Thanks to garry's posterous

Instead, I thought I’d take the opportunity to discuss the blog roll over there on the right. Specifically, why I chose these links in particular.

CounterKnowledge – Having been raised in an environment where I was surrounded by people who pretended to know things they didn’t know, I’ve become almost maniacal in keeping an eye out for claims that aren’t’ supported by evidence or reason. This site is a good resource for separating the real from the imagined. Are there others? Share them in the comments.

Data Evolution and Flowing Data – In addition to sunsets, landscapes, portraiture and the other usual artful suspects, I’ve always thought that the numbers, symbols and expressions employed in math and science shared a similar aesthetic quality.  When I moved into consulting and discovered Tufte that appreciation evolved into the visual representation of data. The New York Times does a particularly excellent job of this and there are a number of sites out there where you can learn to do this better. I’m still learning.

First Look, NYTimes Developers Blog – I plan to dedicate an article to what the NYT is doing digitally generally. For now I draw your attention to their developers blog here as they’re doing some really interesting and progressive things (not just for a newspaper but for digital generally) that deserve our attention.

KONIGI – My entire professional career has been devoted to user experience. When I worked in audio post-production it was all about using music, sound effects, dialogue and the techniques of mixing the three to evoke a response in the viewer or listener. The 10+ years I spent honing that skill greased the skids quite nicely for my transition into digital media. KONIGI is a site I stumbled across a few months ago and read regularly for inspiration.

MBV – Along with pitchforkmedia.com this site is the place to go for the latest in indie/alt rock. Another great one is fluxblog.org but Matthew from fluxblog also works on MBV, so if you had to choose just one (as I chose to) choose MBV.

The Bitstream – Always one to champion the little guy, I’ve added the blog of a longtime acquaintance, Oliver Masciarotte. Oliver and I met each other when he was at Sonic Solutions and I was in still doing audio, using the Sonic Solutions toolset. Oliver’s responsible for taking my forensic audio chops to another level.

In the spirit of kicking this off in the right way I’ll start by quoting something I found earlier this evening that seems apropos:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

-Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles, Ted Orland

Here’s to quality via quantity.