YouTube - "Mankind Is No Island" - a convicting story, beautifully told in the text of street signs. #
AutoViewer Download - nice flash slideshow player; simple and clean. #
Digital Pictures Interactive » Blog Archive » Papervision - Augmented Reality - amazing software recognizes a pattern in a video feed and splices in a 3d character on top of it. Try it with the flash applet below the video. #
YouTube - Louis CK "Everything's amazing, nobody's happy" - I guess we do have things pretty good... #
What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008? - great article from 40 years ago. Only positive things, but some that are far beyond what we've done and some that barely scratch the surface. Now where'd I put my "intelligence pill"? #
Project Pigeon "was American behaviorist B. F. Skinner's attempt to develop a pigeon-guided missile...Three pigeons were to control the bomb's direction by majority rule." They pecked at an image they'd been trained to recognize...awesome. #
Coolest hallway ever: Underwater with sharks in Dubai #
YouTube - Third World Record for Marshall - ok Peter, this is getting ridiculous! #
Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results - How'd they find out about my vacation? #
YouTube - Marshall sets another World Record - Wow! Peter's tearing it up...how come this didn't happen when I retired? #
Peering into the micro world - The Big Picture - Boston.com - incredible photos of microscopic (mostly) natural objects #
In 100 years - actually, in far less than that. Exciting stuff... #
Michael Crichton's creative simplifications: "He said he removed complications from his life while writing by having exactly the same food at every meal, so he never had to waste time deciding what to eat." Echoes of Flaubert? #
Chip log - Wikipedia - Wow! The term "knot" comes from the act of tying a rope attached to a piece of wood overboard and watching how many "knots" in the rope passed by in a given amount of time. #
oblong industries, inc. - the Minority Report science advisor has a company making the gestural interfaces reality. #
The web in the world - great summary of current tangible, ubiquitous, and real-world computer interactions. #
Rovio, a very cool remote (web) controlled webcam robot - not bad for $300! #
The Associated Press: US swimmer Marshall sets unlikely world record - Congratulations Peter! #
"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." - C.S. Lewis #
Amazing in-depth interviews about the creation of the Nintendo Wii - very cool to hear how they made the major decisions: a single remote, cartoonish avatars, the tiny console, etc... #
The shift in county-level voting over the past 16 years - pretty remarkable...interesting that Clinton was elected when the map was more "red" and Bush when it was more "blue"... #
SweetSkinz tires have wild patterns in them, and are even reflective at night. Nice idea--unfortunately only in MTB sizes so far... #
Time Magazine's "Best Inventions of 2008" - in a painful one-at-a-time UI. Favorites I hadn't seen before: a shadowless skyscraper; flying wind turbines; the MonoTracer enclosed motorcycle; enhancing food with sounds; and a braille camera for the blind #
YouTube - Awesome CNN Hologram Interview - whoa. Reason enough to have an election, if you ask me... #
Writing as sense-making: "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it." - David Foster Wallace #
Dean Kamen on the interesting way they score the FIRST robotics competition - "We work really hard to 'ambivalence-scale' our competition, as we call it. We create a competition where there's a lot of luck added to it. The rounds are only 2 minutes long; the scoring system isn't particularly fair. It favors, throughout each round, the underdog...We did everything we could to make it fun enough that if your robot didn't win, it's not a personal thing. " #
High-speed photography of a parrot in flight - if I could design something 1/100th as elegant, I'd be ecstatic. Nature does it for free... #
Discount Dead On Annihilator - crazy tool with a great name. Axe, nail puller, demolition hammer, chisel, wrench...and bottle opener. #
"I scarcely spoke at all for two years. I couldn't be completely free of words, but my wife had to talk to people for me. I didn't want to say anything, make any sounds, until I was pretty sure what those sounds meant and why I wanted to use them." - R. Buckminster Fuller, explaining his two-year silence. #
A fascinating biography of Buckminster Fuller. I didn't know about his self-imposed isolation, a la Thoreau: "Fuller moved his wife, Anne, and infant daughter, Allegra, to a one-room apartment in a Chicago slum, withdrew completely from all friends and social contact, and vowed not to speak again until he really knew what he thought. And then he began to think. His virtual silence lasted for almost two years..." #
How to make a globe - I love this video. #
Fun gallery of wild Dutch bike designs at the Designhuis exhibition. My favorites: the Giant Downtown, with integrated handlebar lock; a bike you connects two bikes to make a 4-wheeled vehicle; a dinky little recumbent trike; a slick carbon recumbent; a rowing-action pullcord drivetrain; and an internal-drivetrain suspended recumbent. #
Wattzon - Profile Summary - bobryskamp - my personal energy use. Averaged out, I use roughly 11,759 watts of energy, all the time. That's 118 100-watt light bulbs burning constantly...or 2,627 gallons of oil per year. Ouch. #
Wattzon - perform your own energy use analysis. Built by Saul Griffith, whose own energy analysis I found fascinating... #
"The starting point for a new way of thinking is to give up the fantasy that there was once a golden age to which we can return. What might have been a golden age for one segment of society was a time of torture for other segments." - Fred Taylor. Good to keep in mind as we watch our most recent economic golden age crumble... #
It's striking to me that the place Christianity is growing fastest--China--is where it is limited by law to churches of fewer than 25. #
Immersive design - "The immersive design process attempts to describe two simultaneous entwined tasks: 1) To design intact worlds that are coherent, have interior logic, contain history, geography, surface, metaphor and story, and allow an audience to be fully immersed in both environment and story. 2) To put in place a non-linear immersive process that provides a fully collaborative, often virtual production space for creators and the work that they are creating." Coined by Alex McDowell, production designer for Minority Report, Fight Club, etc. #
