Lake Casitas
12/23/2008
bob posted a photo:
Nearing the end of a mammoth ride up Highway 33 north of Ojai.
The Autosock is an alternative to tire chains but lighter, simpler, and more compact.
The Scramble meal planning site - takes a holistic view of shopping, cooking, and eating...could make meals much easier to plan for many.
"It's the late fifties or early sixties, and Doug [Engelbart]'s chatting with Marvin Minsky, one of the fathers of Artificial intelligence. Marvin talks about Al and Doug says, "You're going to do all that for the computers? What are you going to do for the people?" - Jaron Lanier
"Deep Time Purpose of Science, Technology, Art, Culture - To provide adventures of sufficient seductive beauty to seduce humanity away from mass-suicide" - Jaron Lanier. Now that sounds like a worthwhile design task.
"[Old Entish] is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to." - Treebeard in The Two Towers
Passage: a Gamma256 video game by Jason Rohrer - This game is incredible...I knew what was going to happen and it still hit me hard. The guy who built it is pretty interesting too...here's his explanation of the game (play it first).
This hovering war robot is pretty out of control. Check the video and the comment by Brent below.
Video of a trip to space - the fun starts around 1:40...who needs Richard Branson?
"In this age of mindless consumerism, of atomized populations living in boxes, working in boxes, and traveling in boxes, almost always alone, with only the electronic voices of their new feudal lords to guide them through life, the bicycle becomes an instrument of gentle revolution." - Bicycle Fixation
This 3-meter-long, 2mm-thick carbon fiber table won't fit in either my house or office, but I want it anyway...
"Brendan Walker is currently the world's only Thrill Engineer." - history: THRILL LABORATORY. I think that should be everybody's title.
"We went and watched one Buster Keaton and one Charlie Chaplin movie per day," he said. "What it did was confirmed our gut [instinct], which was that there's nothing you can't get across if you ripped away everything and could only do it visually." - Andrew Stanton, director of WALL-E
Hamburger ethnography - featuring cultural insights and hamburger usability testing!
e2eMaterials produces petroleum-free, biodegradable composites from bamboo, kenaf, flax, and a soy resin.
Why we create economic bubbles - "For the price to track the fundamental value, says Noussair, 'everybody has to know that everybody knows that everybody is rational.' Thats rarely the case."
Birthday updates
12/11/2008
On my homepage, I describe myself as a “28-year-old designer”. Sharp-eyed observers will notice that’s now inaccurate—I turned 29 on Sunday. So for the past few years I’ve logged in shortly after my birthday and updated the number manually.
This morning I started to do that and remembered that last year I’d grown weary of the process and coded it this way:
I am a <? echo (date(“y”)+20); ?>-year-old designer
So while my homepage will always lag a bit behind reality, for a December birthday this works pretty well. At least until I turn 120.
All (recent) issues of Bicycling magazine now online and searchable. Nice work Google!
HP packs its new laptop in a laptop bag - love the thought, though I wonder if it's really less waste if you don't want the bag.
Being nimble
12/08/2008
I used to think that nimbleness meant only that when a new opportunity arose, you could start working on it immediately. But the ability to start doesn’t mean much without the ability to simultaneously stop doing what you were before.
To be nimble, it’s more important to be able to stop doing things than to start doing them. This summer I did some of my most innovative work, and I credit it mostly to the fact that by moving to London, I was forced to stop almost everything I was doing and start from scratch. By being open to new opportunities, I was able to pounce on the best one when it came up.
In 1998 I had the chance to talk with Steve Jobs after he’d come back and turned Apple around…’Steve,’ I said, ‘this turnaround at Apple has been impressive. But everything we know about the personal-computer business says that Apple will always have a small niche position…What’s the longer-term strategy?’ He didn’t agree or disagree with my assessment of the market. He just smiled and said, ‘I am going to wait for the next big thing.’” - An interview with Richard Rumelt
But when I look for advice on this, I see lots of people talking about how to start things more easily, but few talking about strategies for stopping things. Tim Ferriss’ Four-Hour Workweek is the closest I’ve come, and that’s why it’s one of my favorites.
The world throws opportunities your way every single week. But if you’re feeling overwhelmed already, you’re not going to be able to embrace them. Keep your mind clear of these feelings of obligations so you can be open to receiving new opportunities. - David Allen, Ready for Anything
In creativity, like strategy, it’s sometimes more important what you don’t do than what you do.
NFB - Carts of Darkness - "In the picture-postcard community of North Vancouver, filmmaker Murray Siple follows men who have turned bottle-picking, their primary source of income, into the extreme sport of shopping cart racing." More on YouTube.
"The Dancing Plague of 1518 was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace, France in July 1518. Numerous people took to dancing for days without rest, and over the period of about one month, most of the people died from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion." Huh. I especially like the prescription authorities prescribed: "More dancing"!
Stage 2 of next year's Tour of California includes all my old stomping grounds...Tunitas Creek, Bonny Doon, Empire Grade. And it's on a holiday too (President's Day). Awesome!
Ah, the dilemma: "There's a lot I want to experience, but not a lot I actually want to do."
This video of a frozen pizza factory just keeps getting better and better as you watch. The pepperoni machine is my favorite.
