Highlights from Andy Kaufman's wrestling career - a truly epic stunt. #
YouTube - Amazing Indoor Skydiving - I tried this once...wasn't quite this good. #
Calligraphy in light - beautiful. #
The history of the Earth in 60 seconds - to scale, natch! #
The Homer Simpson metric: "Homer is not going to use his body for anything. That’s the American value system in a nutshell. And that’s what we who are trying to design alternative transportation are fighting against. We've got to make something that's clean, cheap and mechanically efficient without the individual feeling the physical consequences. That’s tough." #
I'm late to view the Siftables demo, but it really is inspiring. #
First-person video of a bike race finish - can't believe I never thought to do this (the filming, not the near-crash). #
Flow chart of where our emissions are really coming from - interesting that land use change (deforestation, etc) is as significant as transportation. #
The Long Now Foundation - Store - Books - great book recommendations from the Long Now Foundation. Love the <10-word reviews; I should try that. #
"The gospel is not primarily a set of facts but a way of seeing and a way of being in the world because of God." - Richard Rohr #
YouTube - Are Violent Video Games Preparing Kids For The Apocalypse? - I'm pretty sure this was what Kenneth Boulding was talking about. #
"The future will always surprise us, but we must not let it dumbfound us." - Kenneth Boulding #
"The vice president began to tremble with rage. He shouted, 'The telephone system was destroyed last night and you had better believe it. If you don't by noon, you'll be fired.'" - Idealized Design: How Bell Labs Imagined -- and Created -- the Telephone System of the Future. Great example of prototyping future experiences to inspire innovation. #
Google finally solves the age-old question of the ideal crank length: 87 minutes #
"In his first week in office, President Obama requested that he see 10 letters a day 'representative of people's concerns, from people writing into the president,' recalls Gibbs, 'to help get him outside of the bubble, to get more than just the information you get as an elected official." - ABC News. Very cool way of tapping into real people's needs. #
Coolest commute ever - kids in Colombia riding a zip line over a 1200-foot valley to get to school. #
"If called, I will certainly serve," he said. "But if not called, I will probably serve anyway." - Carl Malamud, who works to make government documents easily available. Love the attitude. #
For all those times you've said "I wish I could invest in that person": Swayam: Education Funding, people investing in people - "We offer ordinary people the opportunity to become angel investors in the education of talented students, in exchange for a share of their future income." #
Informing Ourselves To Death - a good counterpoint to the "inforevolution": "I believe you will have to concede that what ails us, what causes us the most misery and pain -- at both cultural and personal levels -- has nothing to do with the sort of information made accessible by computers. The computer and its information cannot answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to make our lives more meaningful and humane." #
Christopher Columbus @ All About Explorers - Librarians sabotage the internet to teach kids that you can't trust online information. Great. #
Kevin Kelly reports on Amish technology adoption - "One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that 'you got messages rather than conversations.'" #
Imagining the Internet - good list of books and resources for forecasting and concept design #
Saul Griffith expands on his previous analysis of the energy we need and use as a planet. Really compelling stuff; who wants to start an energy company? #
"It's not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross." - Bruce Sterling #
Flexitarianism - describes my diet pretty well. Here's another good article. #
Fun with the conference bike - a 6-hour adventure yesterday. #
Songsmith fed with Stock Charts - if the news were a song, here's what last year would sound like. #
Awesome tea infuser - you really need a clear cup, but this is great. #
What Technology Wants - Kevin Kelly is getting closer to his 4-year goal of finding "the meaning of tech". He also connects what technology wants to what humans do; energy efficiency, clean water, and intelligence are all shared goals. #
New Metrics for Today's Social Entrepreneurs - various ways of measuring social and environmental, as well as financial, returns on investment, following the idea of blended value. #
Peak-end rule - I refer to this often; people remember the peak and the ending state of experiences the most. So get those right! #
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." - Albert Einstein #
How to prepare a kiwi - favorite tshirt I saw in New Zealand. #
Left New Zealand tonight, got home this morning. Weird. #
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.' That’s rarely the case." #
The fascinating story of how Roosevelt's leaked battle plans influenced the course of World War II. #
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. #
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. #
Charter For Compassion :: projects - interesting crowdsourced effort to help unify the world's religions...which of course reminds me of the similar effort written about in Dune... #
A fantastic long article on the "used future" of Star Wars - ties together George Lucas, Jane Jacobs, Robert Morris, Jonathan Swift and more. The presentation is also excellent, in a side-scrolling page format with half the space dedicated to excellent pullquotes from related works. (via kk) #
Three brightest objects smile down from the night sky - the moon, Jupiter, and Venus formed a smile for Australians yesterday... #
"I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace." #
Very cool self-contained vehicle wheel - includes engine, brakes, suspension, and tire. #
PledgeBank - Tell the world "I'll do it, but only if you'll help" - perhaps also a way to bootstrap a new product? Confirm sales if you get enough... #
"In nonzero, Robert Wright speaks of two major factors which allow a culture to progress. These are communication and transportation...Communication is the key to eliminating redundancy. Transport is the key to enabling progress." - Sustainable Communication. My two passions...no wonder I can't choose between them. #
"If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person." - Thomas Merton. Man, would that make small talk more interesting. #
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? #
Super-offices - "At the rate at which flat screens are expanding while dropping in price, one could put together one of these modern super offices in a few years." Ah yes...but what would you put on the screen? #
Using newspaper page numbers to deliver more information - a fact for every page...nice surprise. #
Enkin: navigation reinvented - pretty wild; overlays map data on a viewfinder to annotate the real world. One reason I'm excited about Android... #
"Really skillful people never get out of time, and are always deliberate, and never appear busy." - Miyamoto Musashi #
A Protected Night Sky Over Flagstaff - imagine looking up in prehistoric times and not knowing what was out there. Heck, it's awe-inspiring even today. Here's another, over Sweden #
Trek Ends Relationship With Greg LeMond - maybe this means LeMond bikes on sale? I'll pick up a few more... #
"Speaking personally, I want my films to make money, but money is just fuel for the rocket. What I really want to do is to go somewhere. I don't want to just collect more fuel." - Brad Bird #
"I said, 'Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door.' A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things, but there was little opportunity to try them, since the established way was working very, very well." - Brad Bird, explaining how he fought "complacency" at Pixar during its most successful time #
Desiging New Technologies for a Better Life - "Polak discovered how important affordability was when he sold two kinds of lug wrenches to Somalian donkey-cart owners. One was a $12 wrench with a lifetime guarantee, and the other was a $6 wrench that would soon break...the donkeycart owners preferred to buy a wrench they could afford today, to make more money for tomorrow, than a wrench they would have to save for, and risk going out of business from a flat tire in the meantime." #
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." - Howard Aiken #
"The train was delayed, and for hours I sat there thinking and thinking and thinking...The irony is I almost always have pen and paper; I write all the time. And on this one occasion when I had the idea of my life, I didn't have a pen. For four hours my head was buzzing."How J.K. Rowling came up with Harry Potter #
Photo Essay: Unlikely Places Where 'Wired' Pioneers Had Their Eureka! Moments - where television, Netflix, quantum electrodynamics, and Harry Potter were conceived. Notably, none in a brainstorming session...or even at work. #
Tour of Gondwana - Post-Tour Index - pretty amazing stories from an in-progress, 3+ year tour of all the continents originally part of Gondwanaland (South America, Africa, Australia, India, etc) #
"In 1994 Jo Ann Ussery found herself in the market for a new home...When she was looking for a mobile home, her brother-in-law Bob Farrow, an air traffic controller at Greenwood Airport, suggested she might look for a retired jetliner." - And she did. Oh wow, here's more airplane homes. And they're offered by a company named Max Power (previously) #
Cool Tool: StrechCordz Short Resistance Training Belt - love it--a bungee cord does a better job than a $20K endless pool #
American Originals: Letter from Fidel Castro, as a young student, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1940 #
Weekend YouTube fun: Pre taped call in show, Orphan game show, and The Audition #
Cellphones - Third World and Developing Nations - "As a family's income grows -- from $1 per day to $4, for example -- their spending on I.C.T. increases faster than spending in any other category, including health, education and housing...'What people are voting for with their pocketbooks, as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications.'" #
A House Not for Mere Mortals - New York Times - "Its architecture makes people use their bodies in unexpected ways to maintain equilibrium, and that, she said, will stimulate their immune systems." #
"I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers. Poets are our original systems thinkers: they look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand." - Sidney Harman #
What CEOs read - it's not business books: Steve Jobs once had a huge William Blake collection; Phil Knight has an Asian art and poetry library; Michael Moritz mentions Seven Pillars of Wisdom; Dee Hock's favorite is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. "If there is a C.E.O. canon, its rule is this: 'Don't follow your mentors, follow your mentors' mentors'" #
"So I've got a god in the room here. I know a lot about gods and I have found what god this is by the way it behaves. This is the God of the Old Testament: a lot of rules and no mercy. And if he catches you picking up sticks on Saturday you're finished" - Joseph Campbell, talking about his computer #
"Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life." - Joseph Campbell #
Pretty cool recumbent trike...yep, I'm on that kick again. #
"If you took a poll of primitive man, happiness would be getting a fire to light more easily. But we've expanded our horizon, and that kind of happiness is now the wrong thing to focus on. Extending our knowledge and casting a wider net of consciousness is the purpose of life." - Ray Kurzweil, searching for things to do with technology. #
"We've made great strides in integration, yet I think we'll be integrating into a burning house...and we're going to just have to become firefighters" - Dr. Martin Luther King to Harry Belafonte, just before his death 40 years ago today. #
New designs for British coins - H.O.T.T. Definitely need to get a full set of these in London this summer. #
"Government is the way we inject values into our economy" - James Gustave Speth, arguing that our market economy needs government controls (especially financial ones) to avoid tragedies of the commons like pollution. #
Great review of life ("Outside") as if it were a game - Eerie how well it maps..."On the whole, Outside is overrated, and many gamers will find themselves forced by friends and family to play it against their will, but it still deserves a high rating. I give it 7/10, and look forward to improvements in future patches." #
"I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact. Everything I designed was unnecessary...I want to find a new way of expressing myself ...design is a dreadful form of expression." - Philippe Starck, voicing the new designer's dilemma. #
"Nobody knows anything about themselves because they're all worried about everybody else." - Jack Johnson - Wasting Time #
Washington Phillips, gospel music pioneer - apparently no one can figure out what kind of instrument he's playing. Listen for yourself at Rhapsody. Totally unique...again via Alex, who guesses it was "a music box, plucked like a mandolin." #
Lincoln the innovator - "As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." #
NONOBJECT Design Fiction : Behind the Scenes Camera - fun concept design; a camera that takes two pictures at once, one forward and one backward. #
Exercises for your brain - some, like showering with your eyes closed, I've tried with hilarious results...in general though, this sort of sensory exercise seems really interesting. #
Kidsave - Because Every Child Needs a Family - organization connects US and international orphaned kids to US families for short-term (and possibly permanent) stays. #
"Possession is becoming progressively burdensome and wasteful and therefore obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller #
The Vatican's mortal sins, circa 3508 A.D. - "3. THOUGHT LARCENY, or the pilfering of another person's ideas through telepathic technology. Such thievery violates the sacredness of the individual conscience." #
Holophonic sound (go try that now) plus stereoscopy a la U23D plus gestural interactions via via projector/tablet or Nintendo Wii hacking = ??? #
A sneaker sanctum - "In downtown Boston, there is a sneaker store that is concealed beyond what looks like a cigarette and candy hole in the wall...You enter a cramped little store, there is a guy surrounded by lotto tickets and cigarettes...You must approach the Coke machine and if you get close enough, it disappears every so suddenly...and you are admitted to the inner sneaker sanctum." #
Leica Camera AG - Service - m8upgrade - Finally, someone working against planned obsolescence--upgrade your digital camera instead of replacing it: "The M8 is designed to deliver professional results over many years. With the M8 Upgrade Service you have the possibility to upgrade your LEICA M8 with the latest technological developments." #
Bitstrips: Comic Builder - pretty cool Flash tool for storyboarding #
Interesting research on philanthropy and matching gifts - "The existence of a matching gift did very much matter [in soliciting more donations]...But the size of the match in the experiment didn’t have any effect on giving. Donors who received the offer of a one-to-one match gave just as often, and just as much, as those responding to the three-to-one offer." #
