Sean Voisen

From Thoreau’s Walden (p. 12 of the Barnes and Noble edition):

One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;” and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.

Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food would have us believe that despite the nearly 200 years of scientific advances since this passage was written, we’re just as confused about nutrition as we always were, if not more so. He’s probably right.

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Waxing poetic on video about design and programming with Ethan Eismann and Nico Lierman.

Being locked into a single vendor technology silo is no longer tolerable. Information, media and creative projects should be available and accessible without having to pay to keep them that way. The value of open source isn’t readily apparent to the average technology user until after he or she has been locked in to something else, and by then it costs too much in both time and money to break out. Is this the price we pay for beautiful, unified design and experiences? If so, the price tag might be too high.

John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World is a 660-page masterpiece of science writing. If everyone went around thinking about their lives and their civilization within the context of the geological timescale, the world would certainly be a less frantic and less stressed place. A million years is nearly incomprehensible for the human mind, but represents hardly a sliver of the earth’s entire history. Also, denizens of the Bay Area should read book 4, “Assembling California.” Fault lines and earthquakes were never more fascinating and terrifying.

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When I first started blogging back in 2002, the very concept of the blog was new and fresh and I approached the whole process of sharing my every waking thought on the Internet with a certain zeal and earnestness. It was exciting, and I gained a great deal from the endeavor. To be certain, starting a blog was by far one of the most rewarding projects of my life. But over time, my enthusiasm has waned and I’ve started to feel that the traditional format of the blog doesn’t suit my current lifestyle or thinking process. I need something different.

So, being that this site has always been largely experimental, I’ve decided to start a new experiment, the idea for which has sat festering in the back of my mind for some time. I am going to continue to write, as I’ve found writing an essential to both my thinking process and creative expression, but instead of a blog, I will publish my writing in the form of longer-format essays in a separate section of the site. The blog itself will be turned into a digital notebook of sorts where, each day that I have them, I’m just going to capture spurious and miscellaneous thoughts as they arise. Kind of like an open-source brain. Comments for everything except essays will disabled. I don’t know why, I just feel that comments will detract from the process. The Internet is full of far too much noise and not enough signal as is. I will reserve my noise — postings of my daily whereabouts, projects and personal ephemera — for other forums.

I’m not sure where this will lead. My guess is that it may help me to better understand my own thinking process. A process where small questions and small ideas germinate into something bigger and more fully thought-out. But maybe not. I don’t know. Either way, the experiment starts now.

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