Links from 2012

<blockquote>It’s better to have a few fantastic things designed for you than to have many untrustworthy things poorly designed to please everyone.</blockquote>

Huh.

Wow.

<blockquote>What is required, therefore (and what is difficult to effect), is the translation of these impulses of wonder and joy at nature, into ecologically valuable patterns of behaviour. Into changed patterns of purchase, consumption, disposal, and travel. Into a shifted sense of the universal. We need, for instance, to retire our medieval vision of the skies, seas, rivers and soil as sinks of infinite capacity; free in what they give, and limitless in their capacity to absorb what we discard into them.</blockquote>

Hear, hear.

The Island satirises the London-centric view of the English capital and its commuter towns as independent from the rest of the country. The artist, a Londoner with a love of his native city, offers up a huge range of local and personal information in words and symbols. Walter speaks in the dialect of today, focusing on what he deems interesting or mundane.

Shunt tunnel

There is the barrel of a cannon, buried upright and projecting about 3 feet into the air in Roy Grove, Hampton. The cannon marks one end of the original base line used for the measurement by triangulation upon which all Ordnance Survey maps were subsequently based.

Common HTML5 <input> patterns.

While the British way can be drainingly negative, The American approach to happiness can spur a debilitating anxiety. The initial sense of promise and hope is seductive, but it soon gives way to a nagging slow-burn feeling of inadequacy. Am I happy? Happy enough? As happy as everyone else? Could I be doing more about it? Even basic contentment feels like failure when pitched against capital-H Happiness. The goal is so elusive and hard to define, it’s impossible to pinpoint when it’s even been achieved — a recipe for neurosis.

I should note that this idea is the same for any other addiction: biting your nails, smoking, drugs, alcohol, etc. We use them as crutches to cope with our needs, and to beat them we need to find healthier methods of coping and meeting our needs.