Recently in Culture Category
Here’s an odd fact for you: I’m fascinated by curling. And yes, I think it’s high time that curling came to balmy South Texas. I mean, what could be better than teams of four going head-to-head in a competition that involves strategic sliding of forty-pound polished stones, quarried in Scotland, down a long sheet of ice?
Cameron Moll has made the point over on A List Apart that good designers redesign, while great designers realign. While the differentiation between "redesign" and "realign" could be construed as mere semantics, the heart of his observation rings true: "The desire to redesign is aesthetic-driven, while the desire to realign is purpose-driven."
Design for its own sake typically leads to a rather depressing and ineffective dead-end. But design that is harnessed, heart and soul, to serving its part in the successful implementation of a larger universe of goals and priorities -- now, that can be a beautiful thing to behold.
According to a report from Reuters, Congress has passed a $14.5 billion energy bill intended to "revive America's nuclear power industry, boost oil drilling, convert coal into a cleaner-burning fuel, and use home-grown, corn-based ethanol to stretch gasoline supplies."
Part and parcel with the legislation comes a four-week expansion of Daylight Saving Time here in the United States, slated for implementation in 2007.
Aside from all the humdrum discussion about whether or not the new energy bill will eventually ease fuel costs or whether it charts a sufficiently progressive course for energy production in our country, it's interesting to note the four-week expansion of Daylight Saving Time.
Originally put into practice by Germany during World War I (and soon after by the United Kingdom and the United States), Daylight Saving Time (DST) has been favored over the decades as an effective means of conserving energy. The idea being, if households can enjoy an additional hour of daylight in the evenings, that's a potentially huge amount of fuel that can be saved because it isn't being consumed to generate the needed electricity for household lights. Since World War II, DST has had an up-and-down, come-and-go history in our country, but by the time 1966 came around, the Uniform Time Act was passed, which made the observance of DST pretty much consistent across the nation.
It's interesting to think that we, as a nation, alter our perception of correct time twice each year in order to better conserve energy. I think it's a rather poignant indicator of the priorities held by modern-day, industrialized society.
If you think about it, it's a little bit like orbiting a different sun.
And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:14-18)
You've gotta love the public domain. It's where the gems of history can wash up on our shores and we can gratefully pick them up -- at no charge. The Unheard Beethoven project is utilizing the public domain to great effect, working to unearth previously unrecorded -- and sometimes even unpublished -- musical works by Ludwig von Beethoven. The works are being saved into MIDI files, the ubiquotous file format for musical notation.
If you have GarageBand, you might get a kick out of dragging one of the MIDI files into your timeline and then assigning instruments and fine-tuning the performance. For example, I used GarageBand to create a recording of this simple sketch for the piano.