Melee - looks like a nice distributed/digital brainstorming app, virtual sticky notes; supports clustering and prioritizing as well...will be released in a couple days #
Manta Bicycle Saddle - it's certainly different... #
One Dollar Diet Project - a couple lives on a dollar a day each for food. #
Toyota's "Winglet" personal transporter - I like this thing a lot; like a Segway you can carry around. #
"Don't just do something, sit there." - Zen saying #
Sleeping in a room with a fan lowers a baby’s risk of sudden infant death syndrome by 72 percent. Wild. #
The ZAP Alias seems similar in approach to the Aptera, but with a shape that seems more palatable today. #
SuperUse, a new PBS show about designers building things from found waste. "Generally, architects...make a final design and then find the proper materials to make the vision real. But what we do is look at the materials that are there and incorporate them in the project that we have...so it's kind of backwards thinking." #
ThinkGeek :: MicroFly Tiny R/C Hovering UFO - looks like way too much fun. #
"Thus even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster...In fact, it’s a safe bet that we have not asked our biggest questions yet." - Kevin Kelly. Exciting stuff--I'd agree that the questions seem only to be getting bigger: climate change, world economies, the web. #
MamaMikes.com - cool service that allows you to send payments and gifts to anyone in Kenya and Uganda; everything from flowers to cell phone minutes to fuel vouchers. Meant mostly for the African diaspora... #
Very slick: a zero-energy humidifier made of water-resistant paper that forces water into tiny droplets, which evaporate more easily. A good cooling strategy as well... #
Kevin Kelly's final statements about what the web will be in 5000 more days: "There is only One machine. The web is its OS." Sounds really similar to the Islamic Shahada...coincidence? I also like his earlier quote, that "We have to get better at believing the impossible." #
Free University in Internet - despite his grammar woes, this guy has uploaded and organized hundreds of videos on Google to create his own online "university". Awesome. #
Halloween contact lenses - way too tempting... #
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand; And a Heaven in a Wild Flower; Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand; And Eternity in an hour." - William Blake, Auguries of Innocence #
Always push the bees the way they want to go - Gerald Cooper. As Russell says, about the best advice you'll hear anywhere. #
"Imagine, as a thought experiment, that everyone on the planet had the same share of the world's resources. It turns out your share is about six acres (2.5 hectares) of dry land. Now imagine if that were your whole world. How would you treat it?" - My little world (and yours, too), an interesting thought experiment that shows how radically we need to change our lifestyles in the developed world. #
WorldChanging: Thriving on Earth ForeverAn interesting quote in the comments: "If plastics will be here for 50,000 years, how are we going to learn to live with 50,000 years of bad design decisions?" I think the assumption is that we won't have to--that we'll be extinct by then. But what if we aren't? What if we survive? #
Nashville pumps dry after panic about rumor of no gas - a self-fulfilling prophecy...these videos of the situation are like a glimpse into the future... #
The Temples of Damanhur are an amazing set of underground buildings carved over 30 years, in secret, beneath an utterly unremarkable Italian country home. Wow. #
A motto for our times: "Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul. " - from The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster, a pretty good prediction of the future from 1909. #
mobaganda* - world's simplest event invitation website. No registration, no nonsense. #
Nice overview of the sustainable design process (PDF). From the upcoming book, Design is the Problem #
"The important thing is not to stop questioning…. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity." - Albert Einstein #
Innovation is "invention that sells" - Larry Leifer #
YouTube - IF Mode - Pacific Cycles - finally, a full-size, cool-looking folding bike #
Interesting: because we take in so much more information than we realize consciously, we make decisions based on feelings, not thoughts. "Traditional models of affect posit that ... first we decide what we think, and then we decide how we feel about it. However, the evidence ... indicates that the real order of things is likely to be the reverse of this... what we feel about something tells us what we think." #
A good summary of 10 creativity "paradoxes" from Csikszentmihalyi's Creativity, which I took notes on earlier. #
It's a trap! Off to the woods! "This is a stunning moment in economic history...today, the more we earn, the more we work, since the opportunity cost of not working is all the greater (and since the higher we go, the more relatively deprived we feel)." #
I do a lot of staring into space, so this was good news: "[Scientists have] demonstrated that daydreaming is a fundamental feature of the human mind - so fundamental, in fact, that it's often referred to as our "default" mode of thought. Many scientists argue that daydreaming is a crucial tool for creativity, a thought process that allows the brain to make new associations and connections...'If your mind didn't wander, then you'd be largely shackled to whatever you are doing right now'" #
"Think of a world where everything is by default on, where the 'record' and 'capture' button is replaced by 'pause'. And then re-imagine the Airplane Mode. Intentionally or not, it's a little switch with a big future." - Jan Chipchase #
Kevin Kelly doesn't think that technology is duping us because the most technical people embrace it most. But I don't really agree with his premise - "By this logic we should expect the least technologically cultured people to be the least duped, and to be the most aware of the plainly visible dangers...But, in fact, those disenfranchised people not under media’s spell are often the most eager to trade in the old for the new." I think there's probably different types of technology that dupe us in different ways...and some are more dangerous than others. #