Picasso "was a marvelous, funny, nice guy to be around, but you'd find by the end of the day [that you] were totally nervously exhausted; that everybody around him had suffered from nervous exhaustion; and he, at the age of eighty or eighty-five, would go off into his studio, strutting off into his studio, and would work all night on your energy." - John Richardson #
Ah, so that's how Semco lets people set their own salaries--they're public knowledge in the company and your coworkers have the power to fire you if they don't think you're worth it - YouTube - The Caring Capitalist - Brazil #
Water Lilies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - wait a minute, Monet started impressionist painting at the same time he had cataracts? Somehow that seems like cheating... #
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon - one of Picasso's first cubist paintings, said to be inspired by African tribal masks #
The World’s 50 Best Works of Art (and how to see them) - some fascinating stuff #
"Never own more than you're prepared to lose in a shipwreck" - Turkish proverb, through Pete Postlewaite #
Timberland Men's Canvas Rippler Slip-On - another simple eco-shoe, like the Toega...though I'd prefer it done without leather. #
Paint an object you want--then sell the painting for the price of the object you painted, so you can buy it for yourself. #
How to run a great company in two easy steps: 1) Hire only the right people; 2) Treat them like adults. #
YouTube - Wireless neckband allows first voiceless phone call - another step closer to telepathy... #
"From the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the townships of Johannesburg to the garbage dumps of Mexico, tourists are forsaking, at least for a while, beaches and museums for crowded, dirty — and in many ways surprising — slums." - Slum Visits: Tourism or Voyeurism? #
"McGonigal presented a forecast (to 2013) of some of the most plausible scenarios she and her colleagues expect in the coming years: 1) Quality of life will become a primary metric for evaluating experiences; 2) Positive pyschology will become a principal influence on design; 3) Communities will form around different visions of a "real life worth living"; 4) Value will be defined as a measurable increase in real happiness or well being, what McGonigal calls 'the new capital'." - SXSW2008: Jane McGonigal - Keynote #
"Laggards have a bad rap, but they are crucial in pacing the nature of change. Innovation requires the push of early adopters and the pull of laypeople asking whether something really works. If this was a world in which only early adopters got to choose, we'd all be using CB radios and quadraphonic stereo." - Paul Saffo #
The Girl in Qatar - crazy henna hand tattoos #
Berkeley/Alameda County Hazardous Waste dropoff center - got a few non-Method products that need a safe home... #
"The highest form a civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust." - Charlie Munger #
General Overview of What's In America's Trash - from the EPA. Paper and yard trimmings make up almost 60%. #
An interesting diet plan made just for you from biological indicators: "Bannock...created my plan after running me through a series of tests that included genetic biotyping, blood and urine analyses, and metabolic screening. He asked me to collect saliva samples during a typical day to track hormonal patterns and had me fill out a lengthy questionnaire. With that data, Bannock crafted a list of foods that targeted my cholesterol, food sensitivities, caloric requirements, vitamin and mineral needs, and glycemic-index targets. In other words, a diet just for me." #
Big love is a renewable building material, says Clay Shirky. Like the Ise Shrine in Japan which is rebuilt -- out of love -- every 20 years. Turns out the longest lasting things don't have an enduring edifice, but an enduring process. - CT2 #
Some gems from the most recent Bike Biz magazine: the folding Zed city bike, a new take on an foldable helmet. #
Marginal Revolution: What books should you read on Africa? - enough to stay busy for a while... #
"Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life." - Proverbs 13:12 #
Sample Syllabi: Academic Programs - Syllabi for classes on blending contemplative practice into work and life. #
"I believe that an organic and functioning city is nothing more than a machine for producing confrontation with the Other." - Adam Greenfield, objecting to how technology can create an echo chamber of our own beliefs instead of broadening them. #
"When infant eyes absorb a world of virgin visions, colors are processed purely, in a pre-linguistic parts of the brain. As adults, colors are processed in the brain's language centers, refracted by the concepts we have for them." - Wired. Basically, how you see color depends on what language(s) you speak. #
Cool Tool: Six Great Long-Distance Bike Trails Without Cars - multi-day bike tours entirely on bike paths? Where'd I put my tent... #
Six Principles for Making New Things - "I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly." - Paul Graham #
From the "didn't see that coming" department - "In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine Internet search leader Google Inc. and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives." #
Chemirocha - a song recorded in 1950s Kenya as a tribute to country singer Jimmie Rogers. "Rodgers' records were the first to be heard in this part of Kenya and the name came to mean anything strange or new. The similarity of his guitar sound to the local lyre meant that a whole legend grew around him: he was supposedly a friend of a local musician and also a faun descended from the god Pan, half man and half antelope." - Hugh Tracey archive (via Alex) #
"In order to read many books, buy just a few." - Juan Ramón again. #
"In order to disorder my inner life, I have to tidy up my outer one." - Juan Ramon. Reminds me of Flaubert's "violent and original" quote. #
Not Star Wars: SkyWalker 12-Foot-Tall Bicycle Probably Requires Jedi Abilities - ok, so I guess my bikes aren't *that* big... #
"I should emphasize that we do not measure the progress of our investments by what their market prices do during any given year. Rather, we evaluate their performance by the two methods we apply to the businesses we own. The first test is improvement in earnings, with our making due allowance for industry conditions. The second test, more subjective, is whether their 'moats' - a metaphor for the superiorities they possess that make life difficult for their competitors - have widened during the year." - Warren Buffett, in Berkshire Hathaway's 2007 letter to shareholders #
History of war through food - wow. #
Public neutral tech support - watch out, Bobby Julich is out to steal your wheels! #
Escaping the Entrepreneurial Seizure: Interview with Michael Gerber - "Entrepreneurs invent businesses that work without them. Technicians create businesses that work because of them...81% of all businesses in the US employ no people besides the owner. They’re sole proprietorships. True entrepreneurs are never sole proprietors." #
Design Strategy - California College of the Arts - an MBA in design strategy... #
Bomberos - the calm look on their faces says a lot about these kids who tow on carts behind trucks in Peru #
YouTube - George Carlin's famous stuff routine - "If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house--you could just walk around all the time! That's all your house is--it's a pile of stuff with a cover on it." #
Adobe Tour Tracker - really an amazing web app--and the content ain't bad either. #
Absolut Quartet: robots making music with ping pong balls and brandy glasses - Engadget - gorgeous, and perhaps an easier option than hiring this guy to play the glasses for you. #
Emotiv Systems - upcoming $299 mind-reading headset... #
Standardizing Your Profile Across Social Websites | White African - well, looks like the lazyweb is alive and well: an effort to standardize online profiles around a single profile you own, just like I asked for the other day. #
INDIGO snowboard - I love the stainless steel inlay with the bamboo board... #
"It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light" - G.K. Chesterton #
BabyPlays Toy Rental Program - Netflix for toys! #
modu - make new connections - tiny mobile phone that plugs into other devices to power and connect them. #
One-line mission statements - Walt Disney: "To make people happy"; 3M: "To solve unsolved problems innovatively" #
The Obree Postiom (mk 2): "Superman" Position - man, that brings me back. It was a really uncomfortable position, but pretty fast... #
Headed to the Tour of California prologue! #
Voyager Golden Record - a good description of the effort to summarize Earth on a single disc. #
"Face time trumps Facebook" - how the tech-savvy are retreating from online lives and using tools like Facebook as merely utilities--not destinations. #
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL): Synthetic Fuel Concept to Steal CO2 From Air - fascinating. One step closer to cars that clean the air as they drive, instead of polluting it. #
russell davies: the magnificent seven and the double-deckers - Double-deckers sounds more fun... #
Spent the morning trying to manage several online accounts and "profiles", each with different settings, some impossible to change...ridiculous. Managing my real life is hard enough. #
Proctor and Gamble's Connect + Develop program solicits ideas from outside the company for development and partnerships. "By 2000, it was clear to us that our invent-it-ourselves model was not capable of sustaining high levels of top-line growth," wrote Larry Huston and Nabil Sakkab. P&G hadn't changed their development model since previously moving from a centralized core to one that leveraged its global offices. Now CEO A.G. Lafley says that 50% of new products should come from outsiders. #
Anomaly - a new type of branding agency. Sure, they'll do your ads, but they'll funnel the profits into creating their own brands to compete. When they reached their self-imposed limit of 100 people, they spun off an autonomous clone of themselves. (from the March 2008 Fast Company, not yet online) #
Why do companies "greenwash"--market their products as more sustainable than they really are? Perhaps because "genuinely going green would mean giving up most of the products and services that clutter our consumer culture...until we are collectively ready to really go green, greenwashing will be with us," David Roberts #
"It's pretty well accepted that at the point at which the usual human being gets pronounced dead, all their cells are alive. It's a very eerie question: if all their cells are alive, what is death?" - Lance Becker, director of the Penn Center for Resuscitative Medicine. #
"Garbage is useful stuff in the wrong place" - Alex Steffen. Does that make it an information problem? #
Nokia remade - phones made entirely from reused/"upcycled" materials, including cans, tires, and bottles. #
SuperCook - The Intelligent Recipe Search Engine - enter what you've got in the house, it chooses recipes for you. #
"Paper is no longer the master copy; the digital version is." - Brewster Kahle #
"This means that a household in which both parents work part-time on their careers and part-time looking after children and the home does not make rational economic sense. Two halves are much less than a whole." - Tim Harford #
Ouch. "The logic of comparative advantage highlighted something that most men--except economists--have found it hard to get their heads around: there is no reason to believe that men were breadwinners because they were any good at it. They might simply have been breadwinners because getting them to help around the house would have been even worse." - Tim Harford #
MAKE: Blog: 7,200 bananas - well, now I know what that looks like. #
Kodak Knows a Little About Dying Business Models - could a 1600-page-per-minute printer create custom newspapers and save that industry? #
Insane Superhuman French People - 3 amazing videos of dance and acrobatics #
Pixar - Lifted - the perils--and power--of advanced interaction designs #
1959 buick convertible - Google Image Search - ooh...a contender for my classic car dreams? #
Soft as a Rock - Baekdal.com - very cool, pillows that look like giant rocks. #
Several pics of Mazda's recent concept vehicles - they're really on a roll...I hope some of them make it to the streets. #
Bloomberg Terminal manual (PDF) - about 80 pages of keyboard shortcuts. Now that's a power application! #
HEXBUG Micro Robotic Creatures - can walk around, sense bumps, and change direction on command. #
Data for the "paper or plastic" choice - paper was much worse than I thought, especially the energy required to "recycle" it. The real answer? Bring your own. #
Using Google to settle African land disputes - "Google can even get you a picture of a mulalo urinating on the Kabaka's tree or a government official forging the kyapa [title] to the Kabaka's land. So all that monkey business - with due respect to the nkima clan - will be no more" #
History of Religion - the religion map is pretty interesting too. #
5000 years of Middle Eastern empires, animated - entire empires I hadn't heard of... #
iPod 1.0 | Shorpy :: History in HD - listening for planes in pre-radar days #
Tour d'Afrique Ltd. - Bicycle Race & Expedition Company - bike tours the length of Africa, across Asia on the Silk Route, and on the Orient Express route. Wow. #
Frozen Grand Central at Improv Everywhere - beautiful, really. #
Skooba Design :: Superbungee Strap : Travel Accessory - cool stretchy replacement strap for sling bags #
bookofjoe: Slippery Low-Friction Tape - looks like fun #
FreedomFiler - a good way to organize personal files? Could some of the principles apply to digital organization as well? #
Netflix: Flex To The Max - "And what happens when someone doesn't live up to expectations? 'At most companies, average performers get an average raise,' says Hastings. 'At Netflix, they get a generous severance package.' Why? Because Hastings believes that otherwise managers feel too guilty to let someone go." #
Bonobos Store :: active styles :: clarks - a pants startup. This is what you get when you encourage MBAs to start companies...at least they're cool pants. #
Portfolio - Crossbreed folding bicycle wheel - not sure how inflatable tires would work, but interesting. #
Green Roofs - GreenGrid® Modular Roof, Rooftop Garden, LEED - build your own green roof #
Inhabitat » Amazing Green Roof Art School in Singapore - beautiful arch design #
"I think the president has to say very credibly and forcefully to the American people that [they] have to think hard about their definition of the meaning of the good life, that hedonistic, materialistic society of high levels of consumption, increasing social inequality is not a society that can be part of the solution of the world's problems. And, therefore, the president has to project to the American people a sense of demanding idealism. Idealism which is not based in self-indulgence, but on self-denial and sacrifice, and on this such an America is going to be credible to the world." - Zbigniew Brzezinski (video, with Kissinger and Scowcroft) #
Catalog Choice - Eliminate unwanted catalogs you receive in the mail - help reduce the 53 million trees used for paper catalogs each year. You've still got the internet, after all... #
