News Quilt September 2023

Key Facts About Quilting in American Communities

Native American quilting traditions date back centuries before European settlement. Quilting was practiced by tribes including Navajo, Lakota, Creek, and Seminole using materials like cotton, wool and buffalo fur.

Immigrant groups like the Amish, Mennonites, Mormons, and Shakers all had their own quilting styles and traditions as they settled in America. Regional styles emerged like Hawaiian and Baltimore album quilts.

Traditional Amish quilts use a patchwork style called “piecing” where small pieces of fabric are sewn together to create the quilt top. This allowed women to make use of every bit of available fabric.

Quilting played an important role for pioneer settlers as they headed West in the 1800s. Quilts were vital for warmth and representing memories of home.

The quilting revival of the 1970s helped recognize quilting as a unique American folk art. Contemporary quilting continues to evolve as an art form and means of creative expression.

Key Facts About the Origins and History of Sausage

The invention of sausage is similar to the invention of quilting. It probably began with a question like: “What do I do with these fragments?”

• Sausage making dates back thousands of years as a way to preserve and make use of meat that would otherwise spoil quickly. Some of the earliest evidence of sausage production comes from ancient Egypt and Sumeria.
• The word “sausage” comes from the Latin word “salsus” meaning salted or preserved. Sausage was a way to heavily salt, smoke or dry meat to make it last longer without refrigeration.
• Sausage making became especially important in Europe during the Middle Ages as a way for peasants to make use of less desirable cuts of meat and preserve them. Many modern European sausage styles date back to the Middle Ages.

A Techno-Amish Quilt With Apples and Sausage Links

Architectural News Stories and Links (No Sausage Links)

• 25 Best Office Chairs: Ergonomic Picks Tested and Reviewed
• Six Spectacular Sky Bridges Uplifting the Urban Landscape
• Libeskind’s Affordable Senior Housing Opens in Long Island for Low-Income Residents
• Wooden Surfaces in Brazilian Homes: Exploring Patterns and Textures { Almost half of Brazil is covered in forest, producing nearly 150 million cubic meters a year. Thanks to the large country’s wide range of tree species, Brazilian designers looking for natural, locally sourced materials have a lot of wood to choose from. Unsurprisingly, wood is a common feature in both traditional and contemporary Brazilian homes, both in construction and when creating decorative surfaces.}
• Singulart: Shaking Up the Online World of Art and Design {The art market was a plump target for digital disruption and democratisation.}

Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius – A Summary

The Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius (De Architectura) contain many foundational design principles. The basic concepts are useful for architects — and anyone else who designs and builds things.  This is a summary and study guide I published on September 12.

Complete Beginner’s Guide to Hugging Face LLM Tools {Hugging Face is an AI research lab and hub that has built a community of scholars, researchers, and enthusiasts. In a short span of time, Hugging Face has garnered a substantial presence in the AI space. This guide introduces transformers, LLMs (large language models) and explains how the Hugging Face library plays an important role in fostering an opensource AI community. The guide walks through the essential features of the Hugging Face library, including pipelines, datasets, models, and more, with hands-on Python examples. Hugging Face, started in 2016, aims to make NLP (Natural Language Processing) models accessible to everyone. }

Multi-AI Collaboration Helps Reasoning and Factual Accuracy in Large Language Models

Two heads are better than one. This proverb encourages collaborative thinking… this wisdom holds true even with artificial intelligence: Multiple language models, working in harmony, are better than one. 

R. Scott Clark posted something about Christians living in Babylon that I found quite interesting. “… the fallen world, is Babylon. Rome was the capital city of the world and the outstanding representative of the corrupt world system, much like Washington D.C. is today. This is the nature of the Christian existence, in Babylon, between the ascension of our Lord and his return. This text makes complete sense to Christians in China, Iraq, and Nigeria, to name but three, but it is a hard and shocking reality for American Christians to accept and many simply refuse. They have made America their home.” Read more…

Resources About Christian Nationalism and the Dangers of Kinism

• The CRC is Right About Kinism (part 1)
• The CRC is Right About Kinism (part 2)
• Resources on Christian Nationalism
• Sub-Christian Nationalism (part 1) This is the start of a ten part series. It begins with some helpful definitions. {“The term nationalism is inherently slippery. Indeed, the idea of a nation, as we think of it, is fairly new. We should not assume that there have always been sovereign nations the way that we think of them in the Modern period. For much of the Middle Ages, most of Europe was dominated by the Holy Roman Empire. Students sometimes write about Germany and France as though they have always existed. They have not. Germany, as such, has only existed since 1871.”} Parts 2 through 10 are here.