Long-term X Prizes - pretty huge problems to solve, if you've got some free time...everything from a cure for AIDS to flying cars... #
Vote for Change - pretty slick voter registration system; created by the Obama campaign but useful for anyone. #
Cycling - News - Universal Sports - new site streaming cycling races both live and archived. World Championships on now! #
"Justice is what love looks like in public" - Cornel West, via the powerful-looking film Call + Response, about human trafficking. #
"Communication always changes society, and society was always organized around communication channels. Two hundred years ago it was mostly rivers. It was sea-lanes and mountain passes. The Internet is another form of communication and commerce. And society organizes around the channels." - Vinod Khosla #
"Around the time that we went public we disclosed in our filing that Beanie Babies accounted for 8 percent of the inventory on the site." - Pierre Omidyar on eBay #
"I made a list of 20 different products that you might sell online. I picked books because books are very unusual in one respect. And that is that there are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category, by far...having a bookstore with universal selection is only possible on the Web. You could never do it with a paper catalogue....and you could never do it in a physical store." - Jeff Bezos #
The history of the Internet - as told by its inventors. Pretty cool... #
The invention of email: "[Ray Tomlinson] said, I need some symbol that separates the name of the recipient from the machine that the guy’s files are on. And so he looked around for what symbols on the keyboard were not already in use, and found the “@” sign. It was a tremendous invention." - Vint Cerf #
"Consequently, whoever he is, that, owing no man any thing, and having food and raiment for himself and his household, together with a sufficiency to carry on his worldly business...seeks a still larger portion on earth; he lives in an open, habitual denial of the Lord that bought him." - John Wesley lays it down #
Avatar is an upcoming 3-D (stereoscopic) film by James Cameron. He describes the process of making it in this interview with Variety. I liked this tidbit: "Small displays will especially benefit from stereo because the small size of the screen can be offset by using Z-depth to stack information...In the future world shown in 'Avatar,' all display devices, including handheld devices and even photos, are all in 3-D." #
Why Apple doesn't do "Concept Products" - a good post and discussion around the wisdom or folly of creating concept designs, especially releasing them publicly. The author's law: "A commercial company's ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products." #
An interesting perspective for those who deem themselves "experience designers": "It is important to understand that, for Dewey, no experience has pre-ordained value. Thus, what may be a rewarding experience for one person, could be a detrimental experience for another...The value of the experience is to be judged by the effect that experience has on the individual's present, their future, and the extent to which the individual is able to contribute to society." - 500 Word Summary of John Dewey's "Experience & Education" #
The oak beams - or, "how to run a culture" #
Adam Kimmel presents: Claremont HD on Vimeo - skateboarders bombing down the hill behind my house...which is scary on a *bike*. #
San Francisco Twilight Criterium - this Saturday at 8pm, should be cool. #
Fat Cyclist » Blog Archive » Exclusive: Lance Armstrong Returns to Pro Racing! (Plus Insider Reactions) - of all the Lance second coming articles, I think this one's probably the most accurate. #
Prototyping 3d objects with balsa wood - basically, cut out thin slices and glue them together. Nice outcome though, and looks more sturdy than foam. #
"We are naturally reverent beings, but much of our natural reverence has been torn away from us because we have been born into a world that hurries." - Macrina Wiederkehr #
How to read a movie, by Roger Ebert. Includes a jam-packed paragraph on cinematography and emotion, as well as a description of "reading a movie", where you pause frequently to discuss a shot or scene as a group. #
The Long Now Foundation - Seminars About Long Term Thinking - all of these look tremendously interesting. Off to one on Tuesday evening... #
Beloit College Mindset List - each year Beloit publishes a set of "cultural touchstones" that its entering freshmen share. Fascinating to see the world from the perspective of someone younger... #
I love this poem...and especially the first line: "The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday..." #
Hidden radio - in the era of the iPhone, sometimes "no user interface" is a refreshing way to go. Reminds me of the Muju CD player as well. #
"The one thing on which we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor...and God is with us if we are with them." - Bono #
Profiles: A Man of Taste - how one of the world's best chefs created food when cancer took away his ability to taste it. "Achatz hopes that, ultimately, the months he has spent without his sense of taste will make him a more creative chef. Regulars at Alinea praised the food that he prepared during his radiation treatment. This worried him; he thinks it suggests that [before cancer] he was cooking timidly." #
Shredding on a Keyboard - really clever; the game JamLegend (a GuitarHero for the web) suggests you hold the keyboard sideways like a guitar. #
Using Real Options to Value Design Concepts - interesting way to value concepts: plot out all possible outcomes, with probabilities and values. This way you can compare the development options as well as evaluate the concept overall. #
This is pretty wild: "Because most people possess positive associations about themselves, most people prefer things that are connected to the self...people are disproportionately likely to live in places whose names resemble their own first or last names (e.g., people named Louis are disproportionately likely to live in St. Louis)...people disproportionately choose careers whose labels resemble their names (e.g., people named Dennis or Denise are overrepresented among dentists)." I also like the name of the paper: "Why Susie sells seashells by the seashore" (PDF). So how many people choose careers based on their names? Approximately 1% #
