Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

I leave for India tomorrow to participate in a Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity being held in Bangalore from the 20th to the 22nd of August. The meeting is organized by the Quest Alliance, USAID and International Youth Foundation and “is designed to bring together education and education technology practitioners, scholars and experts, academicians and students for an exchange of ideas aimed towards creative approaches and solutions for technology use in teaching and learning.”

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I had posted about this really cool video I recently found (see Life is about editing). Behold my surprise when one of the comments on the blog was from none other than Allee Willis (see her wikipedia page here, and personal website here). Read the rest of this entry »

A recent story in the NYTimes about Peter Gabriel (An Old Rocker Gets Digital) brought back memories of Peter Gabriel’s album covers. It tells you a lot about me that I know album covers better than I know his music!
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In response to my previous posting titled How artists work, Leigh Wolf pointed out a book (Curious Minds: How a child becomes a scientist). I had not heard of this book before and a quick google search led me to this page. Read the rest of this entry »

A fun and thought provoking, recursive music video by Allee Willis titled “Editing is Cool.” The video attempts to capture the process of creating this very video, from the lyrics, to the music to the special effects and so on. Denise Caruso (at Salon) quotes Allee Willis as saying, “… you can see every single stage of the song and video coming together, along with work logs and lyrics and lots more.”
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An interesting (and growing) collection of “habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people and teams use to get their work done. And in the specific anecdotes and the way people describe their own relationship to their own work.”
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An evocative image from today’s NYTimes about our improved understanding of the beautiful phenomena known as the northern lights. You can read the story here, but I would like to quote from the end of the article:
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I had posted earlier about a “virtual speed bump” a visual illusion that make drivers think that they were approaching a speed bump when in actuality it was just a design cleverly painted on the ground. Now here’s another one: Directions in a car park… Read the rest of this entry »

This is just too good to be true!

Also see here and here.

Every now and then it happens. The state or the system encounters an individual who, bafflingly, maddeningly, absurdly, cannot be broken — Christopher Hitchens

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is no more. He was not an easy author to read - and the last time I read him was back in high school (or maybe college). But I remember them still. Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s NYTimes story about an economist ranking art by the numbers (see A Textbook Example of Ranking Artworks) bothered me a bit. As the article says, David Galenson’s method is based not on the aesthetic qualities of the artwork but rather on “how frequently an illustration of a work appears in textbooks.” His method is simplicity itself, and I quote: He tallied the number of illustrations of each piece in the 33 textbooks he found that were published between 1990 and 2005, on the assumption that the most important works merited the most illustrations.” By this method he argues that Picasso’s, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, as being ranked as number 1. There are two main concerns I have about this methodology. Read the rest of this entry »

While researching my previous post about véjà du and Abraham Wald I came across “The Back of the Napkin Blog” (a.k.a. Digital Roam). This blog is devoted to visual thinking and representation. Very cool and very interesting… well worth a visit. Turns out that there is a posting here about Abraham Wald and his WWII insight. You can read it here: The hole story, What you don’t see will kill you. You can see the author’s page here.

Mike DeSchryver sent me this video… very funny particularly if you are a typophile like me… Read the rest of this entry »

I have been catching up on my reading of Slate and came across this gem of an article by Judith Shulevitz titled, The care and feeding of fiction. Shulevitz has written a quasi-review of James Wood’s new book How fiction works and makes we want to read the book itself. Of the many interesting ideas in the article is this wonderful quote that I just had to share:

There is only one recipe—to care a great deal for the cookery – Henry James

A statement that ought to apply to all that we do…

As an aside, it is clear from this essay by Woods that he has a “take no prisoners” style of writing. His take down of most magical realistic writing (which is calls hysterical realism), including Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo and Foster Wallace is a must read. This just makes me more confident that the book will be a wonderfully, idiosyncratic, engaging and intelligent read.

Optical illusions are usually seen as being cool visual tricks, an intriguing way of peeking into how our brain works. They have rarely been considered to be functionally useful. Here is an exception: an optical illusion seen as a virtual speed bump! Check it out…

Just a link to online videos related to design. Check it out by clicking here

Relevant to CEP817 and CEP917 (and maybe even CEP818)

Browsing through Nikita Prokhorov’s website (see this posting about Nikita’s new blog about the process of creating ambigrams) led me to a fascinating article about how symbols and the historical weight they can carry. Read the rest of this entry »

I received an email out of the blue from Nikita Prokhorov, a freelance graphic designer and assistant professor of graphic design from Connecticut. Nikita runs a blog devoted ambigrams, but in a different kind of way. As the email said, the blog is “devoted to the art and process behind ambigrams. It’s not meant just to showcase ambigram work, but rather explore each artist’s individual process & approach to ambigrams.” What a great idea. Read the rest of this entry »

My 12 year old son, Soham, has never been into music. An MP3 player I bought for him languishes somewhere in his room. So you can imagine my surprise when, a few months ago, he indicated an interest in a song, Louis Armstrong’s What a wonderful world. So this posting is for him, two very beautiful, yet very different renditions/representations of the same song, brought to you, thanks to YouTube.
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Re-Public: re•imagining democracy, an online journal focusing on innovative developments in contemporary political theory and practice, has a special issue devoted to Distributed Creativity and Design. This may be a useful resource for my Learning technology by design (CEP817), Creativity in teaching and learning (CEP818), Knowledge, media, design (CEP917) courses.