When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me – it still sometimes happens – and ask me if Carl changed at the end & converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again.

Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous – not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance…, That pure chance could be so generous and so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful…

The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

(Via Lil Chlo)

Keenan Cummings:

You can’t own style. Style is commodity. Own an intelligent process for making decisions and you’ll have a defensible and competitive advantage.

Lukas Mathis:

It’s easy to take «consistency» to mean that everything should be the same. That’s wrong, however. Consistency also means that different things should be different, to prevent people from forming wrong expectations.

A small point; but then as Otto Jespersen (the greatest of all 20th-century grammarians) remarked in his retirement address in 1925: “To anyone who finds that linguistic study is a worthless finicking with trifles, I would reply that life consists of little things; the important matter is to see them largely.”

Gestalt.

(via Daring Fireball)

In their paper titled The Aesthetics of Reading, Kevin Larson and Rosalind Picard present their findings on the effects of typography on reader mood and cognitive performance. They conducted two studies, each involving 20 people. The participants were divided into two groups of 10 and were given 20 minutes to read a specially typeset issue of The New Yorker on a tablet device. One of the groups got a badly typeset version (using Courier, with spaced out words), the other a properly typeset one.

Interesting findings. Bottom line: typography matters.

Lukas Mathis have an interesting analysis:

This is a sentiment you often hear from people: casual users only need “entry-level” performance. Even casual users themselves perpetuate it: “Oh, I’m not doing much on my computer, so I always just go with the cheapest option.” And then they buy a horrid, underpowered netbook, find out that it has a tiny screen, is incredibly slow, the keyboard sucks, and they either never actually use it, or eventually come to the conclusion that they just hate computers.

In reality, it’s exactly backwards: proficient users can deal with a crappy computer, but casual users need as good a computer as possible.

Computer housekeeping is still a complicated matter for any regular people to deal with, heck, even for a proficient user. Even with iOS which is a blank slate of an OS, Apple clearly pushing hard to get rid of the file system, and yet still not achieve the level of simplicity and ease of use they desire.

There’s still a lot of complexity we have to deal with using a computer, any computers, why? Because it’s multipurpose device. Consider a smartphone, it’s a phone, a camera, a calendaring device, an internet browser, an email device, a gaming device, and anything that an app can offer, on top of that it got plenty of sensors, gyro, proximity, light, GPS, and you name it, in short it’s a darn complex computer.

The challenge is how to make it more simple? You can’t just mindlessly reduce or hide the complexity and call it a day, because simplicity is not the absence of clutter, simplicity is not so simple to achieve.

“Most artists and designers I know would rather work all night than turn in a sub-standard job. It is a universal truth that all artists think they a [sic] frauds and charlatans, and live in constant fear of being exposed. We believe by working harder than anyone else we can evaded [sic] detection. The bean-counters rumbled this centuries ago and have been profitably exploiting this weakness ever since. You don’t have to drive creative folk like most workers. They drive themselves. Just wind ‘em up and let ‘em go.”

— Linds Redding, A Short Lesson in Perspective.