collision detection: Paper explains how the "engineering mentality" produces terrorists - interesting...engineering can certainly promote universal solutions rather than local diversity and uniqueness--and thus further intolerance? #
"Work is love made visible." - Kahlil Gibran in The Profet #
MBDC | Cradle to Cradle Certification - good criteria for designing sustainable products #
"The way [Bob] Blaich had design at Philips organized, under one big office, with a team built around each brand or project, and designers moving around between teams, that's a model of design management I've always liked. It's tough; companies go through periods of time when they're centralizing everything, and periods of time when they're decentralizing everything. There's never a right answer over the long term, only for a certain period of time. But Philips seemed to handle this well." - Rob Pew, Steelcase chairman #
IDSA Ecodesign - great links to eco/green-design materials and tools #
Commercial Real Estate - City of Alameda California - hmm...works for Squid... #
"Childhood capacity for work is one of the best predictors of adult mental health and the capacity to love" - How Can America's Rich Teach Their Children the Value of a Dollar? -- New York Magazine #
"What, I ask Stratyner, do the most distressed rich kids fantasize about when it comes to their family money? That they didn't have it? 'Rarely,' he answers. 'They're not stupid.' Having less? 'No, not really.' So what, then? He thinks for a long moment, then finally gives an answer. 'That they'd made it themselves.'" - the plight of the super-rich #
"At [age 11], I was quite certain I would someday be a famous cartoonist for newspapers. I imagined it quite clearly. And when my career later took a turn toward cubicles, I woke up surprised every day that I wasn't already a well-known cartoonist." - Scott Adams #
magdeburg water bridge - Google Image Search - that seems a bit indulgent...although apparently it eliminated a 12km detour. #
"We've agreed that on any major decisions the three of us agree." - Eric Schmidt on working with Larry and Sergey #
Cool patterned bike tires - reflective too #
The Simple Life (Eller) 3 - some interesting thoughts on simple living for Christians: "The motive of Christian simplicity is not the enjoyment of simplicity itself...the sole motive of Christian simplicity is the enjoyment of God himself--it is 'the view of the stars,' 'the contemplation of the heavens rather than of fireworks'...More specifically, Christian simplicity is so to use 'things' so that, first, they do not interfere with one's absolute joy in God, and, second, they actually point toward and contribute to that joy." #
Paleo-Future: Disposable Clothes Just Around Corner (1961) - "Part of the problem is one of salesmanship. Disposable clothes are still a novelty and command novelty prices. In addition, the American public is still hamstrung by the idea that waste is bad." #
Hunt Rettig: Film & Looped Paper Sculptures - now that's pretty. #
"Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it." - Walter Chrysler #
Michael Ball from Rock Racing deals with sponsors pulling out - I'm starting to like this guy..."We just got another phone call from another sponsor who is wavering. And go! See ya. I don't care. I'll buy all the equipment. I'll make my own. Next! And guess what? I'll make it better, cooler, and I'll take your market share." #
Richard Gregg: The Value of Voluntary Simiplicity - "The essence of personality does not lie in its isolated individuality, its separateness from other people, its uniqueness, but in its basis of relationships with other personalities." Hadn't ever thought of it that way, but he's right. Our personalities only matter in relationship with others; their relative differences are less important than their shared traits. #
Richard Gregg: The Value of Voluntary Simiplicity - nice split-screen content + footnotes layout as well. #
Richard Gregg: The Value of Voluntary Simiplicity - "It would be consistent with a real awareness of human unity if I should invite into my house for a meal and a night's lodging a starving man who has knocked at my door. But if my rugs are so fine that I am afraid his dirty shoes may ruin them, I hesitate." #
"Design is a response to social change" - George Nelson, Herman Miller's lead designer in the 1940s #
"There were three reasons why we survived. We had no money, we had no technology, and we had no plan. Every dollar, we used very carefully." - Jack Ma #
Inside the billionaire service industry - "'If the income inequality persists, we could end up with real armed camps, like in South Africa.' She said she was increasingly aware of the tension between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots,' and she described a surge in demand among the ultrarich for real estate in out-of-the-way places such as New Zealand and rural Argentina--expensive insurance policies in case things go haywire for some reason at home." #
YouTube - Let's Paint,Exercise,& Blend Drinks TV! - I still think this is the funniest thing on the internet. #
St. Teresa's Prayer - Ahh... #
In Praise of Idleness By Bertrand Russell - "Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever." #
The Simpsons - The Land of Chocolate - hee hee... #
Cycling the PCH - "I have learned a new phrase the bikers use along the coast. It is 8 and 8. That would be 800 mg's of Ibuprofen every 8 hours." Good tip to keep in mind for my trip... #
"An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely, polished copies, it hasn't been so good at creating notable originals. Even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force." - Jaron Lanier #
Pultius TV remote control - 20 inches long, with a key for every channel between 1 and 100. Now that's usability! #
wrapping up 2007 (28 December, 2007, Interconnected) - "The more effort we put into driving well manually, the less need there is for robots. So we don't get flocking cars and we have to work harder. That's the story of the 20th century, if you ask me." #
"Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand." - Confucious #
Listening: Alone: The Home Recordings Of Rivers Cuomo 1992-2007. Loving "Longtime Sunshine". #
A "minimal bar" - "Vodka, Gin, dry vermouth, tonic, cranberry, Triple Sec, olives, Rose’s, soda." Also suggestions for "basic" and "well-stocked" bars. #
"Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail." Eliot Spitzer. #
What one man learned from saving his trash for a year - "The vast vast vast majority of trash comes from food packaging. Packaged food is less nutritious, on the whole, than fresh food. Packaged food, ounce for ounce, is often more expensive than fresh food. I've learned that making less trash, by consuming less packaged food actually makes me healthier and wealthier." #
Summer Express: 101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less - pretty interesting recipes...10 minutes is about my limit. #
BNET Book Brief: The 4-Hour Workweek - great video summary of the book; well worth watching. #
Felt Bicycles 2008 - some more cool city bikes...man, these things are springing up everywhere. #
Elkhide Sewn-on Bar Covers - pretty slick, nicer than any tape I've seen. #
Brodie - 2007 - very cool city/commute bike, simple and slick. #
TED | TEDBlog: Why design? Philippe Starck on TED.com - "With billions of people who have been born, worked, lived, and died before us, these people who have worked so much, we have now bring beautiful things, beautiful gifts, we know so many things. We can say to our children, OK, done, that was our story. That passed. Now you have a duty. Invent a new story. Invent a new poetry. The only rule is, we have not to have any idea about the next story. We give you white pages. Invent. We give you the best tools, the best tools, and now, do it. That's why I continue to work, even if it's for toilet brush." #
"You must and will go on at all costs including comfort and health and kicks; but keep it kickwriting at all costs too, that is, write only what kicks you and keeps you overtime awake from sheer mad joy." - Kerouac to Cassady #
Once - Music From The Motion Picture on Yottamusic - actually great music from the movie, which was fun as well. #
Why do teenagers take too many risks? - "It turns out they estimate the costs of drinking and drug-taking pretty accurately, they simply see the benefits as higher than older people do." #
adaptive path » sketchboards: discover better faster ux solutions - interesting pre-wireframe prototyping technique; take the giant sheets of paper filled with sketched ideas to your team for early concept feedback. #
FREE RICE: FEED HUNGRY MINDS, FEED HUNGRY MOUTHS - play a game, donate rice. They're doing so in a way that lends itself to one more "bottom line"--you could use the linguistic results to power a natural-language computing engine. #
"Sometimes incompetence is useful. It helps you keep an open mind." - Roberto Cavalli. Well, that's always been my strategy. #
Corporate Design Foundation - Interview with Michigan's Governor - Jennifer Granholm a designer? This plus Detroit's resurgence makes for interesting prospects... #
Detroit: the new Wild West for creatives - whenever I'm back in Michigan, I do think it would be a great (and cheap!) place to start a company...from the article: "It's a familiar story: pioneering artists and creatives move into an abandoned industrial area, infuse the place with creativity and the life that only the right-brained can bring, and within years you've got a revitalized, hip (and no longer affordable) SoHo, Berlin, Billyburg or DUMBO." #
How to edit your OS X hosts file - the command in Terminal: sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit /etc/hosts #
"I believe advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable." - Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad #
Taking things seriously - Caring more for fewer things may be my favorite way of avoiding consumerism and building sustainable products. #
SimpleDB from Amazon - let Amazon handle your database as well as your files and hosting! #
Photo: Steve Jobs at home in 1982 - "This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had." - Steve Jobs #
2007 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards - more great high- and low-tech inventions. #
Windbelt - Third World Power - Wind Generator - WAY cool way to generate electricity by harnessing wind on a micro or macro scale! #
Disappearing Car Door - nice rethinking of the car door... #
Regret the Error » Crunks 2007: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections - the best jokes are those you don't intend to make... #
"The ugly corollary is that there might be a time when an industry isn’t yet ripe for UX, when a technological solution with a poor UX is still economically advantageous and competitively viable...The opportunity is to identify when an industry and organization is ready for engaging in UX." - Brandon Schauer #
Niti Bhan: Design for an emerging world - A reason for designers to cultivate simplicity in life? "The world class designers are all who practice in conditions of abundance. They create with no shortage of materials, funds, resources, fuel or energy. If we need to design products and systems under maximum constraints using minimal resources...where better to begin seeking answers but amongst those who already live under these conditions?" #
"By the time most scientists have reached age thirty they are trapped by their own expertise. They have invested so much effort in one particular field that it is often extremely difficult, at that time in their careers, to make a radical change. I, on the other hand, knew nothing, except for a basic training in somewhat old-fashioned physics and mathematics and an ability to turn my hand to new things.... Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice." - Francis Crick #
OLC = One Less Car - pretty interesting plywood bike...some drivetrain and steering innovations as well. #
These Time-Management Issues Will Be Easily Resolved With A Series Of Streamlined Meetings - are "organized" and "efficient" actually opposite concepts? This one hits a little too close to home. #
What stock options actually "cost" companies - "From an economic standpoint, stock options are a transaction between the employee and existing shareholders and the true 'cost' is represented by the potential dilution of their interest in the company...there is no 'expense' to the company." #
Want to stave off aging? "Look for opportunities to practice standing on one leg." Funny how the most basic things in life (like standing up) can fall out of practice in our imbalanced world. #
Products with more than one main feature risk alienating customers, who prefer more focused products in many cases. #
UPS used computer modeling to optimize their routes - including minimizing left-hand turns, proven to waste time and energy, especially across 95,000 vehicles daily. #
MoMA Store - 3D Drawing Pad - looks like fun #
Futuristic movie interfaces would also be good wall-inspiration. #
The evolution of Apple product design - worth printing poster-size, I'd say... #
Exercising Common Sense - 10 common sense--yet often ignored--parts of transforming a company (or group). Good as a checklist when trying to do so... #
Springwise: Ready-to-cook meals delivered to busy urbanites - finally, I've been looking for this for years. Now I just have to more to Singapore... #
PressDisplay.com - Newspapers From Around the World - interesting service...plus the homepage adjusts to fit your screen resolution. Looks incredible on my 30" screen... #
Cool suspension wheel by Dahon - uses a floating axle to provide 12mm of suspension. #
"Had Sony targeted consumers in established markets, the pocket radio would have bombed. But for teenagers, the alternative to a Sony pocket radio was no radio at all. By competing against nonconsumption, Sony set a very low technical hurdle for itself: The product just had to be better than nothing in order to find delighted consumers." - Clayton Christensen #
"How's this for a mission statement: We make crummy products for non-consumers." - most disruptive innovations start out as poorly-executed products for people who currently aren't buying anything, writes Clayton Christensen #
"Incumbents usually see the same technologies that entrants do. Because of their processes and values, however, incumbents predictably 'cram' the technology into the largest and most obvious market applications...The problem with cramming is that it changes the innovation in ways that obviate its inherent disruptive energy. It takes an innovation from a circumstance in which its unique features are valuable to a circumstance in which its unique features are a liability." - Clayton Christensen #
"The initial absolute size of a disruptive opportunity is generally too small to justify any substantial amount of investment or even management" - Clayton Christensen #
HBS Entrepreneurship Conference - looks interesting; will have to follow up, hopefully notes are published. #
Investigating the unknown - "If you look at Sustainable Habitat, some of the product and service concepts are already generating interest, because the notion of sustainability has firmly become rooted in mainstream consciousness,' he continues. 'Two and a half years ago when we talked about this kind of issue people thought we were being alarmist - now it makes perfect sense. That's how quickly the cultural tide can turn, and it shows the value of our probes program." #
