yomikoma

Just finished: I really enjoyed Victoria Finlay’s 2002 book _Color: A Natural History of the Palette_ (slightly different name in other countries). Knowing where the world used to get its colors and how that changed was fascinating as an artist and her research took her all over the world to interesting places

Examples: “ultramarine“ and “indigo” are about where those dyes come from rather than their actual shade, an often-taught story about yellow dye in India may possibly be nonsense, how (conveniently for the book’s rainbow organization) the discovery of synthetic violet gave rise to all modern synthetic dyes.

In Stanislaw Lem's book The Cyberiad, the main characters are two constructors, almost-omnipotent robots in a posthuman world. In their sixth sally, they are captured by the pirate Pugg, a robot with a head covered in eyes who has an insatiable hunger for information. He demands they tell him everything they know before he releases them.

To defeat him, they create a Demon of the Second Kind, which lets only true facts out of a random data source. Pugg starts reading with gusto, only to soon realize that most of these facts are totally useless. At first he hopes that great secrets of the universe will be related at any moment, but soon he is buried in information which his many eyes can't help but take in (as the heroes sneak away).

I was naturally reminded of my current information-acquisition tactics - twitter, lj/dw, rss feeds, etc. There's a lot of good information there but plenty of useless nonsense too. I need to remember to filter agressively, lest I end up crushed under a mountain of facts like the Pirate Pugg.