human existence on the planet. During most of...
Seth's Blog
Confusing good luck with skill If 1,000 people toss a fair coin three times, 125 of them will get three heads in a row. Perfect...
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If 1,000 people toss a fair coin three times, 125 of them will get three heads in a row. Perfect score. And 125 will lose every time. We probably shouldn’t give the winners too much credit. Actually, the real work is deciding which games to play and which results are worthy of...
Open Culture
Watch Momijigari, Japan’s Oldest Surviving Film (1899) At first, film simply recorded events: a man walking across a garden, workers leaving a factory, a...
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At first, film simply recorded events: a man walking across a garden, workers leaving a factory, a train pulling into a station. The medium soon matured enough to accommodate drama, which for early filmmakers meant simply shooting what amounted to stage productions from the...
Seth's Blog
Mirrors and hats No one buys a hat without looking at themselves in a mirror first. Ever. There were hats before...
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No one buys a hat without looking at themselves in a mirror first. Ever. There were hats before there were mirrors, so I’m not sure how it used to be, but that’s how it is now. Even though we may imagine we’re wearing a hat to protect ourselves from the sun, the mirror reminds us...
Open Culture
Seven Philosophy Books for Beginners: Where to Start One especially appealing aspect of philosophy, as a field of study, is that you don’t have to go...
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One especially appealing aspect of philosophy, as a field of study, is that you don’t have to go anywhere to learn it but the library. And these days, you don’t necessarily have to go there, now that so many philosophical texts have become freely available on the internet. In the...
Seth's Blog
Job churn Since I was born, humans have created 6 billion jobs. All while technology relentlessly disrupts...
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Since I was born, humans have created 6 billion jobs. All while technology relentlessly disrupts existing industries. The pin making machine replaced the hand-crafted pin. The ox-pulled plow replaced millions of hours of backbreaking work. The amplification and electronic...
Open Culture
The Origins of Satan: The Evolution of the Devil in Religion The Devil, the Beast, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Satan: whichever name we happen to call him, we know full...
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The Devil, the Beast, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Satan: whichever name we happen to call him, we know full well who the guy is — or at least, we think we do. In fact, the images and evocations of that embodiment of (or perhaps metaphor for) sin, deceit, and temptation that many of us...
Seth's Blog
“GET OUTTA MY WAY” Pedestrian traffic in Grand Central Station is a bit of a miracle. Thousands of people, all walking...
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Pedestrian traffic in Grand Central Station is a bit of a miracle. Thousands of people, all walking quickly, in almost non-Euclidian chaos, headed toward different trains. And no one collides. We see the same thing at a more dangerous clip when a four lane highway merges. The...
Open Culture
Gustave Doré’s Haunting Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy Inferno, Canto X: Many artists have attempted to illustrate Dante Alighieri’s epic poem the Divine...
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Inferno, Canto X: Many artists have attempted to illustrate Dante Alighieri’s epic poem the Divine Comedy, but none have made such an indelible stamp on our collective imagination as the Frenchman Gustave Doré. Doré was 23 years old in 1855, when he first decided to create a...
Seth's Blog
The violinist problem Two hundred years ago, there were a lot of violinists. Many made a living at it. If you were of...
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Two hundred years ago, there were a lot of violinists. Many made a living at it. If you were of means and wanted to hear music, your best option was to hire someone to play it for you. Of course, the invention of the phonograph and the radio changed all of that. Now, one great...
Open Culture
The Ancient Roman Dodecahedron: The Mysterious Object That Has Baffled Archaeologists for Centuries There isn’t much place for dodecahedra in modern life, at least in those modern lives with  tabletop...
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There isn’t much place for dodecahedra in modern life, at least in those modern lives with  tabletop role-playing. In the ancient Roman Empire, however, those shapes seem to have been practically household objects — not that we know what the household would have done with them....
Handprinted - Blog
Meet The Maker: Alex Williams I’m Alex Williams, a printmaker and illustrator based in Somerset. I mainly make linocut prints in...
3 weeks ago
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3 weeks ago
I’m Alex Williams, a printmaker and illustrator based in Somerset. I mainly make linocut prints in bright and bold colours - I very rarely use any black ink! I also create illustrations, murals and bespoke window paintings and run printmaking workshops for adults and...
Open Culture
21 Rules for Living from Miyamoto Musashi, Japan’s Samurai Philosopher (1584–1645) Browse the ever-vaster selection of self-help books, videos, podcasts, and social-media accounts on...
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Browse the ever-vaster selection of self-help books, videos, podcasts, and social-media accounts on offer today, and you’ll find no shortage of prescriptions for how to live. Much of what the gurus of the twenty-twenties have to say sounds awfully similar, and almost as much may...
