Skip to main content

Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

An excellent thought-provoking book that's fun to look at and to hold. Yes, I'll steal the size of this book for my homeschool travel book, and well, that was one of the points! Austin Kleon who serendipitously came to live in Austin, TX wrote this book of http://austinkleon.com/steal/missives on how to best experience being creative. The book covers more of the how than the what I'd say. Some of the advice Austin offers filtered through my reading:

1. Think of your heros' lives, not just their creative input. Let their lives inform yours.
2. Dress for the job you want. Keep being a kid, keep pretending.
3. Get bigger pockets if you need to but keep a journal(s) on you at all times.
4. Who influenced the people who influence you?
4.a. Who does influence you anyway?
5. Don't worry about your ideas being stolen.
6. Everything that needs to be said has been, but no one listened.
6.a. Say it again.
6.b. Say it your way.
7. Write not what you know, but what you like to read.
8. Touch your work. Rearrange it. Tape it to the wall.
9. Tune out while you experience the world. Take the bus. Keep your head up.
10. Keep a log book. Ask yourself what's the best thing that happened to you today?

All of it's so, so good!

No. 1 our 6 y.o. demonstrates how to tape your work to the wall! (And some of Leroy Neiman's).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1.  While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero.  This is typically explained in the following way.  While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare.  That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2].  Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector.  Its operation is in...

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:...