Quickrelease.tv » The Best (and Worst) Bicycle Saddles Ever - including some I hadn't yet seen #
Saul Griffith, "Energy Literacy" - fascinating talk on measuring and calculating the energy needed by individuals and all humanity, and what we need to do to meet it. #
IFTF's Future Now: The case for human-future interaction - "At its core, human-future interaction would be the art and science of effectively and ethically communicating research, forecasts, and scenarios about trends and potential futures...[there is now] a growing view of the future as a medium that anyone can affect and co-create, and less as looming inevitability to be passively consumed. #
Walls made from discarded plastic bags - since recycling them is less than desirable, why can't we use them for something else? Looks like urban art to boot... #
"People who write books, people who work in universities, who work on big projects for a long time, are on a diverging course from the rest of society. Slowly, the two cultures just get further and further apart." - Neal Stephenson. So how do I get on that course? Stephenson, by the way, works for Intellectual Ventures. #
"You can't have art without resistance in the materials" - William Morris #
ZuiPrezi zooming presentation editor - might be fun for documenting brainstorms, actually. #
Love-ability is a key to Sustainability - I want to work at the intersection of sustainable and beautiful design...these tips seem a good way to get there. #
Finding Paths through the World's Photos - gorgeous way of browsing through a 3d world made up of thousands of people's photos. #
How I talk about my job - I think I've used all those options, actually... #
Korean artist Yeondoo Jung took children's drawings and built the scenes in real life. Time to dig up my childhood sketches, I think... #
Cool: Bike Furniture Design - "Welcome to Bike Furniture Design, the preeminent designer and producer of fine, hand-crafted, contemporary / modern furniture made from recycled and reused bicycles." #
Miracle Berry Fruit Tablets - the amazing taste-changing fruit, now in convenient tablet form. Anyone for a lemon-eating party? #
Berkeley Public Library :: Tool Lending Library - With Amazon and the web, I haven't been to a library in a long time. That's about to change... #
When General Motors Was Dreaming - wild concepts from the 50s. Wonder if the wildness of the concepts was caused by--or caused--the booming business they used to have? #
Infrastructural Branding - making logos/names integral instead of slapped-on. #
Volkswagen to Make Limited Edition of 1-Liter Car (282 MPG!) in 2010 - nice to see the big manufacturers getting up to speed on efficiency. #
Thallium-Doped Lead Telluride - Try saying that five times fast. Apparently it can turn heat into electricity twice as efficiently as any other material, and might be able to reclaim heat from car engines to power them further. #
Gravity Bikes - stripped down BMXs with fairings, meant for going downhill only. Check out the videos and pictures, and how to build your own. #
IKEA provides free bicycles and trailers for hauling your stuff home - But only in Denmark so far: "About 20% of IKEA's customers ride their bicycles to the stores - even though most of then are located outside the cities. IKEA in Denmark has now introduced a free bicycle hire scheme with VELORBIS bicycles and trailers. You can borrow a bicycle and trailer to take home your newly purchased items." #
Liv'it Fly Shelf Projection Screen - slick; it rolls up into a shelf when you're not using the screen. #
Environmental Constraint = Better Quality - A major motivator behind my own environmental constraint: "Time and time again we see that when we reduce environmental harm, we end up producing better-performing, higher-quality Patagonia garments. And sales of those improved garments often enhance our business health and profitability." Includes lots of good examples. #
"Eritrea has, sadly, a long history of civil war with Ethiopia. They got their freedom in 1992. There are lot of land mines. As a result, at the University of Asmara in Eritrea, I'd say maybe 25 percent to a third of the students are missing a limb. Those who are missing legs cannot get up the stairs to the second floor or the third floor. No questions asked, the students just carry each other. I've never seen anything like it. Very naturally, somebody offers you his back and you climb on it and he takes you up to the next floor." - Tom Campbell #
Flash Cards Gone Mental | Mental Case - "RSS for your head" - set it to create flash cards from things you want to remember... #
The world's ten oldest jokes - I think you probably had to be there. #
Block Posters - finally, an online utility to blow up photos nicely across many standard size sheets of paper. #
"To be an industrial designer, you have to be three people at the same time. You have to be the crazy person. Then you have to be the person who reviews those crazy ideas and says, 'no, not that, and not that either.' The third person has to be the observer who stands off to the side and manages that process." - Syd Mead #
Infinite OZ | Tin Man | SCIFI.COM - a beautiful immersive experience. Like living paintings you fly through... #
A dump truck that's a work of art. Amazing. #
Shoreditch tricycle race benefits social entrepreneurs - D'oh! It's the week after I leave London..."it's a pedal powered race of epic proportions, mixing the glamour of Monaco, the endurance of Le Mans and the idiocy of adults attempting a street race on children's toy tricycles" #
Nike Ultimate Ignition SS V-Neck - there's something cool about taking something really simple to a performance extreme. Like a t-shirt. #
Tony Blair on his role in world events - Surprisingly humble: "Truthfully, the British prime minister has limited power to affect this. Maybe 80 years ago he did. The only way I affect it is by persuasion. And by giving people a sense of strategy and a plan. No one outside the US president has meaningful levers in their hands." #
"Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the 'one thing necessary' may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed." - Thomas Merton #
A design company posts their business plan online - Nice philosophy: "So what about people stealing our ideas? Well, the 'how' of how we do it isn't as much of a competitive advantage honestly...It's just technology, and eventually everyone gets the same stuff anyways. It's really about people and process." #
Two Things Design Experts Do That Novices Don't: design lots of different concepts and reframe problems to be solvable. Cites two interesting studies, How designers work (a Ph.D. Dissertation) and Expertise in Design (PDF). #
Cool Tool: Sleeptracker Pro - "... a wrist watch that monitors your sleep cycle from barely asleep to REM by tracking a succession of small bodily movements." A watch with value beyond telling the time... #
"It's heavy to drag, this big sack of what you should have done...But Now has arrived and is looking straight at you." - William Stafford #
Wow. "The Acropolis was besieged twice during the Greek War of Independence, once by the Greek and once by the Ottoman forces. During the siege the Greeks were aware of the dilemma and chose to offer the besieged Ottoman forces, which were attempting to melt the lead in the columns to cast bullets, bullets of their own if they would leave the Parthenon undamaged." - Wikipedia #
BBC - Dragons' Den - people pitching investments to highly entertaining venture capitalists. #
GM is making a big bet on electric. Yes, they tried this once before...but never with this much effort. These sink-or-swim turnarounds are fascinating to me... #
The Jesus Sutras are scrolls from early (7th century) Chinese Christians. They interpret stories of Jesus in a Chinese Buddhist/Taoist context (e.g. Jesus saves people from karma)...looks fascinating. Here's an interesting discussion about Christian and Buddhist similarities and conflicts. #
"Everything has been created out of sea-mucous, for love arises from the foam" - Lorenz Oken, seen at the Hayward Gallery #
High-res Video using Still Photos - this is amazing stuff. "Object removal" near the end makes me think the era of trusting video footage is near its end (still photos, of course, have lost all credibility) #
Flying past Saturn - Looks...lonely. (best viewed in Quicktime Player) #
Tofu packed in baloons, japan. - Beautifully elegant. Come to think of it, tofu could come in any shape...where's the creativity? #
Sliding Liberia - "A story of war, peace, and surfing". Looks great. #
Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno on the future...in 1993 - "15 years ago some of these predictions were far more outrageous than today, and some are more outrageous today than back then." Sounds like a fun thing to do with friends. #
Yvon Choinard on fly fishing (video) - "You have to look at a river and be able to read a river like a rock climber reads a rock...[and] match that with the right fly. It's not about catching fish, it's all about adapting yourself to where you're worthy of catching the fish. It's not about catching the fish, it's about the fish catching you." #
Inside Nairobi, the Next Palo Alto? - good intro into Google's work in Africa, and Nairobi specifically. #
You can now add items from any web site to your Amazon wish list. It's already where I look first for most things anyway. Now, if they'd only improve the wish list UI itself, it'd be perfect. #
The new Radiohead video was made without cameras--just laser-traced 3d data. Try the viewer they used to do the "filming", and imagine movies made this way--you could choose where in the movie's world you wanted to view from! #
Air pollution helium balloon - like an ambient orb for the entire city. Try ignoring that! #
How To Tell A Story - nice concise tips. Most everything is a story in one way or another...so useful for most work. #
How an art museum visit inspired the design of the Air Max 1 - "Had I not seen the building, I might not have suggested we expose the air bag in the shoe" #
Visual thinker - except for the Spanish, this could have been one of my exams... #
Enduring ideas - interesting timeline of business strategy and operational frameworks. I wish more of them were described and annotated (only 2 are)...but perhaps they will be in the future. #
"'I just don't know what to do next,' [said] the choreographer...Gower [Champion, famous director] replies 'Well do something, so we can change it!'." - Michael Johnson Talk Report - Upcoming Pixar #
Conversation with Michael B. Johnson of Pixar - Part 1 - really great insight into Pixar's process, through talking about their tools. #
"Too much debate about scriptural authority has had the form of people hitting one another with locked suitcases." - N.T. Wright #
Nintendo Wii MotionPlus - the Wii gets another motion controller for more accurate pointing... #
Dark night sky over Death Valley - warped a bit to make a rectangular panorama, but still cool. #
How to design thrilling experiences: "In the beginning, my work was more conceptual, strategic. But recently, I've been getting jobs where I do have to design or choreograph the ride. I'm not designing what a particular ride might look like; it's more like creating storyboards of the way a ride will feel." - Brendan Walker #
The rest of Markus Kison's work is great as well: Folding Polaroids to make a 3d scene; live webcams projected onto static 3d cutouts #
Invisible Memorial in Dresden - very cool secret experience; assume the position of someone cowering from the Dresden bombing and you can hear the sounds through vibration. #
Kodak Zi6 | Uncrate - $180 HD pocket camcorder... #
My ideal notebook - just refill with A4 sheets whenever you run out! #
YouTube - Train Runs Through Bangkok Market - Fastest. Market setup. Ever. #
BC Bike Race || a Seven Day Mountain Bike Stage Race from Victoria to Whistler, BC, Canada - the race that would deliver the singletrack I just posted about... #
Quorn | About Quorn - got to be the meat substitute I love in the No-Meat Treat #
"The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer." - Zadie Smith #
YouTube - Kinetic sculpture at the BMW Museum (full lenght) - like a living cloud...and would be the coolest 3d prototyping tool ever, though they only hint at that. #
Video of Train Plowing Deep Snow - man, one of these would have made Michigan winters *much* more interesting...also see 9 other railroad snowplows #