Seth's Blog
All that torque A screwdriver works because the handle is bigger than the screw. You can twist the handle with...
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A screwdriver works because the handle is bigger than the screw. You can twist the handle with leverage, causing the screw to turn. The bigger the handle, the more leverage you have. We’ve spent a trillion dollars building a worldwide communications and AI network, and you can...
Open Culture
75 Post-Punk and Hardcore Concerts from the 1980s Have Been Digitized & Put Online: Fugazi, GWAR,... Between 1985 and 1988, a teenager by the name of Sohrab Habibion was attending punk and post-punk...
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Between 1985 and 1988, a teenager by the name of Sohrab Habibion was attending punk and post-punk shows around the Washington, DC area. What set him apart was the bulky video camera he’d bring to the show and let roll, documenting entire gigs in all their low-rez, lo-fi glory....
Seth's Blog
“No” is an option “Maybe” is the problem. If you’re serious, say, “yes.” And if it’s not for you, walk away. But...
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“Maybe” is the problem. If you’re serious, say, “yes.” And if it’s not for you, walk away. But endlessly reconsidering opportunities without forward motion is a place to hide.
Open Culture
Yuval Noah Harari Explains How to Protect Your Mind in the Age of AI You could say that we live in the age of artificial intelligence, although it feels truer about no...
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You could say that we live in the age of artificial intelligence, although it feels truer about no aspect of our lives than it does of advertising. “If you want to sell something to people today, you call it AI,” says Yuval Noah Harari in the new Big Think video above, even if...
Seth's Blog
An invitation to vibration Many organizations have a widget or service, something people already need or want, and they work to...
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Many organizations have a widget or service, something people already need or want, and they work to sell it to people. Some seek monopoly power so they can force others to do what they want them to do. But there’s a third path: we can create a brand or a movement or a community...
Open Culture
Discover the World’s Oldest Surviving Cookbook, De Re Coquinaria, from Ancient Rome Western scholarship has had “a bias against studying sensual experience,” writes Reina Gattuso at...
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Western scholarship has had “a bias against studying sensual experience,” writes Reina Gattuso at Atlas Obscura, “the relic of an Enlightenment-era hierarchy that considered taste, touch, and flavor taboo topics for sober academic inquiry.” This does not mean, however, that...
Seth's Blog
What sort of success? “Who’s it for?” is not simply a question about your target customer. Milton Friedman offered to let...
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“Who’s it for?” is not simply a question about your target customer. Milton Friedman offered to let us off the hook–the only thing the work is for is to maximize shareholder value, he said. Nothing else is worth measuring. I’ve never met anyone who consistently believed this....
Open Culture
Watch Joan Baez Endearingly Imitate Bob Dylan (1972) Joan Baez was already heralded as the “Queen of Folk” by the time Robert Zimmerman aka Bob Dylan...
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Joan Baez was already heralded as the “Queen of Folk” by the time Robert Zimmerman aka Bob Dylan arrived in New York City. Many things brought him to the burgeoning folk scene there, but Baez was the siren who called to a young Dylan through his television set long before he met...
Seth's Blog
“A now, a word from our sponsor” Not really. Just a post about sponsors. Even if you don’t run a media company, the way media...
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Not really. Just a post about sponsors. Even if you don’t run a media company, the way media companies run matters. That’s because media shapes our culture and how we spend our time. There are three kinds of ad models, and it’s easy to confuse them. The most common and...
Open Culture
2,178 Occult Books Now Digitized & Put Online, Thanks to the Ritman Library and Da Vinci Code Author... In 2018 we brought you some exciting news. Thanks to a generous donation from Da Vinci Code author...
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In 2018 we brought you some exciting news. Thanks to a generous donation from Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, Amsterdam’s Ritman Library—a sizable collection of pre-1900 books on alchemy, astrology, magic, and other occult subjects—has been digitizing thousands of its rare texts...
Seth's Blog
Moving without traveling Moving is physical, travel is an emotional journey. Moving takes us from one place to another, one...
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Moving is physical, travel is an emotional journey. Moving takes us from one place to another, one job to another, one situation to another. But if we seek to insulate ourselves from the emotional labor of travel, we can build a cocoon around our experience and discover nothing....
Open Culture
Behold the Very First Color Photograph (1861): Taken by Scottish Physicist & Poet James Clerk... Since its ancient origins as the camera obscura, the photographic camera has always mimicked the...
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Since its ancient origins as the camera obscura, the photographic camera has always mimicked the human eye, allowing light to enter an aperture, then projecting an image upside down. Renaissance artists relied on the camera obscura to sharpen their own visual perspectives. But it...