Notes from Dune
12/03/2008
Dune reminded me in many ways of Anathem, as it is set in a world with 20,000 more years of history. It’s interesting to read stories of intelligent societies that have lived for hundreds of generations, especially since we have just 6000 years of history so far.
What might our world look like with 20,000 years more? I have trouble grasping the differences from less than a century…
The other theme that stuck with me is scarcity. Dune, as a desert planet, demands absolute adherence to strict rations and rules. It’s sustainability with almost nothing to start with. But it gives me hope that as we move to a sustainable culture, we’ll be able to adapt our behaviors and even benefit from the focus that scarcity brings.
The danger of always taking the road most traveled:
The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation. (472)
The last words of a man who tried to unify the world’s warring religions into one “master” belief system:
“Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, ‘I am not the kind of person I want to be.’ It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.” (506)
For posterity
12/01/2008
bob posted a photo:
Since I doubt we'll see a gas price starting with 1 again until we hit 10...
Multitasking
11/19/2008
bob posted a photo:
This woman was driving in traffic, reading a clipboard, and dialing a phone all at once. With a baby seat in back. Classy.
Notes from The Silmarillion
10/22/2008
When I read The Lord of the Rings, I was endlessly intrigued by the references Tolkien made to the ancient history of Middle-Earth. What had really happened there? Why was it called Middle-Earth? How did the events of LOTR fit in with the rest of its history?
So it was with great anticipation that I picked up The Silmarillion (Amazon), in which Tolkien chronicles the full history of the LOTR world.
In its scope and length it reminded me of Anathem, where a single 900-page book felt like several different, but related, stories. In The Silmarillion, this is made explicit by separating the book into four separate sections. Each section uses a different level of perspective and detail, from high-level creation and deities down to personal interactions. This gives the book immense scope and the ability to give a full history of the world. It also uses the same trick as Anathem with its setting, in a world that is “not Earth”, but clearly “similar to Earth in many ways.” (Technically, Tolkien last described it as Earth “at a different stage of imagination”)
As a literary work, however, it’s almost the opposite of LOTR and Anathem. While those books start small, with interpersonal issues in a small community, The Slimarillion starts very big, with the creation of the world and its deities. It sets up an interesting overall flow, as the focus shifts from large scale to very small and back again in LOTR.
Tolkein gives a good description of this himself in the letter to his publisher included in the front (of my version, at least), which was at least as interesting as the rest of the book in telling how he created these works. He describes his goal as follows:
To make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story — the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendor from the vast backcloths. - Forward, xi-xii
The lyrical, poetic writing style is tough to read but is appropriate for the telling of ancient stories. The Silmarillion is set as a work of mythology for the world it describes, not for we as outsiders. As such, it tells the stories to people who are already familiar with the names and places. Fortunately, Tolkien includes a thorough index and glossary at the end of the book for those of us born outside Middle-Earth.
For those simply wishing to understand the history of the LOTR world, the Middle-Earth Wikipedia page is probably the best resource. But if that isn’t enough, and you want to hear the stories yourself, The Silmarillion is the place to find them.
Notes
Just a few notes cribbed here; as with Anathem, the focus is on the reading of the story itself.
Tolkien didn’t write everything with the final grand scheme in mind; rather, it emerged from the writing:
The mere stories were the thing. They arose in my mind as ‘given’ things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew…always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’. - Forward, xii
The Hobbit…was quite independently conceived: I did not know as I began it that it belonged. But it proved to be the discovery of the completion of the whole. - Forward, xii
An interesting perspective on the Dwarves, which were created outside of Eru’s (God’s) grand vision by an angelic Valar and didn’t have the same respect for the earth that the Elves did. Sadly, this seems also to be our perspective in this world…
Because thou hiddest this thought from me until its achievement, thy children will have little love for the things of my love. They will love first the things made by their own hands, as doth their father. They will delve in the earth, and the things that grow and live upon the earth they will not heed. Many a tree shall feel the bit of their iron without pity. - 39
And while many of the stories immediately recall similar religious stories, Tolkien says this was not his goal:
I dislike Allegory—the conscious and intentional allegory—yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth of fairytale must use allegorical language. (And, of course, the more life a story has the more readily will it be susceptible of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story.) - Forward, xii-xiii
How Paul Krugman works
10/14/2008
Insights from the new Nobel laureate:
Listen to the Gentiles - “Pay attention to what intelligent people are saying, even if they do not have your customs or speak your analytical language.”
Question the question - “In general, if people in a field have bogged down on questions that seem very hard, it is a good idea to ask whether they are really working on the right questions. Often some other question is not only easier to answer but actually more interesting!”
Dare to be silly - “What I believe is that the age of creative silliness is not past…If a new set of assumptions seems to yield a valuable set of insights, then never mind if they seem strange.”
Simplify, simplify - “Always try to express your ideas in the simplest possible model. The act of stripping down to this minimalist model will force you to get to the essence of what you are trying to say (and will also make obvious to you those situations in which you actually have nothing to say).”
Full version here; despite his disclaimer at top that “I don’t know anything special about life in general”, these ideas seem applicable to most creative work.
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