Hamleys, which is London’s 251-year-old version of F.A.O. Schwarz, recently dismantled its pink “girls” and blue “boys” sections in favor of a gender-neutral store with red-and-white signage. Rather than floors dedicated to Barbie dolls and action figures, merchandise is now organized by types (Soft Toys) and interests (Outdoor).
I haven’t seen the new design, but in the past Hamleys has been wonderful in large part because of its unassuming style. When you walk in there are no great vistas: everything is simply crammed into the available space, just as it is at the local ironmonger. What that means is that you never know what you’re going to see as you turn a corner or come to the top of a staircase. Constant surprises.
When I took my seven-year-old son there in 2000, the most dramatic experience came at the entrance, where there stood like a sentinel a seven-foot-tall Hagrid made of Lego. After wandering around for a few moments Wes asked, “Is this the biggest toy store in the world?” A nearby employee smiled and replied, “No. Just the best.”
Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.
(Of course, it’s not at all fair to judge the whole book from this sentence. I have perpetrated some pretty silly sentences myself that I wish I could extract from my books. But still: wow.)
What English speakers call ‘computer science’ Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik. Now even biology has become an information science, a subject of messages, instructions, and code. Genes encapsulate information and enable procedures for reading it in and writing it out. Life spreads by networking. The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level—an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being. 'What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a “spark of life,”’ declares the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. 'It is information, words, instructions.… If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.’
Scalasaig, Colonsay
In a sense, every house, hill, barn, and byre [on Colonsay] is a center of gossip, but there are several principal ones—The Shop, the post office, the potting shed at Kiloran Farm, and, above all others, the pub, which has no name and is in the rear of the inn in Scalasaig. What is said in these places will frequently include a high proportion of factual incorrectness, but truth and fiction often seem to be riding the same sentence in such a way that the one would be lonely without the other.
I believe that we ought so to love and trust God in our lives, and in all the good things that he sends us, that when the time comes (but not before!) we may go to him with love, trust, and joy. But, to put it plainly, for a man in his wife’s arms to be hankering after the other world is, in mild terms, a piece of bad taste, and not God’s will. We ought to find and love God in what he actually gives us; if it pleases him to allow us to enjoy some overwhelming earthly happiness, we mustn’t try to be more pious than God himself and allow our happiness to be corrupted by presumption and arrogance, and by unbridled religious fantasy which is never satisfied with what God gives… . Everything has its time, and the main thing is that we keep step with God, and do not keep pressing on a few steps ahead — nor keep dawdling a step behind. It’s presumptuous to want to have everything at once — matrimonial bliss, the cross, and the heavenly Jerusalem, where they neither marry not are given in marriage. ‘To everything there is a season.’
Weizsäcker’s book The World-View of Physics is still keeping me very busy. It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know; God wants us to realize his presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved… . God is no stop-gap; he must be recognized at the centre of life, not when we are at the end of our resources; in health and vigour, and not only in suffering; in our activities, and not only in sin. The ground for this lies in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. He is the centre of life, and he certainly didn’t ‘come’ to answer our unsolved problems.
Ahh, Firing Line! If I leave a TV studio these days with what Diderot termed l'esprit de l'escalier, I don’t always blame myself. If I wish that I had remembered to make a telling point, or wish that I had phrased something better than I actually did, it’s very often because a “break” was just coming up, or the “segment” had been shortened at the last minute, or because the host was obnoxious, or because the panel had been over-booked in case of cancellations but at the last minute every egomaniac invited had managed to say “yes” and make himself available. But on Buckley’s imperishable show, if you failed to make your best case it was your own damn fault. Once the signature Bach chords had died away, and once he’d opened with that curiously seductive intro (“I should like to begin . . . ”), you were given every opportunity to develop and pursue your argument. And if you misspoke or said anything fatuous, it was unlikely to escape comment. In my leftist days, if I knew I was going on the box with Buckley, I would make sure to do some homework (and attempt to emulate him by trying to make sure it didn’t show).
the-bitterist:harrietsdaughter:IT IS ALWAYS FUN. Why don’t people enjoy meeting new people? Jesus Christ.hamburgerjack:Of all the lies that ever were … .OMG, TELL IT LIKE IT IS KITTY.Story of my lifeIt’s never fun.
And then I can’t even enjoy the food because I don’t want people to judge me for being a food hog.
So it’s awkward and I’m so hungry but at the same time UNhungry because I’m just so awkward.
sigh
I’m an introvert. I. get. it. I really do. Sometimes when I’m with people I get really grumpy and shut down and wanna go home as fast as possible and be alone (with Twitter). But that’s wrong! Because meeting new people really is fun and cool and awesome! If you just give it a try! If you convince yourself that you won’t have fun (as I sometimes do), you won’t! I can guarantee it. But if you decide to have fun, you will.
No, PEG. Sorry, but no. I tried for years — for decades. It’s pointlessly stressful, at least for someone of my age. When I have to meet new people, all I can think about is all the cool people I already know that I don’t get enough time with. Every hour spent with a new person is an hour I can’t spend with people I already know, already have some history with, and want to know better. If you don’t have enough friends, if you don’t know many people, then I’m sure meeting new ones is wonderful. But for me, now, meeting new people is an enormous pain. And I bet that most of us would do better to cultivate and strengthen relationships we already have rather than go hunting for new ones.
Call this a leftover 2012 prediction: like a forest getting older, our social network usage will continue to diversify. And that’s a good thing. The many overlapping networks will come to occupy personalized niches in the social biome. Some will flourish; many will just survive; others will die. But to the extent that they find their own niches instead of duplicating what others are doing, the individual network and the biome will flourish.