oh good grief...

Students Aren't Allowed To Touch Real Rocks - Forbes.com:

Michael Warring, president of American Educational Products in Fort Collins, Colo., had his shipment all ready: A school's worth of small bags, each one filled with an igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock. Then the school canceled its order. Says Warring, "They apparently decided rocks could be harmful to children."

After all, who knows exactly what is in a piece of Mother Nature? There could be a speck of lead!

The children will study a poster of rocks instead.

And so it goes in the unbrave new world, where nothing is safe enough. It's a world brought to us by the once sane, now danger-hallucinating Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Japan: a world of two cultures

The puzzle of Japanese web design – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report:

It is odd that in Japan, land of world-leading minimalism in the traditional arts and design, web users and skilled web design practitioners believe more is more.

As a commentor on /. noted: Ever been to Tokyo?

Japan has, since the war ended, been a nation of 2 cultures. The historical one of patience and minimalism, of haiku and single-color painting, expressed in modern terms through examples like the music of Toru Takemitsu. 

Then there's the modern one, the one that embraced the culture of the victors in the war (that would be us) and maximized it.  Everything we do, they would do better, they would take to an extreme.  Neon cities, car enhancements, animation, graphic soap operas, dangerous game and reality tv shows, even Disney World* itself, all outdoing what we did.  The trouble is that they are missing something we still have, that filter of conservatism.  For some reason, the two cultures don't meet. 

Where our traditionalist nature and the conservative side of our culture does call for a restraining of the artistic extremes to at least have some adherence to taste, theirs (in that most appropriate of ironies) remains silent on the matter.

* however, Tokyo Disney Seas shows what Imagineering can really do if money is no object, and is a huge artistic success.

fresh (tiny) rant

I let wiser men's words supply my answer to the question of whether or not it was right to release the documents wikileaks released this week.