10/5/2003 » Musings

I admire traditional Islam's five-times-a-day discipline and grandiosity (they've built the best monuments IMHO, and I'm going out to Istanbul and Cairo in December). Very execution-focused, but it's just taken to an extreme with the fundies (the executional discipline of the hijackers...)

There’s a strong computer science connection, the geometric artwork of mosques due to the stricture against graven images. It’s beautiful to Escher / fractal admirers. There’s an emphasis on symmetries with the minarets. It's less personal than the Vatican or Hindu images, but that makes it more beautiful to a tech romantic.