By Hand and Eye

...lden section, for instance, and the shelf spacing came from an exercise on page 131 of the book. Far from being restrictive, I found the principles in Walker and Tolpin’s book liberating. I now had a starting point for any design project. For modern folks it’s difficult to imagine working without a ruler. Walker and Toplin explain, Instead of asking, “How high is this base dimension in inches?” pre-industrial artisans would have asked, “How tall i...

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I Deleted my Facebook Account

...ce: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection. It’s a sobering 429 page nightmarish list of social media’s many sins. Then there’s Jeremy Ashkenas who, in a series of tweets, dug up some of Facebook’s patent applications. As others have pointed out these patents read like Black Mirror episode summaries. If that isn’t enough, there’s Facebook’s attempt to exploit depressed teenagers for advertising revenue. Ironically, much of the privacy i...

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Spam Poetry Sunday

...us is the ultimate purpose of these spam comments. This one was placed on our announcement for our upcoming coffee roasting class (not a popular or highly linked post), and linked to a page for a restaurant which is obviously just a place holder, in that it has no content or history or graphic design. And who the heck is Janet?...

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Sheltered

A page from Shelter. Maker, builder, publisher and author Lloyd Kahn left a great comment on my rambling review of the documentary Spaceship Earth. Lloyd said (in reference to the title of Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 book Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth), “In 1973, in our book Shelter, I wrote “Calling Earth a spaceship is like stepping out into a clear night in New Mexico and saying, “Wow, it looks just like the planetarium.” If you aren’t fa...

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Fermentology: Mini Seminars About Cultured Food

...d will be recorded and available afterwards on the Applied Ecology Youtube page. Registration here! Follow us on twitter or facebook for updates. A closing note: I’m fortunate to be able to stay at home, with plenty of food, and watch fermentation seminars. Many are not so lucky. I have a friend and neighbor who runs several farmers’ markets through a non-profit called SEE-LA. They are soliciting donations to support families sheltering in place i...

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