Halla

psychotherapy:

For thousands of years, people have speculated that there’s some correlation between sadness and creativity, so that people who are a little bit miserable (think Van Gogh, or Dylan in 1965, or Virginia Woolf) are also the most innovative. Aristotle was there first, stating in the 4th century B.C.E. “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.” This belief was revived during the Renaissance, leading Milton to exclaim, in his poem Il Penseroso: “Hail, divinest melancholy/whose saintly visage is too bright/to hit the sense of human sight.” The romantic poets took the veneration of sadness to its logical extreme, and described suffering as a prerequisite for the literary life. As Keats wrote, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

Well, it turns out the cliché might be true after all: Angst has creative perks. That, at least, is the conclusion of Modupe Akinola, a professor at Columbia Business School, in her paper “The Dark Side of Creativity: Biological Vulnerability and Negative Emotions Lead to Greater Artistic Creativity”…

marco:

One of the surprisingly useful sessions from WWDC 2010 was #138: API Design for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.

The title wasn’t a very good expression of its content. It’s more fairly (albeit verbosely) titled, “Conventions, naming styles, and structural guidelines that Apple has used for the Cocoa…

Interesting to know, even for a lowly web app maker like maself :)

therealkatiewest:

My mother has taught me some very important lessons in life, two of which are: to never write down something you don’t want anyone else to read, and to have no regrets.

I’ve sometimes failed with the first one: writing an email that I shouldn’t have written. Posting something somewhere that I…

An excellent post by Katie