Investigating the unknown - why Philips does long-term, exploratory design research: "With probes, we study emerging trends and behavior and examine the link with associated technologies that, in a number of years time, may be relevant for our business. This involves tracking developments in five main areas - politics, economics, environment, technology and culture." #
ThinkGeek :: Electronic Bubble Wrap Keychain - pretty funny, and the every-100th-click-sound is a good example of the "random surprise" that keeps you on your toes. #
How to Become an Early Riser - "The solution was to go to bed when I'm sleepy (and only when I'm sleepy) and get up with an alarm clock at a fixed time (7 days per week). So I always get up at the same time (in my case 5am), but I go to bed at different times every night." #
The Google Enigma - "Nearly everything the company does...is aimed at reducing the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use...[and] because the marginal cost of producing and distributing a new copy of a purely digital product is close to zero, Google not only has the desire to give away informational products; it has the economic leeway to actually do it...Google faces far less risk in product development than the usual business does." #
The Google Enigma - great article on Google I've been recommending to lots of people. "First...we don't even know whether its approach to management, and in particular its approach to innovation, is a cause of its success or a product of its success - a crucial distinction. Second, we don't know how well Google's example applies to other businesses....Is the company an exemplar or a freak?" Link requires registration but it's worth it (plus it's a good publication). #
My Amazon wishlist, online and in RSS. You know, just in case...oh, and don't buy me books, those are added for other reasons. #
Patagonia Men's Rimu - nice pull-on shoe #
"I've said that to open a novel is to arrive in a music hall and be handed a viola. You have to perform." - Kurt Vonnegut #
"For a lot of people, TV is life itself. Churches used to provide people with better company than they had at home, but now, no matter what your neighborhood life or family life is like, you turn on the television and you get relatives, family...Human beings will believe in all kinds of things that aren't true, and that's okay. And TV is a part of that." - Kurt Vonnegut #
"I always say to people, practice an art, no matter how well or badly [you do it], because then you have the experience of becoming, and it makes your soul grow." - Kurt Vonnegut #
FOODPAIRING - tells what foods go together...useful in planning meals? #
Howstuffworks "1961-1964 Cadillac" - cool article on the design evolution of my favorite car #
United Nuclear - Aerogel - buy it online, in powder or block form. Powder is much less expensive; what can you do with it? #
Provisional Application for Patent - $100 buys you a year to sell your idea... #
Advice on licensing product ideas - "I’ve talked to inventors who have been contemplating or working on ideas for years. That’s not me. When I have an idea, it only takes me three days to three weeks to find out if the idea has legs. On average, I recommend that my students take no longer than three weeks to three months before they make the decision to keep working on the project or dump the idea and move onto the next one." #
Kids' paper prototypes for laptops - I want kids to design all my products... #
Canvas Vertical Sling For MacBook Pro : Incase Products - cool laptop bag #
MIT World » : Leading by Omission - "The problem, Semler figures, is that there's 'something fundamental about organizations and...leadership that makes it almost impossible for people inside a business to change their own industry.'" #
Guano Islands Act - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - wonderful, the U.S. passed a law allowing it to take possession of any unoccupied islands in the world, as long as they're covered in bird poop. #
"More and more, we know more of less; until there will come a time when we will know much of nothing, and nothing of the whole." - George Bernard Shaw #
Marginal Revolution: The end of angst? - I guess most people are not of the same mindset as I#
oobject » crazy bicycles - some really creative and cool stuff! #
What Would Jesus Buy? - looks interesting... #
gladwell dot com - designs for working - Gladwell on the emerging social workspace, and how to physically design it...part of his next book? #
"We stand on the threshold of rocket mail." - U.S. postmaster general Arthur Summerfield, in 1959. #
When speaking publicly, try to avoid ultimatums: Top 87 Bad Predictions about the Future #
Tough Spelling Bee - tough kid! #
"We've had the wrong research-and-development strategy. We've been focusing on improving parts of the system rather than focusing on the system as a whole. As a result, we have been improving the parts, but not the whole. We have got to restart by focusing on designing the whole and then designing parts that fit it rather than vice versa." - from Bell Labs #
All prayers should be this humble: "Dear God...whose name I do not know...Thank you for my life. I forgot how big..." Joe Versus the Volcano #
Ride today from Berkeley to Crockett and back - about 70 miles, 4500 ft of climbing. Ouch. #
Nicholas Kristof, from Election 2004: "One of the Republican Party's major successes over the last few decades has been to persuade many of the working poor to vote for tax breaks for billionaires...[John Kerry's supporters] should be feeling wretched about the millions of farmers, factory workers and waitresses who ended up voting - utterly against their own interests - for Republican candidates." #
Understanding Customer Experience - "Customer experience is the internal and subjective response customers have to any direct or indirect contact with a company." #
Algeria property for sale - Properazzi - just across the Mediterranean from Nice... #
Magnet Skateboards - could they do for skateboarding what clipless pedals did for cycling? Another good link #
"Everybody's debt is somebody else's asset." - Warren Buffett, explaining why he doesn't worry too much about interest rates affecting the overall economy. #
"Stanley designed [the Fubar, a new kind of hammer with an appetite for destruction] because today’s contractors use hammers mostly to break stuff—they drive nails with pneumatic guns." #
U.S. Army enlists anthropology in war zones - "American officers lavishly praised the anthropology program, saying that the scientists' advice has proved to be 'brilliant,' helping them see the situation from an Afghan perspective and allowing them to cut back on combat operations." #
Humour: How To Talk To Non-cyclists | BikeRadar.com - "Non-cyclists aren't ready to hear about your exquisite existence in its unadulterated perfection. No, you will need to translate the sublime cycling experience into terms they might be able to understand." #
A Brief Message: Arrogance and Humility - "Figuring out how to be arrogant and humble at once, figuring out when to watch users and when to ignore them for this particular problem, for these users, today, is the problem of the designer." #
The Right Brain vs Left Brain test - "Do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?" Whoa. #
Malcolm Gladwell on the future of work - "We will require, from a larger and larger percentage of our work force, the ability to engage in relatively complicated analytical and cognitive tasks...Jobs have gotten harder and more demanding. You're still going into the same place and wearing the same clothes, but a lot more is being asked of you...You're going to have to create internal structures that will help people grow into positions." #
"We have given people virtually unlimited access to data, to information; the next question is, can we give them better tools for making sense of that information...I'm quite prepared for the possibility that the next revolution is not going to come from a machine; it's going to come from creating a more thoughtful work force and giving people the opportunity to be thoughtful." - Malcolm Gladwell #
"It seems that the more complex an organization gets, the more likely it is that inefficient and unproductive businesses accumulate in the nooks and crannies and back alley--and sometimes right up there in center aisle. These businesses are subsidized by their cousin, brother, and sister businesses that are doing well, and they stick around for too long because there's a bias against shutting things down." - Richard Rumelt #
"If you ask a group to put aside the bullet points and just write three coherent paragraphs about what is changing in an industry and why, the difference is incredible. Having to link your thoughts, giving reasons and qualifications, makes you a more careful thinker—and a better communicator." - Richard Rumelt #
"I use another tool I call 'value denials.' These are products or services that are both desired and feasible but are not being supplied to the market...A classic example is an airline ticket guaranteeing that your luggage will not be lost. It just isn’t supplied at any price...There are times when we would pay the premium, but those services are not offered." - Richard Rumelt #
"Then 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 #
Apparently, Tour de France cyclists used to get their drinks by stealing them from stores - "The chasse a la canette? Well, that translates into 'hunting for cans' - drinks cans. Riders would get off their bikes at the sight of a bar, run inside, grab all they could off the shelves and out of the refrigerators and disappear with armfuls of booty which they had no intention of paying for. It was a colourful feature of the Tour de France until the organisers realised that what riders needed was more and not less to drink." #
fietstocht.com - my new hero #
One year by bicycle - Including "the warmup, across the USA...I expect this to be a tough, but not too strenuous ride that gives me a good chance to get both myself and my equipment in better shape." Wow. #
Another unique saddle: the RIDO saddle from the UK #
A couple unique saddle designs: Adamo racing saddle, Moon saddle #
63xc.com--How To | Magic Gear - adapting a frame with vertical dropouts to support a fixed gear...or a coaster brake, like I need... #
"The idea of the program is that a good way to learn about a new idea is to write about it. As someone who's written a lot, I can attest to the validity of that. I've never learned as efficiently about something as when I’m trying to write about it." - Robert Frank . Reminds me of how we remember 95% of what we teach #
YouTube - Sergey Brin and Larry Page: Inside the Google machine - both Larry and Sergey went to Montessori school...interesting (8:45) #
Bret Victor's website - some very fun stuff here. #
Creative Think: Design A New Calendar - interesting thought experiment; I think mine would have 3-day weekends and a day off in the middle of the week as well... #
A nicely broad definition of design - "Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones." - Herbert Simon #
SFMOMA | Exhibitions | Exhibition Overview: Take your time - Olafur Eliasson's exhibit at SFMOMA, with one room of rounded corners and constantly-changing lights, and another of pure yellow light that makes everyone look monochrome. Said of the former, "every time the light changes, you have different ideas." #
ABEC 11 Skateboard Wheels - Flywheels 97mm - giant skateboard wheels...smooth... #
Rosemarie Fiore: Vintage Video Game Long-Exposure Photography // Centripetal Notion - I love seeing things in the fourth dimension; reminds me of Sugimoto's Theatres, where he kept the shutter open for an entire movie. #
Brian Dettmer: Book Autopsies // Centripetal Notion - whoa...books cut from the front to reveal layers of imagery and text. Beautiful. #
Patterson Pass ride - another cool climb I haven't done...BART to Dublin/Pleasanton, ride to Livermore #
dead-end bike rides off Skyline Blvd - sadly, have never done these! #
Blue Man Group starts a preschool - "Some schools feel like they've got to rein the kids in," Wink said, banging on a drum the size of a hot tub. "We kind of let them have moments of unbridled exuberance." #
Neatorama » Blog Archive » Family Ditched Car Completely for a Better Life - "Shopping on a bike, says Erick, prompts the question: 'Do we really need an extra box of Crunch ‘n Munch?'" #
YouTube - Soundwagon vw bus - toy bus drives around a record to play it, instead of spinning the record. #
Earth in 250 million years - "The next Pangea, "Pangea Ultima" will form as a result of the subduction of the ocean floor of the North and South Atlantic beneath eastern North America and South America. This supercontinent will have a small ocean basin trapped at its center." Somehow I doubt we'll be around to see it. #
Interesting quote on why individuals should be environmentally responsible - "But the goal of personal (or consumer-based) environmentalism isn't to solve the problem single-handedly. It's to create a cultural climate that's more conducive to significant global change." #
Three factors to organization success - According to McKinsey: "Clear roles for employees (accountability), a compelling vision of change (direction), and an environment that encourages openness, trust, and challenge (culture)." #
Moving On - WSJ.com - "Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things...the brick walls are there to stop the *other* people." - Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch's "last lecture", as he's diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and just a few months to live. #
Rory - Neopoleon : The Loveliest Little Thing - truly all creations should be this thoughtful #
Local Harvest / Farmers Markets / Family Farms / CSA / Organic Food - how to find local organic food #
Farmer's Market - Three in Berkeley, Sat, Tues, Thurs #
9/10 heart surgery patients don't change their lifestyle after surgery, even though the consequence is death. But teaching people "to appreciate life (rather than fear death" causes change 70% of the time. "When even the threat of death can’t make people change their lifestyle sustainably, it becomes clear that motivation based on avoiding something is simply not as effective as motivation based on achieving something." #
"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it." - Dwight D. Eisenhower #
adaptive path » demystifying data analysis - good walkthrough of how to organize and decipher design research #
Slipstreamz - Products - The Spoiler - these things actually work pretty well...I'd say they cut about half the wind noise from cycling, and all the high-pitched hissing. $6 for a lifetime of better hearing on and off the bike? I'll go for that. #
TruVativ Rouleur - finally, a new 180mm crankset that's not $400. Also, this one is just $72 but only takes 1 chainring. Good for TT bikes, perhaps...or commuters. #
Belt drive design - very slick, it uses a special dropout to let you pass the belt through the rear triangle. #
A couple more rides going north from Berkeley: to Crockett and to Napa (80 miles round trip) and Orr Hot Springs (140 miles one-way) #
Creative Generalist - "If you're wondering, a meal at Moto starts with an edible menu and then move on to such delights as liquid salad, noodles made from pureed rice, mac and cheese with quail, a Chicago hot dog with melting mangoes, charcoal, freeze cooked tuna, cotton candy truffles, and sweetened nachos with a chocolate topping resembling ground beef. 'I want you to remember each course 10 years from now,' says Cantu." #