Notebook Portable Grill - beautiful folding charcoal grill #
Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb - this looks awesome. One of those things you can't believe they let people do... #
"So long as you live as a Christian you keep looking for a new order, a new structure, a new life." - Henri Nouwen. Sounds like a good life for a designer... #
Rosetta Stone Claims Infringement - I thought this must have been a spoof headline; after all, copying (ok, via translation) was the whole point of the real Rosetta Stone. #
Wimbledon TV watchers cause a power surge in the UK - " A 1,400 megawatt spike - equivalent to 550,000 kettles being boiled - was recorded at around 9.20pm, as the Spaniard lifted the trophy...National Grid spokeswoman Isobel Rowley said the surge was huge because fans were so transfixed by the tennis, they could not move from the sofa to switch the lights on until the end." It was a pretty great match. #
Telling description in the Lonely Plant entry for The Edinburgh Literary Pub Tour: "Tour length depends on drinking time." #
Scenario planning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - in-depth description of it as a science; I'm mostly interested in how you visualize the futures you foresee... #
V&A Building Trail - Victoria and Albert Museum - the museum has several "trails", meant to guide you through the huge collection. Here's another good one. #
Aerial --- tailored emotional experience - interesting design consultancy...focuses on designing emotional experiences. And it's based in London, so there's lots here to explore... #
Oakland Museum of California - while we're visiting every single museum in London, I never knew there was one in Oakland. The current exhibit, Birth of the Cool, looks...cool. #
Cool bike racing cartoon on YouTube - the final sprint is very stylized...but looks just like they feel in real life! More here. #
The Tri-bot is an omnidirectional, three-wheeled toy robot controlled with a tilt-sensing wand. This seems more interesting to hack into than robotic dogs... #
"Ultimately we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world." - Etty Hillesum #
"Long time no see" is an expression created by Chinese dock workers trying to speak English; it's now used commonly by native English speakers - Wikipedia #
"An estimated 300 million Chinese -- roughly equivalent to the total US population -- read and write English but don't get enough quality spoken practice. The likely consequence of all this? In the future, more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese." - WIRED #
Freehold Or Leasehold - we saw several "leasehold" flats for sale in Notting Hill today and wondered what you were buying with that...not much, it turns out. #
Marginal Revolution: The secrets of *Lost*, revealed - spoilers and speculation included, of course. I love this notion; reminds me of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth. What better way to build a new story than on a framework tested for millenia? #
Fireworks, lightning, and a comet - all in the same photo. Who needs tv when you've got a sky like that? #
When pro mountain bikers can't stop talking about great singletrack, it means a trip there is in order... #
Giant drawings in sand. Here's more. Awesome. #
"All the political, religious, and moneymaking institutions' power is built upon those institutions' expertise in ministering to, and ameliorating, the suffering, want, pain, and fears resultant upon the misassumption of a fundamental inadequacy of life support on our planet and the consequent misfortune of the majority of humans" - From "Cosmography" by R. Buckminster Fuller, 1983 #
Anil Dash: Bill Gates and the Greatest Tech Hack Ever - "Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria. That, effectively, is what Bill Gates has done." #
The feel-good YouTube video of the year - and a neat statement about people around the world. #
Very cool sketch notes - without concern for overlaps, which just make them more interesting... #
X-bike - very cool concept bike, via Bicycle Design #
Unicycle.com :: Products :: Ultimate Wheel - who needs a seat...or two wheels. #
Global Nomadic Expatriates - interesting to read about while trying it out ourselves... #
And yet: "We are seeing the growth in what could be termed a new aristocracy. Their emphasis on the home and family, on personal fulfillment and the environment are all testament to this new way of thinking." - Guy Salter, chairman of luxury-brands firm Walpole #
I knew it--it's a trap! "Being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed." - Daniel Kahneman #
SEED 3 Sketchnotes - Much more organized than mine. Larger pullquotes, sketch of each speaker, varying "fonts". Pretty slick. #
Product Design - WSJ.com - Nice in-depth report on the design process #
Amron Experimental - cool little design concepts, like a toothbrush+rinse tool and a money clip made from, well, money. #
Consulting Wisdom - most apply to other jobs as well #
this is a working library - beautiful blog design #
The Highest Popping Toaster in the World - and it's in *my* city. Seriously, I love this over-the-top stuff. #
Amazing record player animations - Takes advantage of the RPM of the record player. Mesmerizing... #
"Many companies enjoy packaging their goods inside nasty materials covered in gaudy graphics.That's because many companies are controlled by crazy people." - Help Remedies #
June 21: the summer solstice? Yeah, but more importantly: Go Skateboarding Day #
Indentured advertude - "advertising where you are held hostage to look at it and you know all it's doing is paying for the crappy experience you're having." #
::whike:: - "This recumbent bike can take advantage of the wind to propel itself, while still allowing cycling (if there's no wind)." #
Lexon Around Clock - acquire - clever way to show time, with a single rotating cylinder #
Extreme Instability - wild photos by a professional storm chaser; check out "Images by year" #
Images of Fly Geyser - man's most beautiful mistake? #
Lonely panda - hee hee. #
I love how the finish line cameras can't deal with spokes spinning so fast. Also, my old friend Kirk O'Bee continues his winning ways... #
"It's a terrible world, and modern parents are trying to cocoon their kids as much as possible...What better way to protect them than wrapping them in nostalgic brands?" - Alfred Kahn. Spoken like a true marketer. #
