What does "postmodernism" mean?

I hear the term "postmodern" here and there. But what does it mean? Can someone help me to understand the flavor of what this term conveys?

I assume that "modern" is like "Progress, Science, and Technology Will Make Life Better And Give Us Hope.". Whereas "postmodern" is like "Um, Hiroshima and Auschwitz. Life is absurd; life has no meaning. I grow old, I grow old; I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

I take it that "modern" is like Aaron Copland, Billy Joel, and Pablo Picasso whereas "postmodern" is like Arnold Schoenberg, Lady Gaga, and Jackson Pollock.

Hope in science/progress ("modern") vs. giving in to depression/apathy ("postmodern").

Is that the distinction?


Modern? Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians (1921)


Postmodern? Jackson Pollock, No. 5 (1948)

Cute pic of the day: Sleepy pug

This is my brother's pug, in its customary attitude of burying its face in a pillow.

Two lessons learned from ordering pizza

Yesterday, with 12 minutes to spare before I had to be somewhere, I ordered a small pizza. I ended up burning the roof of my mouth (because the pizza was too hot), and being a couple of minutes late for my appointment.

From this I draw two lessons:
1. If the food is too hot, don't eat it yet.
2. If there isn't enough time to do something, don't do it yet. Unless, of course, the thing is so important that it's a risk worth taking.

We already live in a multiverse

In a sense, we already live in a sort of visible multi-universe. I'm talking here about the cell phones, video games, iPods, iPhones, iPads, iWhatevers that are being used by half of the people in a room or on a bus. This generation is a small-screen generation—half the time they are looking at a small screen of some sort. Their presence is fragmented—instead of everyone in one place being in that one place, each person is only half-there; the other half of them is somewhere else—in a conversation with someone tens or hundreds of miles away, or in the information-space of the web, or in the artificially created world of a game.

And I'm not sure that being fragmented for most of your life is a good thing.

To ensure that a deck of cards is sufficiently shuffled...

...shuffle it 7 times for a deck of 52 cards.

9 times for two decks (104 cards).

12 times for six decks (312 cards).