In their own words -- literally - Los Angeles Times - the advantages of inventing a language...or at least a word: "The phenomenon was noted by early 20th century linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. They proposed a theory that language had the power to broaden or constrain a speaker's thoughts. That is, it is hard to think about concepts without the specific words to express them." #
Masters of the Breakthrough Moment - “Teams are a way of making groups more comfortable for men by adapting the language of sports. Groups were about collaboration and learning, but teams can be focused just on winning. This appeals to organizations focused on the bottom line, but the ability of people to make breakthroughs is compromised." #
Masters of the Breakthrough Moment - "Productivity and creativity in the workplace, in their view, occur when members of a group or team wade together into the muck of confusion and unspoken assumptions in order to surface concerns and conflicts that get glossed over in the rush of daily life." #
How to make fire wire with steel wool | Dangerously Fun - "Most people don’t consider steel flammable but steel wool will burn vigorously if you give it enough oxygen. An easy way to achieve this is to swing the burning wool in a wide circle. The result is surprisingly entertaining because tiny bits of material melt and fly off, creating a firework-like pyrotechnic display." #
Kevin Kelly has compiled a list of what he calls True Films -"documentaries, educational films, instructional how-to's, and what the British call factuals - a non-fiction visual account." Some interesting categories are Artists at work and People at work. As he says, "Perfect for Netflix!" #
Wild coincidence in Cambodia - "I found Mr. Niem at the ruins of Angkor Wat. Notice that he also graces the cover of my Lonely Planet guidebook to Cambodia. Mr. Niem could not speak any English so communication was not easy. I do not think he knew that he was on the front cover of a book, until I showed it to him. He was so excited. I had to be careful, as too much excitement might not be good - he seemed like he might be about 200 years old." #
Hiroshi Sugimoto (the oceans photographer) is showing at the SF de Young Museum until September 23... #
The Dilbert Blog: Absence of a Thing - "Recently I was wondering if life as a rock would be superior to life as a conscious entity...Perhaps you think that sitting around pain free would not be enough to make you happy. It would be boring and unfulfilling...But boredom and lack of fulfillment are types of pain. Imagine sitting around doing nothing while having no tinge of boredom, or lack of purpose, or loneliness, or any other discomfort. I think it would feel like happiness. The ideal happy creature would be a rock with consciousness. It would have no discomfort and no goals beyond eroding." #
My library - Google Book Search - made a list of all the books I've read that are currently on the shelves or that I remembered offhand...more to come, I hope. #
An Online Version of Your Library - ok, I didn't notice this before, but the new "My Books" in Google Book Search is...searchable. Well, I know what I'll be doing this weekend..."Probably the most important reason you should build the library is because it becomes searchable. Imagine being able to find a scene from one of your books without knowing its title and by typing some keywords that describe the scene." #
Dori's Moblog: Design As Margaret Mead - "Some of the old Design people sought new lands to explore who they are and what they could do...some of the groups landed in the land of Anthropology [where] some said kill them for they bring disease. Others said we should take care of them and mate with them; we have something to learn from them. The latter group won, but the former group constantly eyed the visitors with suspicion." #
"The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones." - Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, former head of OPEC; mentioned in William McDonough's TED talk #
Cal Cycling - Fruit Stand - fun ride today...though I missed the fruit stand! #
Awesome photo series of Spanish beach tourists helping African migrants, just arrived from a 1000 km sea journey - World Press Photo #
Tents for the homeless in Paris; protects people while raising their visibility - World Press Photo #
9 year old sex worker...and she's (gasp!) smoking! Yeah, our kids, um, sometimes play video games too much... - World Press Photo #
Gorgeous photo of the ocean - I want this 6 feet tall on my wall. Pretty much the opposite of the Tokyo wave pool link. #
Tokyo wave pool packed beyond capacity - Stop the ride, I want to get off. #
Cannondale folding bicycle - Cycle-Licious - Sooo....hotttt. Enclosed drivetrain, single-side fork and rear stays, folding in the middle, saddle on a beam. Please manufacture this, Cannondale. #
"No building ever feels right to the people in it unless the physical spaces (defined by columns, walls, and ceilings) are congruent with the social spaces (defined by activities and human groups)." - A Pattern Language #
Management Methods | Management Models | Management Theories - like a full MBA on a single page. Yikes. #
Sanders Says: Rehearse the future = "Horst Rechelbacher, the founder of personal care product maker Aveda, has a great way of leveraging meditation to sharpen his business effectiveness...He believes that when you internally account for a day's activities it enhances your ability to be more mindful in the future...he's able to keep a perspective about his work that's removed from the frantic pace of real business life. " #
designverb - Tunnel House - just, wow. A conceptual art installation in a house scheduled to be demolished. #
Bearskinrug, The Homepage - really beautiful blog; of course doing custom illustrations for each post helps... #
The real problem with software - "No matter how cool your software is you still use it on a computer, which is fundamentally kinda boring. I've compensated for this a little by working in mobile, so at least you can use my stuff outside. But if you're outside why not climb a tree or something rather than reading news feeds or texting all your friends to talk about climbing a tree." #
Yahoo! Avatars - customize cartoony characters and pose them... #
Simple online comic strip creator - for kids...or me. #
"Stop searching for God and just sit!" - Zen Buddhist quote #
:: PIMPAMPUM :: Bubblr! .:. - create comics by dragging speech bubbles onto Flickr photos #
Seth's Blog: The Galapagos Post Office - "On a deserted beach on a small island near the equator, there's a barrel and some ziploc bags. This post office has been here for more than a hundred years." You drop letters off, someone going the way you need your letters to go picks it up and delivers it for you for free. "Apparently, you can send a letter anywhere in the world and count on it showing up. There's actually a shortage of mail... more people want to carry the letters then write them." #
Two of John Maeda's Laws of Simplicity: Simplicity and complexity need each other. More emotions are better than less. #
ThinkGeek :: Power Strip Space Saver - the "aha" is not the flexible extension for power bricks--it's the fact that the back side still has a plug so you don't lose any space at all! #
"Focusing exclusively on tasks and goals means that you tend to ignore or de-emphasize all of the activities that people engage in that are specifically not goal-oriented. It also means that you will often ignore the messy jumble of activities that take place around but are not oriented toward your system...When it comes to designing for the total experience, the activities that have little to do with the system you are designing are often just as important as those that are central to it." - Todd Wilkens #
Family Guy storyboards - as they put it, "see how the sausage is made." With a lot of effort, it seems... #
Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith - Mother Teresa said she almost never felt God's presence once she began her famous work...she learned to overcome that and even use it as her foundation. "Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear." — to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979 #
Online Book Rental. Cheap Books. Borrow new releases and classics at BookSwim. - Yes! Netflix for books! #
How the Wright brothers tested wind drag before building their planes - benefits to owning a bike shop! #
wyndowe - iinnovate episode 3: David Kelley, founder of IDEO - "[Typical] offices are particularly bad, about status, you know, like who has the big office in the corner. I suggest if you were a business owner, take the crummiest office in the place, then you’ll never have to deal with that. If somebody comes in says they don’t like their office, say 'will you trade with me?'" #
Will Wright buys collections of things and then gives them away - "I'm uncollecting. I buy collections on ebay, and I disperse them out to people again. I have to be like an entropic force to collectors, otherwise all of this stuff will get sorted." #
"Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be." - William Hazlitt #
Eating Italian in San Francisco - Gridskipper, the Urban Travel Guide - Looks pretty good... #
Ming the Mechanic: Learning to Learn - "It's the old story of a human being able to pay attention to just 5-7 things at the same time...I think we're actually a lot better wired than we readily think. Your sub-conscious mind deals with millions of variables quite well. Your intuition does great with complexity. You probably do have the equipment you need to operate at a much higher level. But it isn't necessarily going to work if you leave your 5-7 bit mind in charge." #
The flip side of Kenneth Boulding/Scott Adams/Spinoza's idea that we are engaged in building a greater intelligence? That we might be part of a simulation for someone who got there first. #
The Books of The Bible | Home Page = "The Books of The Bible is a groundbreaking new presentation of the Scriptures designed to accurately reflect the biblical authors' intentions." Emphasizes the reading of "whole books" by reordering the books, removing chapter/verse numbers, printing in full-page-width and more. #
"Cold sweat" ice cream contains 3 types of peppers and 2 types of hot sauce - "[A customer] said it tasted like 'fire -- with a side of fire.'" #
Amazon.com: Pulltaps Classic Bronze Corkscrew in a Gift-box: Home & Garden - the best corkscrew I've ever used. I use the basic $10 version; this is an upgrade. #
YouTube - (2008) Be Kind, Rewind Trailer - this looks great. #
"Formal education slows down our process of growing up." - makes sense to me, anyway. Most of the "growing up" I've done happened outside of school, when I had to make my own decisions. A commenter adds some positive spin though: "[It] is partly designed to remove young people from the labor force for a period of time - it wasn't until the Depression that most children went to high school, and that was a deliberate policy choice - it employed more teachers, and it kept teenagers from competing for jobs with men supporting families. In some other sense, formal education is designed to slow our process of growing up - we don't require children to show as much responsibility, in exchange for giving them the tools to do better when they do accept adult responsibilities." #
The "Vomit flashlight" - A flashlight that strobes and throws patterns that incapacitate viewers. "There’s one wavelength that gets everybody," says Lieberman. "Vlad calls it the evil color." #
Marginal Revolution: The Persistence of Poverty - "If pains and troubles are high enough, extra pain and trouble just isn't so bad. You hardly notice it. But that overturns standard economic assumptions of diminishing marginal utility..."Getting tough" with the poor through policy is more likely to backfire than succeed, as it just encourages more mean-reducing, risk-taking behavior...It can make more sense to give money to people on the verge of leaving poverty, rather than people deeply mired in poverty. The former transfer will get people onto "normal" marginal utility curves, but the deeply poor will just squander their new wealth, as it doesn't much alleviate their unhappiness." #
Watermelon steak - roasted for 2 1/2 hours... #
YouTube - Barry Bonds #756 - what it was like in the stands, four rows from where the ball landed. Chaos. #
Cooling big buildings with ice - "Credit Suisse's Trane-designed system in the Met Life tower freezes water in tanks at night, when power demands are low, and pumps chilled air via fans by day as the ice melts." #
Side-mounted bicycle pedal - very cool concept #
Where Work Is a Religion, Work Burnout Is Its Crisis of Faith -- New York Magazine - "Most Americans believe they work more today than they did 35 years ago. Yet according to the American Time Use Survey...Americans now have five more hours of leisure per week (38) than they did in 1965...Americans [also] experience their leisure quite differently and therefore may feel as if they’re working more. For one thing, it’s non-contiguous leisure time, time meted out in discrete increments...we gain 90- second reprieves with our microwave ovens. But do we do anything meaningful in those 90 seconds? Or do they vanish in the same particle puff?" #
Door dwell - The amount of time it takes for the door to close after having boarded an elevator. #
"Pines found that the most-burned-out people were nurses working in children’s burn units--'It was too painful'--and the least were serial entrepreneurs, those metabolic wonders creating companies as if they were baking cakes." - Where Work Is a Religion, Work Burnout Is Its Crisis of Faith -- New York Magazine #
"[E.T.] was probably my most personal film, because it was the first film I had made about something that had happened to myself" - Steven Spielberg. Of course, he meant the emotional parts...I think... #
"I've been afraid of most everything most of my life, so falling in love with fear is something that was in my DNA." - Steven Spielberg #
Steven Spielberg started his career by simply getting off a Hollywood tour bus and walking around the lot. He found an empty office and just set up shop, waving at the guard every day as he drove in... #
"Virtual groups, where people brainstormed individually, generated nearly twice as many ideas as the real groups...In addition, in the studies where the quality of ideas was measured, researchers found that the total number of good ideas was much higher in virtual groups than in real groups." - from The Medici Effect, which I desperately need to read. #
"The other guys think the purpose of communication is to get information. We think the purpose of information is to get communication." - Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder. There's really something to that...if organizing and supplying information is a service, then communication is an experience using that service--a higher-level offering. I think Zuckerberg's limiting this to person-to-person communication though; automated communication be as engaging and useful. #
Temple of the Seven Golden Camels: A Question and a Quickie - why not to sell out to merchandising: "Animated movie tie-ins with fast food places are always the same thing: the kid's meals come with a toy from the movie, thus cementing the idea in people's heads that animation is for kids only and that animation itself is cheap, low quality and unsatisfying like fast food. Who wants the public to equate their film with greasy cardboard Happy Meal boxes and the smell of French fries?" #