Mystery on Fifth Avenue - a truly awesome treasure hunt designed into a house by the architect. Every product should be so intriguing... #
Scenius - "like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes." The growing science of collaborative work. #
The carbon footprint of food - "83 percent of emissions came from the growth and production of the food itself. Only 11 percent came from transportation, and even then, only 4 percent came from the transportation between grower and seller." #
J.K. Rowling on the value of failure - "Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged." #
SURFWISE the Film - about a family of 9 who dropped out of the system and surfed all day. Plus a cool website... #
Incredible interview with Werner Herzog - detailing his wild exploits, including midgets, volcano bombs, and getting shot (starts at 30:00) #
Cultures collide - via my new favorite site, The Big Picture #
Incredible photos of the Chaiten Volcano eruption - the electrical storm photos look like a doomsday movie. #
Sunset on Mars - somehow this makes it much more real. Big version #
Seriously, the dancing prison will become a landmark in world history. Seriously. #
The Height Gap - "A survey of some six thousand adolescents in the nineteen-sixties showed that the tallest boys were the first to get dates. The only ones more successful were those who got to choose their own clothes." Hmm...what if you're really tall, but still have trouble choosing your own clothes? #
Spending on Happiness - "Can money buy you happiness? Yes--so long as you spend the money on someone else." #
An interesting way to measure the value of subjective experiences - for an item costing four times as much as another, "Would you recall, with fondness, the experience of one four times as often as the experience of the other?" #
"[Negative numbers] darken the very whole doctrines of the equations and make dark of the things which are in their nature excessively obvious and simple." - Francis Maseres. I spent so much time learning about negative numbers growing up, and just realized how ridiculous it all was. #
Jeff Bridges still has the coolest website around. #
Santa Fe 1 hour opera - very cool concept, introductory opera in a format that doesn't scare people. Wonder if that technique could scale to other culturally intimidating experiences? #
How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight? Hee hee...and, 19. #
Why bother living green? - "Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can't prove that it will." - Michael Pollan. Reminds me of Daniel Engber's reason: "to create a cultural climate that's more conducive to significant global change". #
"We do not think our way to right action. We act our way to right thinking." - David Milch #
Wow! The Miracle Fruit, a Tease for the Taste Buds - "The berry rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy." #
REGIONAL» Blog Archive » Self-portraiture and emerging artistic consciousness in Dafen - amazing what Chinese reproduction painters can do when turned loose... #
YouTube - Spaceless in Action - pretty slick furniture concept to fold things into the floor... #
"If markets were costless to use, firms would not exist. Instead, people would make arm's-length transactions. But because markets are costly to use, the most efficient production process often takes place in a firm." - Ronald H. Coase, Biography. So as markets become less costly to use, do firms disappear? #
Free nature-friendly home plans - pretty cool business model, offer designs for free and partner with material suppliers and builders for revenue. #
Now the ethanol frenzy is making high-fructose corn syrup and movie tickets more expensive. I wondered while reading The Omnivore's Dilemma if the environment would end up forcing us to be healthier...looks like it might. #
Photos from Luminale 2008, an artistic festival of lights across the city of Frankfurt. #
The Littlest Big Bang | Popular Science - one theory of the universe is that it is a 3d world suspended in a 4d superstructure...so what might that 4d structure be? #
The Write Stuff? | Popular Science - very cool pen that records and transcribes your writing, and also records audio in 3d via two earbuds you wear! #
Alien activity in Africa? - nope, just salt ponds. Wild colors though... #
For those (like me) suffering from disaster fatigue: the China earthquake really hurt and the news keeps getting worse. Deny your fatigue a bit by donating for relief. #
"Prayer is not introspection...Prayer is the presentation of our thoughts to the One who receives them, sees them in the light of unconditional love, and responds to them with divine compassion." - Henri Nouwen. One neo-interpretation of prayer is as simply a meditative, time-boxed personal practice; Nouwen rejected that, seeing it as a constant conversation. #
Crocs Santa Cruz - crocs comfort + canvas casual #
"Today, a person standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on a cloudless night would be unable to discern much more than the moon, the brighter planets, and a handful of very bright stars--less than one per cent of what Galileo would have been able to see without a telescope." - The Dark Side: The New Yorker. I'm really interested in how this affects our thoughts about the universe beyond us, as Kottke notes, and how we might reclaim our sense of wonder about it. #
"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." - EB White. Amen to that... #
"[Will Wright's] car was a mess, inside and out; Wright never washes it, because he wants it to look like one of the banged-up starships in 'Star Wars.'" - The New Yorker #
Why smokers are happier when cigarettes cost more - because it gives them an excuse to quit. Wonder if the same will be true for gasoline and driving? #
PlasticsEurope > The World in 2030 - somewhat standard futurist outlook...the interesting thing was that this was the first time I looked at it and thought "But who would want that?" I'm already an old curmudgeon... #
Whoops, quoted that one wrong: "Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night." William Blake - The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Though, swapping reading for eating isn't such a bad trade... #
