Objets Trouvés
David Gelernter goes on about "machine beauty," but these days the
term mostly exists for me only in the most abstract sense, in the
elegance of Unix file descriptors, ML polymorphism, and (credit where
it's due) Windows IO completion ports: not things given over to
aesthetic visualization, or even easy explanation. But occasionally
there's something like the
Curta, which is one of the few
things that seems to justify the retro analog fetish. There's a Flash
simulator, but
it's just not the same.
The Merzcar
lives. (Why not the Merzcedes?) It's purely conceptual, but justified
in that I really am curious to see what it would be like to drive
around in an old Mercedes uncontrollably blasting high-pitched noise
at top volume...for about two minutes.
Posted by waggish at February 20, 2005 11:51 PM
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