Smart Recharge Station - unclutters wires; probably easy to build one #
Films for the Humanities and Sciences - Educational Media - The Launch: A Product Is Born - a reality show about a product design firm...too bad this one didn't make it past the pilot. #
Mike Creed » Lame - sounds like Mike Creed is having problems stemming from sitting crooked too. Only his have a lot more miles behind them than mine. #
1/8"x4'x8' Tileboard White - good whiteboard material from Lowes, item #16605 #
Was I right about the dangers of the Internet in 1997? - By David Shenk - Slate Magazine - "Probably the greatest overall threat [of the information culture] is that so many potentially meaningful experiences can easily be supplanted by merely thrilling experiences." #
dezeen » Blog Archive » The Secret Life of cars by BMW - huge report on how people use their cars--especially the little things like gestures between drivers, cupholder use, how multiple couples sit, and more. Truly awesome. #
cabel.name: New! Product Update - Soda with vitamins, mystery-flavor Doritos, and cereal straws. Amazing, the lengths we go to trying to use all that corn... #
Norman Borlaug, a pioneer of the "Green Revolution" who was born on a Cresco farm in 1914, became one of only five people in history to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, Nobel Peace Prize and Presidential Medal of Freedom. Never heard of him? You've probably heard of the others: Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Elie Wiesel and Nelson Mandela. Some videos of the man... #
Out Of The Ashes: Lowe's Makes "Katrina Cottages" Available Nationwide - Consumerist - awesome. Smaller homes are a viable market segment; unfortunate that it took a hurricane to expose it. #
Alarm Ring - worn on your finger; vibrates to wake you up silently. #
YouTube - "Thriller" - performed by "1,500 plus CPDRC inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, Cebu, Philippines". Wow. #
Microwavable custom insoles - not sure how good they are for cycling, but perhaps worth a shot... #
"Far too long, historians have accepted the claim that the conversion of the Emperor Constantine (ca. 285-337) caused the triumph of Christianity. To the contrary, he destroyed its most attractive and dynamic aspects, turning a high-intensity, grassroots movement into an arrogant institution controlled by an elite who often managed to be both brutal and lax." - Rodney Stark #
Markee Dry-Erase Paint - makes something more like a pinkboard than a whiteboard, but it's a start... #
Solutions MB: Eliminate Graffiti - MB3000 Whiteboard Repair - whiteboard paint! #
World Bicycle Relief - another great project using bicycles to change the world. I'm of course a sucker for these things due to my cycling interest, but I do believe that bicycles can have a huge impact on people's lives. #
Rich ethnographic reports about the uses of ICT in low-income communities « Culture Matters - reports from around the world. One excerpt: "all Internet users in the Accra slum studied used the internet only for chat with foreigners (as well as some diasporic family members and friends). There was exceptionally low awareness of even the existence of websites". #
Ben Cohen's Oreo presentation - given at the Global Philanthropy Forum; a good way to visualize our country's financial situation and opportunities. #
The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World plots all human societies on a single graph, with axes for "traditional/secular" and "survival/self-expression" values. #
World Values Survey - "This is a place to learn more about values and cultural changes in societies all over the world." #
"This weekend, Paris placed over 10,000 bikes in just 36 hours , launching an ambitious bike sharing system that is meant to 'lead a revolution in the way Parisians move around the city'." #
"Video is 3 dimensional, because it’s two dimensional—graphic, and the third dimension is time" - Jakob Nielsen #
Nearly 20% of the donations made online to the Red Cross last month were by people using stolen credit cards. - apparently donating to a charity doesn't require an address nor raise the ire of an in-store clerk, so thieves donate to charity to see if the card is valid. Amazing. #
Microsoft's new collaborative design/development space for mobile phone designers; slide 5 looks especially nice #
glumbert.com - Japanese Tetris - this is awesome. Note how the best strategy for getting through is rarely the one suggested by the cutout...but most people try that one anyway. #
Tech Center - very cool new aerobar mounting method; on the faceplace of the stem. #
Tech Center - great article on hacking shorty aerobars for road riding #
» How to Travel the World with 10 Pounds or Less (Plus: How to Negotiate Convertibles and Luxury Treehouses) #
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution." - Albert Einstein #
Temple of the Seven Golden Camels: The Secret to Practically Everything (well, duh) - contradicting (or perhaps just extending) Rolf's "just copy" strategy: "It was pretty evident from that exchange that one key to great life drawing is to use the model for inspiration and capture the essence of the model and the pose while using design to make a pleasing picture. That's why my sketchbook drawings work when they do: I am filling in the gaps in my memory, using design to make choices instead of trying to remember exactly what I saw." #
Job holders as servants - "Free enterprise isn't anything like big-corporate capitalism. We've been told the two are equivalent, but that's just another bit of cultural brainwashing...Job holders by definition aren't capitalists. Job holders, no matter how well paid they might be, function merely as the servants of capitalists, just as medieval serfs functioned as the servants of lords. They are beholden. They function in a climate of diminished responsibility, diminished risk, and diminished reward. A climate of institutional dependency." #
James Madison on entrepreneurs Well, farmers actually, but the same statements hold - "The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: They are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself." - James Madison #
Why to Not Not Start a Startup - a good test for whether your company is "big" or not? "If you took a nap in your office in a big company, it would seem unprofessional. But if you're starting a startup and you fall asleep in the middle of the day, your cofounders will just assume you were tired." #
blog.pmarca.com: The Pmarca Guide to Big Companies, part 2: Retaining great people - interesting list; how to fix the problems that evolve as a company grows...in order, "Don't give up [having a startup feel]", "Focus", "Clean house", "Promote your best people", "Simplify and clarify your organizational structure", "Don't rely on recruiters for everything", "Ramp up college recruiting", "Communicate within", "Shake things up". Also, how to keep your great people and how *not* to retain people... #
Clayton Christensen on why it's hard for companies to innovate - and why it's so rare that companies pull it off: "Never does an idea pop out of a person's head as a completely fleshed-out business plan. It has to go through a process that will get approved and funded. You're not two weeks into the process until you realize, "gosh, the sales force is not going to sell this thing," and you change the economics. Then two weeks later, marketing says they won't support it because it doesn't fit the brand, so we've got to change the whole concept. All those forces act to make the idea conform to the company's existing business model, not to the marketplace. And that's the rub. So the senior managers today, thirsty for innovation, stand at the outlet of this pipe, see the dribbling out of me-too innovation after me-too innovation, and they scream up to the back end, "Hey, you guys, get more innovative! We need more and better innovative ideas!" But that's not the problem. The problem is this shaping process that conforms all these innovative ideas to the current business model of the company." #
Clayton Christensen's Innovation Brain - interesting that he puts limits on the iPhone's true success possibility: "The iPhone is a sustaining technology relative to Nokia. In other words, Apple is leaping ahead on the sustaining curve [by building a better phone]. But the prediction of the theory would be that Apple won't succeed with the iPhone. They've launched an innovation that the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat: It's not [truly] disruptive. History speaks pretty loudly on that, that the probability of success is going to be limited." #
Doug Pagitt at Sanctuary - "Second-order faith": to talk about your faith. Real Christianity is lived; reflecting on it, talking about it, and hearing about it are secondary activities. #
Guy Kawasaki on the Art of Innovation - "Always ask the people who are adopting your product or service why they're doing it, then give them more reasons to do it. That is very different from asking the people who are *not* adopting your product why they are not adopting it and trying to fix it for them. I have never seen that work." #
Article on how children aren't allowed to run free anymore - I was thinking about this while reading Calvin and Hobbes last night; Calvin, of course, runs free all over the place, as did I growing up. It was great. The report "warns that the mental health of 21st-century children is at risk because they are missing out on the exposure to the natural world enjoyed by past generations." #
Smashing The Clock - "At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours." #
mob incentive: Home - fascinating...raise money as a prize for the first person to do something you want. Like endowing your own X-prize on anything that's important to you! #
Danger Bomb Alarm Clock | Uncrate - my alarm clock got "lost" in the move...maybe this would be a sufficiently-annoying replacement? #
Amazon.com : Cannibal Apocalypse: DVD - hee hee: "i had very high hopes when i bought cannibal apocalypses..." It's very hard to find non-war movies about Vietnam, but this is still pretty bad. #
www.cyclingnews.com presents the 59th Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré - "This is the view the winner of a major stage race gets" #
cbs4.com - Bob Barker Hosts His Final Showcase Showdown - "Here I am, 83 years old, been doing something I love all of my adult life." #
Bob Barker's last show - "He hosted for 35 years. He is 83. That means he started hosting when he was 48. So at that age he was still able to find a carrier to begin that would be his life work - Awesome." #
The Dilbert Blog: Minutia - Scott Adams liveblogs his day; how he creates Dilbert! #
Crushpad wine - specify the settings and label for your wine, they grow it, bottle it, and send it to you. Optionally they'll also distribute and sell it for you. The foundation for a 4-hour workweek? #
Wired 15.04: The See-Through CEO - "Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system." #
Employee Lounge: Offices that look like living rooms make you happier—and more productive." - Popular Science - "I can't remember the last time I had a great idea at my desk" - Robert King, CEO of Humanscale #
Wired 15.03: Snack Attack! - "Radio SASS (Short Attention Span System), an experimental radio protocol currently in development that takes classic tunes and whittles them down to about two minutes." #
'omg my mom joined facebook!!' - I heard this from a family counselor as well recently: "Facebook is all about being a reflection of real-world relationships," she said. "The same thing you’re experiencing with your daughter online is a reflection of how you’re not a part of her social network in real life." #
ABC.com: American Inventor - Home Page - back on the air this Wednesday, with George Foreman as a judge! #
Tour de Frank Info, Trailers, and Reviews at FilmSpot - "A comedy about competitive bicycling"...awesome #
Yay Hooray | brain cell structure same as universe - more support for the universe as giant brain theory? #
Psst! from the archives: "There is no multi-tasking. There is only the monkey mind jabbering so fast it seems like multi-tasking." #
Personal History: How I Spent the War: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - "After is always before. What we call the present, this fleeting nownownow, is constantly overshadowed by a past now, in such a way that the escape route known as the future can be marched to only in lead-soled shoes." #
evhead: You have to decide what game you're playing There are several established games: 1) The Big Game 2) The Little Game 3) The Fun Game You can also make up your own game. #
Helix — a 1D skyscraper with a single corridor - The first comment: "But how would you deal with people rolling bowling balls down the corridor?" #
TED Talks: Robert Wright - Google Video - a great intro to my favorite author's ideas #
Debunking Christianity: What Would Convince Me Christianity is True? - attacks only the straw men of fundamentalism, however. #
The keys to creativity - from Edward de Bono: "There are three things that are necessary for creativity; motivation, thinking skills and lateral thinking." #
Better living through self deception (kottke.org) - how our thoughts and memories impact our performance and experience..."Perhaps the way to true personal achievement and happiness is through lying to yourself instead of being honest, loafing instead of practicing, and purposely forgetting information." #
TerraCycle Inc - beautiful business model: they take trash (organic waste), compost it using worms, then package it in old soda bottles bought cheap from schools who collect them as fundraisers and sell it as organic fertilizer. #
"We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn." - or, "We don't learn that we don't learn that we don't learn". #
Wondermill Webworks - User Experience Designer Required - a good level to shoot for with any design: "When people have created an account with one of our products, they should shed a tear because the experience is over. They should write ballads and march from town to town reading them to anyone who'll listen. They should hang signs from highway overpasses proclaiming our good name, hold 3-day block parties and call up radio stations to dedicate cheesy songs." #
Pedal Revolution Donations - good home for old bike stuff #
shelter in a cart - designboom - designing a shopping-cart-sized portable home for the homeless #
archibald - designboom - what to do with a big metal radiator? Repurpose it to steam and dry your clothes! #
milkmoments - designboom - world's coolest cereal bowls... #
bookofjoe: I'm in search of a lifestyle that does not require my presence - just love the title quote, by Kinky Friendman #
YouTube - Invisible Boards by Spike Jonze - seriously, this is what it feels like...magic. Especially the last scene. #
TuneCore: Welcome - indie artists can easily get their music sold on iTunes, Rhapsody, etc... #
The Value Of Aggregating Content » Publishing 2.0 - "Disaggregation — taking apart media — is only step one of the media revolution. Step two — or 2.0 — is finding dynamic ways to put it back together." #
Rainbow Liquid Chalk Markers - Blick Art Materials - multi-surface whiteboard markers? #
A Hot Little Portable Grill for Summer: ArtBuzz - beautiful, little, and cheap #