How the mortgage crisis happened - nice explanation in a 1-hour radio program. #
Jet-powered wingsuit - I really want to fly...but this looks a little crazy. #
Microsoft TouchWall can inexpensively turn any flat surface into a multi-touch display - apparently still just a demo...but a nice one! #
"The argument is that divisionalization allows you to have general managers who then make operating decisions that are fast moving. The problem with that is if the customer wants an integrated experience it now looks like they're looking at a federated experience." - Eric Schmidt #
Nick Bostrom's home page - more from the futurist who hopes we don't find life on Mars. #
WorldChanging: Don't Just Be the Change, Mass-Produce It - the designer's role in sustainability? #
Doodles: A Really Giant Coloring and Doodling Book - very cool concept: don't just color inside the lines, draw on top! #
Feel-good story of the day: World-famous violinist plays in Newark airport parking lot #
Why it's good news if we don't find evidence of life on Mars - it would mean we have a chance of future life on Earth. #
WWJ Newsradio 950 - Creative Economy Gets Access to State Tax Credits - I've said it before and I'll say it again: Michigan is past due for a major creative revitalization. All that talent and infrastructure could be very powerful...if they could just fix that snow problem. #
Hulu - Pet Chow: Saturday Night Live - hilarious! #
The Gegenschein is "a rarely discernable faint glow [that] can be seen 180 degrees around from the Sun in an extremely dark sky" #
bookofjoe: Transparent Post-It Notes - interesting, lends itself to overlay uses. Looks pretty wasteful though, if it's plastic. #
"Insight could be orchestrated...They had different backgrounds and temperaments and perspectives, and if you gave them something to think about that they did not ordinarily think about...you were guaranteed a fresh set of eyes." - Malcolm Gladwell, reporting on Intellectual Ventures, an "invention company". #
"A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do." - Malcolm Gladwell, channeling Robert K. Merton #
A Final Farewell - WSJ.com - more on Randy Pausch, including some fascinating stories since the lecture. The book sounds good too... #
"[My chapters] start with a Shakespeare quote for two simple reasons. One, to remind everybody that most of what science has to tell us about human behavior already has been divined by writers with great insight. Science helps us confirm which writers were right and which were wrong, but it rarely tells us something that a writer of Shakespeare's caliber didn't come up with first." - Daniel Gilbert #
"I guess it seems a bit ambitious to ask practitioners in an emergent field to suddenly take on responsibility for marketing and strategy and all that colossal headache but I'm convinced that some sort of Experience Design will become the master discipline for businesses that want to be good at selling stuff." - Russell Davies #
"I'm telling an old myth in a new way...I guess I'm localizing it for the end of the millennium more than I am for any particular place." George Lucas, commenting on how Joseph Campbell's work influenced his films. #
A modular, self-assembling robot - Andreesen says it well: "Don't fool yourself -- they're coming for us" #
Timeline of the universe - pretty awe-inspiring stuff. And the culmination of this is...reality TV? I don't think so... #
Amazon on advertising in their boxes: "Amazon.com shipments are opened virtually 100% of the time." I wonder where the "virtually" came from... #
"There's a reason we talk about 70/20/10, where 70% of our resources are spent in our core business and 10% end up in unrelated projects, like energy or whatever. Actually, it's a struggle to get it to even be 10%" - Larry Page on trying to get Googlers to spend time on speculative projects #
"We had all this internal risk we had just invented. It's not that we were going to starve or not get jobs or not have a good life or whatever, but you have this fear of failing and of doing something new, which is very natural. In order to do stuff that matters, you need to overcome that." - Larry Page on his fear about starting Google #
Don't know why I bothered biking all the way up Mount Diablo, when I could have just gone there with Google Maps #
Dairy ratings according to sustainable practices - including animal treatment and organic methods. Aka, who to buy your milk from. #
"When we enter meditation, it is like a 'mini-death,' at least from the perspective of the ego...In this sense, meditation is a mini-rehearsal for the hour of our own death, in which the same thing will happen." - Cynthia Bourgeault #
slowLab > slow design - a movement to design for the "slow" lifestyle: Reveal, Expand, Reflect, Engage, Participate, and Evolve. #
The New York Times > Real Estate > Interactive Feature > First, Hide the Bed - narrated slideshow about making an incredible space out of a tiny studio apartment. Slide the bed under the floor! #
"In the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, [his four-year-old daughter] jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen...She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, 'What you doing?' And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, 'Looking for the mouse.'" - Clay Shirky, on how computers fundamentally change how we view media; we expect that we can interact with it and change it. #
"Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat." - Clay Shirky. I know that's how I use tv... #
Omnisio - an interesting way to watch videos, especially presentations. Better in some ways than being there live... #
Experience gifts - all in New York, but good ideas in any case. #
"[In fifty years] there won't be any designers. The designer of the future will be the personal coach, the fitness trainer, the nutritionist. That's all." - Philippe Starck. Sounds like the Experience/Transformation Economy to me... #
Street Use: One Gate, Multiple Locks - interesting idea; by stringing locks together the ability to open any single lock can open the entire gate. #
"She walks in beauty, like the night, Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that's best of dark and bright, Meet in her aspect and her eyes" - Lord Byron #
edun LIVE: organic t-shirts and blank t-shirts made in sub-Saharan Africa - Bono has a t-shirt company? #