“These things are complicated,” he said, “and they involved a lot of people, and you never quite know where they went wrong. A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue. The chances of it getting done ever without something colliding or some misstep are small.”The February 2008 Fast Company talks about MIT's lawsuit against Gehry.
Maybe they should have asked Christopher Alexander to design the building, since he's revered in the software design pattern world :)
There's been at least one attempt to compare Tufte and Alexander: "Edward Tufte Meets Christopher Alexander" (Fresno State people can access the paper here and Hawaii people can click here).
The 9 October 2007 Radio Lab show, in addition to talking to Oliver Sacks about magnets, had an interesting segment about phantom limb syndrome (cured using a $2 mirror) and about how brain and body experience emotion. The interesting part isn't really about phantom limb syndrome, it is the lead-in about experiencing emotion including provocative questions about male-female differences, and whether quadriplegics experience emotion differently.
In the phantom limb segment they talk about a civil war photograph of a pile of feet. It's from the National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM) in Washington DC and if you want to see it, click here.
Bonus thought-provoking things: first, an online exhibit of bezoars from NMHM, including "Rapunzel Syndrome" requiring surgical removal of a trichobezoar.
Second, Duncan Watts takes Malc's tipping point to task: "Is the tipping point toast?"