bookofjoe: Larry J. Kolb learns why 'I don't know' is not only the best but the correct answer "If you happened to be asked, 'Why did Mr. Gandhi go to the restaurant?', your answer could not be 'Because he was hungry' or 'To eat.' Your only truthful answer would be, 'I don't know.' Because, even if Rajiv told you he was hungry, that's just hearsay, and you don't know what went on in his mind that made him go into the restaurant. But, if you were asked, 'Did Mr. Gandhi eat in the restaurant?,' ands you were in the restaurant when he was, and you saw him eat there, your answer would be?" Finally a part for me. I said, "My answer would be 'Yes.'" "Correct," said Frank. "Your answer would be 'Yes' and it would not be 'Yes, I saw him eating apple pie in the restaurant.' Because they didn't ask that, and it's not up to you to volunteer anything." #
991001; Atlantic Monthly, p. 47 - 57; Beyond the Information Revolution - "This means that the key to maintaining leadership in the economy and the technology that are about to emerge is likely to be the social position of knowledge professionals and social acceptance of their values. For them to remain traditional 'employees' and be treated as such would be tantamount to England's treating its technologists as tradesmen -- and likely to have similar consequences." #
Bill Moyers and Jon Stewart - "You know, one of the things that I do think government counts on is that people are busy. And it's very difficult to mobilize a busy and relatively affluent country, unless it's over really crucial-- you know, foundational issues...I'm sure what [Bush] would like to do is send 400,000 more troops there, but he can't, because he doesn't have them. And the way to get that would be to institute a draft. And the minute you do that, suddenly the country's not so damn busy anymore." #
I Chat, Therefore I Am... | Technology | DISCOVER Magazine - paging Dr. Turing...or not #
I Chat, Therefore I Am... | Technology | DISCOVER Magazine - paging Dr. Turing...or not #
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Darwin's letters archived on web - "Evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin thought the voyage of the Beagle was a "magnificent scheme" allowing him to spend time "larking round the world"." #
APOD: 2007 May 16 - Dark Matter Ring Modeled around Galaxy Cluster CL0024 17 - "How do we know that dark matter isn't just normal matter exhibiting strange gravity? A new observation...is shedding new dark on the subject." Ha ha. Plus, a pretty amazing image. #
Gluing captions to cats - on metadata; reminds me of Kottke's metadata overfizzle post a while back... #
Can CBS Put the Net Into Network? - WSJ.com - "CBS's new chief Internet strategist now jokes that the Web address for Innertube should be 'CBS.com/nobodycomeshere.' CBS, after a year of experimenting with various Web initiatives, says that forcing consumers to come to one site -- its own -- to view video hasn't worked. Instead, the company plans to pursue a drastically revised strategy that involves syndicating its entertainment, news and sports video to as much of the Web as possible." #
'Mudtrails' caused by trawlers revealed - first heard about this from a friend on Saturday; now an old friend is leading the visualization research on its impact! #
Pamela Kendall Schiffer - Welcome - my aunt-in-law's (is there such a thing?) new site showing her amazing paintings, especially of the Santa Barbara area. We're proud to have a couple hanging in our home. #
Temple of the Seven Golden Camels: Carrying a Sketchbook, part one - "Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that a sketchbook is more than a way to improve your drawing, it forces you to focus on the world around you and analyze it. Just trying to record the world on paper makes you observe and study everything around you instead of just letting the world wash over you without a glance." #
Temple of the Seven Golden Camels: Carrying a Sketchbook, part one - "The best advice I can give you about becoming a better artist is to carry a sketchbook with you all of them time and to draw in it whenever you can." #
"Reading becomes dangerous when instead of waking us to the personal life of the spirit it tends to substitute itself for it" - Marcel Proust #
Paul H. Rubin - Evolution, Immigration and Trade - washingtonpost.com - Another way that we're unprepared to understand situations on a global scale: "In a group of 100 people, when we observe something that has happened to someone, it is a reasonably likely event. In a society of 300 million, when we learn about something happening to one person, it may be an extremely unlikely event, but we often perceive it as likely when we see it on the news." #
UIE Brain Sparks » Blog Archive » Would You Bet Your Life Savings On It? - a good question to ask before making strong recommendations #
AlterNet: Blogs: Video: Update: Cartoon Marketing Ignites Bomb Scare [VIDEO] - Years from now, this will still be cited as a turning point, in so many ways. The press conference they gave (video at the site) is especially fascinating. "A guerrilla marketing campaign for a cartoon show about a box of french fries and his milkshake pal set off a scare that nearly shut down Boston's commercial district yesterday, as bomb squads closed highways and two bridges in search of what turned out to be magnetic-light versions of the cartoon characters." #
Annals of Transport: There and Back Again: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - "In that kind of life, you have a small refrigerator, because you can get to the store quickly and often. By this logic, the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul." #
Annals of Transport: There and Back Again: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - "Three years ago, two economists at the University of Zurich...found that, if your trip is an hour each way, you’d have to make forty per cent more in salary to be as 'satisfied' with life as a noncommuter is." #
Annals of Transport: There and Back Again: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - "People tend to behave in their cars as though they are alone in a room. Road rage is one symptom of this; on the street or on the train, people don’t generally walk around calling each other assholes. Howard Stern is another; you can listen to lewd evocations without feeling as though you were pushing the bounds of the social contract. You could drive to work without your pants on, and no one would know." #
Annals of Transport: There and Back Again: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - "There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections." - Robert Putnam #
Annals of Transport: There and Back Again: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - "'Drive until you qualify' is a phrase that real-estate agents use to describe a central tenet of the commuting life: you travel away from the workplace until you reach an exit where you can afford to buy a house that meets your standards." #
Annals of Transport: There and Back Again: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - "Pisarski calls commuting 'the interaction of demography with geography,' and the nuances are legion." #
current work - visualizing the plastic bags, shipping containers, war money, guns, drugs, and more used in the United States. Incredibly powerful. #
» Outsourcing Life and How to Eliminate E-mail Overload "The Master does nothing, yet he leaves nothing undone. The ordinary man is always doing things, yet many more are left to be done." Tao Te Ching Chapter 38 #
``If I look at the mass I will never act'':\ Psychic numbing and genocide - "In this paper I have drawn upon common observation and behavioral research to argue that we cannot depend only upon our moral feelings to motivate us to take proper actions against genocide. That places the burden of response squarely upon the shoulders of moral argument and international law." #
``If I look at the mass I will never act'':\ Psychic numbing and genocide Mother Teresa: "If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will." #
[Mailbag] Raymond Chen, Pinkberry, Massimo Vignelli, Frank Gehry, etc. - (37signals) - "In the documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry, the architect explains that he creates multiple scales of a model to remember that the model is not the project. He explains that its often too easy to become infatuated with the model itself instead of remembering it is a representation of a building." #
06 le tour de menlo half century PDF map - Edgewood, Crestview, etc...crazy hills! #
Annals of Transport: There and Back Again: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - "A commute is a distillation of a life’s main ingredients, a product of fundamental values and choices." #
Freakonomics - Baby Boomers - Aging - Middle Age - Economics - New York Times - "As much as people may love music, most of them apparently don’t feel the need to make it for themselves. According to Census Bureau statistics, only 7.3 percent of American adults have played a musical instrument in the past 12 months." #
Church brainstorm ideas - Google Docs & Spreadsheets - random stuff to help spark ideas #
The Flying Scotsman - Official Movie Site - Graeme Obree movie playing in SF! #
15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will | The A.V. Club 1. "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'" #
EXKATE- Electric Skateboards and Powerboards - higher-performance than most...higher cost too. #
bookofjoe: BehindTheMedspeak: The higher the ceiling, the better you think - 10-ft ceilings produced more creative ideas than 8-ft ceilings #
Tim Ferris Interview - Part I - "In 2004, I was working 80-hour weeks in Silicon Valley as the CEO of my own start-up, and I realized that income had no practical value without time." #
Desks4Computers: Prota-6 Height Adjustable Glass Top Desk - pretty slick, sit+stand+type+draw #
How to live on $1 a day. - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine - "In 1981, 40 percent of the world's people lived on less than $1 a day, according to Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion of the World Bank. The figure plummeted to 21 percent by 2001 and may be as low 15 percent by 2015. We can hope." #
How to live on $1 a day. - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine - it's counted differently than I thought..."In other words, a Kenyan farmer might have 50 cents a day to spend but still not count as "very poor" because 50 cents in Kenya buys more than $1 would in the United States. However you look at it, a dollar a day is a tiny income." #
bookofjoe: Philip Johnson's Iconic Glass House To Open to Visitors Next Monday - one of my favorite houses... #
Amazon is letting third-party companies use their shipping and distribution network - amazing--Amazon's infrastructure is amazing and they've nailed the shipping problem; can't wait to use this network for my own products! #
Temple of the Seven Golden Camels: Listen to Your Ol' Pappy K! - "Those times when you are just sitting there with nothing else going on, immersed in the people and happenings around you are when you really get to see special things: people just going about their ordinary business. That's when people are at their most fascinating." #
Springwise: Flexible pet ownership - Netflix for dogs! And I thought Netflix for books was innovative... #
George Foreman iGrill | Uncrate - ok, that's pretty cool: $150 for a compact and cool-looking grill that plays your iPod too. #
Micro Persuasion: The Participation Ladder and Its Impact on Marketing and PR - more along the lines of the low creation rate on YouTube, etc. #
How We Learn - we learn "95% of what we teach to someone else" #
Participation on Web 2.0 sites remains weak - Well, more of an audience for the creators: "The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation's couch potatoes -- voyeurs who like to watch rather than create, Tancer's statistics show." #
Humboldt Fog - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - wonderful goat cheese #
david belle le parkour translated - Google Video - freestyle walking! (inside joke...) via Google's new recommendation service #
Space Shot: Genzyme Center, Cambridge, MA - "Still, although there's more actual space here--350,000 square feet--there's less personal space. Genzyme...opted to create more common areas, as a means of boosting the site's collaborative potential. 'Most of the employees don't sit at their desks from 9 to 5...the whole building was created around the idea of a highly communicative work environment.'" #
Flight Plan - DayJet - Ed Iacobucci - Complexity Science - "We're dealing with a problem where the problem specification itself is changing as you go along," Sawhill says. "You no longer want to find the best solution--you want to be living in a space of good solutions, so when the problem changes, you're still there." Fluidity is the greater goal than perfection. #
gladwell.com: Enron and Newspapers - "But I think we should also recognize what the Enron case tells us about the value of newspaper journalism. Maybe, in other words, we have underestimated the value of impartial, professionally-motivated, under-paid and overworked generalists in tackling the kind of information-rich, analysis-dependent “mysteries” that the modern world throws at us." #
Slashdot | Chimps Evolved More Than Humans - yeah, but humans evolved *better*...not all innovation is valuable... #
Adobe Tour Tracker - 2007 Tour De Georgia - Tour de Georgia being tracked with live video and images just like the Tour of California was! #
UPS Pressroom: Advertising - beautiful lightweight, *conversational* ads...with whiteboards #
Secret Bookcase Doors | Bookcase with Doors - Woodfold - oh man, I've got to get me some of these... #
Welcome to Syntactica - cool concept for automatically summarizing websites #
Is Content Still A Business? » Publishing 2.0 - "Sales are so down and so off that, as a manager, I look at a CD as part of the marketing of an artist, more than as an income stream" - Jeff Rabhan #
TED | Talks | Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? (video) - "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original...And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that ability." #
coRank - collaboratively filter the internet...like StumbleUpon but for a smaller subset of friends? #
Roll Out Flower Gardens - that's right, a garden that comes in convenient "roll" form...awesome. #
Make No Little Plans - "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized." - Daniel Burnham #
Weekend Web - Trek Bikes - Videos - WMAQ - video explaining the Trek Lime #
Collection: Design Patterns - Flickr pool...very cool #
Debunking Christianity: Why atheists should go to church - satirical and a bit insulting at times, but in interesting contrast to the Gallup poll from a couple days ago. #
Epicenter - Wired News - fascinating raw interview with Eric Schmidt about the management of Google #
Pearls Before Breakfast - washingtonpost.com - "What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare." - W.H. Davies #
ROLL-AROUNDS INSTANTWHEELS SET/4 - add wheels to anything! #
Apple - Pro - Profiles - Trek Bikes - "We’re big believers that the office is not the best place to experience things if you’re trying to create relevant products" #
YouTube - John Cage "4'33" - in *full* orchestral version--ha! Bet Cage didn't anticipate people experiencing this via YouTube... #
YouTube - Eric Schmidt at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference - interesting video #
Foonz - Free Conference Calls and Group Calls - like it sez...looks easy too. #
Hyperbolic discounting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "The functional equation for hyperbolic discounting is as follows: v = V / (1 + kD)" #
Hyperbolic discounting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "Hyperbolic discounting refers to the empirical finding that people generally prefer smaller, sooner payoffs to larger, later payoffs when the smaller payoffs would be imminent; when the same payoffs are distant in time, people tend to prefer the larger, even though the time lag from the smaller to the larger would be the same as before." #
"Today’s games-and-entertainment enthusiast has an insatiable appetite for digital high-definition content" - Really? No, really? Because that actually sounds like a made-up need for a made-up person. #
World's weirdest indoor cycling trainer - for astronauts (big .mov file) #
Bicycle Design: What kind of bikes can change the world? - "I have no problem with heavy slow utilitarian clunkers, but lets face it, people all over the world are abandoning those bikes as soon as they have the means to do so. The bikes that have the most potential for change are the ones that people really WANT to ride, not the ones that people HAVE to ride for lack of a better option. " #
Amazon.com: Snug Plug Drain Stopper - Set of 2 plugs (2 packs) - (White) - Large Set of 2: Kitchen & Housewares - finally, a great drain plug! #
Wonderland: Etech 07: Raph Koster on magic - "Games, and each individual game, has to be FUN. We game designers obsess about making all of those micro bits entertaining. Clearly designers of typical application productivity software don't do this." #
Wonderland: Raph's Keynote - "If you don't have a pattern library, you are going to die. You won't be able to tell an apple from Drano. Fun is the feedback the brain gives while successfully absorbing a pattern." #
MediaShift . Futurama::How the Online Newspaper Can Become a Community Hub | PBS - "With time becoming a more precious commodity to most, and the endless hours spent in the work place on computers, picking up a print out (newspaper) that does not involve going back on a computer will remain an attractive option." #
Techmeme @ 2:05 AM ET, March 26, 2007 - interesting thoughts on the future of newspapers...my thoughts to come... #
Temple of the Seven Golden Camels: Carrying a Sketchbook, part one - "Carrying a sketchbook is very, very important. A sketchbook is your best opportunity to catch real life as it passes by you. Why is this important? Because what makes great storytelling, animation, characters and films of every kind is that they capture a truth about real life." #
"My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots" - world's greatest user experience rant #
Microfinance - Investing for Social Impact - Google Video - very cool talks on a different kind of investing #
Prayer blessing enemies by a Serbian Orthodox bishop - among others, "Whenever I have wanted to lead people, they have shoved me into the background." #
Cognitive Daily: Artists look different - "Trained artists learn to...draw the world as it really appears. Even world-famous artists such as Leonardo da Vinci have had to resort to tricks such as looking at their subject through a divided pane of glass in order to render proportions accurately. As you can see from the two examples above, even when looking at a picture, artists look differently." #
Storage inside a bike seat - A-ha! On the very slick Trek Lime #
Google signs software deals in two African nations - I'm proud of my company today; developing Africa's economy through technology is one of the greatest things we can do. It's just a start, but a good direction... #
Wow, a Choose Your Own Adventure DVD - though I wonder how you simulate holding your fingers in place--you know, in case you make a mistake and have to go back... #
Microsoft Inductive User Interface Guidelines - aka "task-based" interfaces...some good tips to help design them, including four main ones: "Focus each screen on a single task; State the task; Make the screen's contents suit the task; Offer links to secondary tasks." #
Ben Stein on money today - fantastic rant on the bankrupting of society to pay for the excess of the rich. #
Yeeaahh! Home - nicely-gridded Yahoo home page redesign #
gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards": random thoughts on being an entrepreneur - "Bill Gates may have a million times more money than me, but he isn’t going to live a million times longer than me, watch a million times more sunsets than me, make love to a million times more women than me, drink a million times more fine wines than me, listen to a million times more Beethoven String Quartets than me, nor sire a million times more children than me. Human beings don't scale." #
Coasting Home Page - a few bikes built on the Shimano/IDEO bicycle project findings...not as different as I'd hoped, but nice, clean and fun. #
Wild lifelike billboards and posters - gives me hope for print media advertising #
Amazing New 'Swiffer' Fails To Fill The Void | The Onion - America's Finest News Source - puts product design in perspective... #
Help! - Aero Ace Won't Charge. - RC Groups - this happened to several of my planes; need to try this fix! #
Jean Baudrillard quotes "Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. In other countries, the business of laughing is left to the viewers. Here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation." #
Jean Baudrillard quotes - Baudrillard may know now, RIP: "Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void." #
The Dilbert Blog: Smarter Than a 5th Grader - "If it were up to me to add some classes to the grade school curriculum, I think I’d put more emphasis on these skills: public speaking, risk assessment, bullshit detecting, social skills, decision-making, managing your own body, and influencing people." #
Interspire WebEdit - very cool, just drop a PHP file into a directory and you can edit any other files in it with a WYSIWYG tool. #
bookofjoe: Post-it Table - wow... #
Samsara - a film by Ron Fricke, the sequel to Baraka - hopefully released in 2007? #
Mark Scandrette » CREATIVITY AND IMAGINATION - Creativity is one of seven vows the reImagine community has taken as part of their growth: "Although some people may fear the concept of imagination, (as though it is synonymous with myth or fantasy), as a culture I believe we suffer, not from too much imagination, but a lack of redemptive imagination." #
Warren Buffett's 2006 shareholder letter - really a fun read; thoughts on lots of topics #
Polyurethane Foam and Resin - source for polyurethane foam, 2 lb density #
RED campaign raises only $11M - sure, it's more than I could give, but for its high profile that sure didn't accomplish much...a single Bono fundraising dinner could probably do that. #
High-Water Marketing - washingtonpost.com - "Cause marketing soothes the compunctions of a mass-consumption culture at the same time that it contributes to that excess. It allows us to be giving at the same time that we are selfish." #
Black & Decker InfraWave Oven | Uncrate - finally, a smaller oven! 90% of the time you don't need all the space in the big one... #
Continuously-variable planetary transmission - uses rotating balls to change gear ratios...nice animation shown. #
ThrustPac - Empower Yourself - crazy fan-powered propulsion in a backpack! Like a horizontal jetpack! #
Ning - new Ning poses some interesting possiblities...a social network for every group you're in... #
Don Norman's jnd.org / Why doing user observations first is wrong - "Let’s face it: once a project is announced, it is too late to study what it should be – that’s what the announcement was about. If you want to do creative study, you have to do it before the launching of the project." #
Wengomeeting.com - video conference - in Flash, no registration required, up to 5 users at a time...pretty nice! #
Insurance Executive Fakes Own Life | The Onion - How different is this from most jobs? "But I just couldn't keep it up. I couldn't stand the lies. Faking your own life is harder than it looks." #
TopStyle and AlleyCode both seem to be like Taco HTML Edit (with live preview), but for Windows... #
Interesting Gallup poll on religion and evangelism - finds an emphasis on living well personally or converting others to your beliefs, not direct social action: "Only a small percentage of highly religious Americans -- 15% -- believe the best way to spread their religion is to change society to conform to their religious beliefs." #
"No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - Samuel Beckett #
The Myth About Creation Myths - Story - Background - Origin - Don't quit your day job: "In other words, companies aren't born in garages. Companies are born in companies." #
Flash Reference Guide > Create A Video Conference - using Flash #
The Kamusi Project | The Internet Living Swahili Dictionary - also cool for looking up domain names! #
1videoConference - Open Source Instant Video Conferencing, No Downloads, No Installations - well...except that you have to run WinXP and install an applet. Still, looks good, and their demo is inspiring #
Imagination Cubed - virtual whiteboard for one-time use from GE...stylish though #
Thinkature - Real-time collaboration for the web - very cool virtual whiteboard in a browser #
Saintsbury Carneros Pinot Noir - my favorite Pinot Noir #
Cloudy Bay chardonnay - my favorite chardonnay #
Benessere Black Glass Zinfandel - my favorite zinfandel #
Connect 18 - wow, cycling+travel+watching tv+learning a language...exercise classes where they teach you languages while you work out! Only in SF... #
How to praise your kids - It turns out you should praise them for their effort, not their intelligence. If you praise kids for their intelligence, they tend to avoid tasks they fear they will fail at. #
Kellogg's™ Lego® Fruit Flavored Snacks - Designer's food #
IDEO's bicycle project - results in a mass-market easy-to-ride prototype #
Marketing as it should be: "…the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself." - Peter Drucker #
June Walker: Tax & Financial Advisor to the Self-employed since 1979: Designers Dozen: Tax Saving Tips for the Graphic Artist #
bookofjoe: 'I have yet to meet a person who's under 20 who would not give up email first' [before texting or IM] #
"I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing." - Carlos Castaneda's don Juan #
APOD: 2007 February 5 - Comet Between Fireworks and Lightning - now THAT's a picture! #
I, Pencil - "If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing...one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith. " #
I, Pencil - "I am a lead pencil--the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write...Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me." #
"Think in the morning, act in the noon, read in the evening, and sleep at night." - William Blake #
YottaMusic - better web UI for Rhapsody's awesome music service. Better recommendations, too, it seems...though that may be just because I had to start my library fresh. Cool social aspect too. #
CEO morning rituals - interesting that email is such a prominent thing even in the morning; I would have expected it to be less embraced by strategic people (more on this topic soon). #
miswanting (mis.WAWN.ting) pp. Desiring something that one erroneously believes will make one happy. #
What to do with food - "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." #
"No material thing can ever achieve full and utter acceptability. People are too ductile to have their problems solved. People are time bound entities transiting from cradle to grave. Any 'solved problem' that involves human beings solves a problem whose parameters must change through time. A 'thing' is no more stable than the humans who cherish it. Properly understood, a thing is not merely a material object, but a frozen technosocial relationship." - Bruce Sterling #
Vegetable Love - Pythagoras was a vegetarian? #
Charles & Marie: Battery Lamp Presale - the minimum state of a lamp: battery+LED+shade #
Serotta Competition Bicycles - some great stuff about bike fit, summarized at Velonews #
Brand Noise: Interview: Marc Gobé Tells It Like It Is - "Design is the new advertising. The agencies should fold, they’re out of line and out of touch. The only advertising that works is about product that you’re drawn to any way." #
2057: Discovery Channel - show about the future, in 2057? #
Introducing the brand new Jawbone Bluetooth headset - beautiful and elegant use--definitely the one to get! #
SimpleGTD : Organize your stuff online - another cool new to-do list #
Hiveminder - Get busy! - cool new to-do list #
TIM HARFORD | The Global Challenge of Corporate Governance - great summary of differential pricing, price discrimination, and more #
Independent Online Edition > This Britain - the world's happiest man? Buddhist... #
Tibet Press Kit - like Asimov's First and Second Foundations? "For centuries our best minds, our saints and our philosophers concentrated all their time and energy to understanding the nature of the mind. And who can say which would really matter in the end--the landing on the moon or the understanding of the mind?" - Lhasang Tsering #
Nieman Reports - Winter 2006 - about newspapers in the digital age... #
Connecting Cultures, Changing Organizations: The User Experience Practitioner As Change Agent :: UXmatters - interesting stuff about the cultures of design vs. business #
Creative Generalist - "Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing." --Konrad Lorenz #
Cocktail Recipes: iDrink: 14800 Free Cocktail Drink Recipes - enter what you have, they tell you what you can drink! Saves your list for the future... #
Ming the Mechanic: Learning to see - "You're in the periphery, not in the focus" #
World Economic Forum - Knowledge Concierge - quick briefings on a TON of subjects for participants at the World Economic Forum in Davos...but free to us proles too =) #
ThinkGeek :: Wireless Extension Cords - wow, wireless power! UPDATE: Can't believe I fell for that...it seemed TOO easy... #
The Accidental Innovator - "Artists think they develop a talent for causing good accidents. Equally or perhaps even more important, they believe they cultivate an ability to notice the value in interesting accidents. This is a non-trivial capability." #
Louis Pasteur - Wikiquote - "I am on the edge of mysteries and the veil is getting thinner and thinner." #
Louis Pasteur - Wikiquote - "In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind." #
The Accidental Innovator - "Another, a potter, showed me how he would create beautiful pots and then, while they were drying, whack them with a stick. Sometimes they just broke, but other times he'd get an interesting shape that he'd never seen before. Then he'd make a whole series based on that new shape. He was trying to get outside of what we would call his "cone of expectations and intentions" to create something truly new." #
The Accidental Innovator - "It takes a considerable capability to see the value in an accident, and to build upon it to create even more value." #
The Business Innovation Insider: Harvard Business School's 25 most popular articles - 5 on innovation #
Evgen Bavcar - if a blind guy can be a photographer, i can too, right! #
Wayne Gretzky quotes - "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." #
Creative Generalist - how an episode of family guy is made #
Quaker City Wheelmen | Home - cycling team in Philly #
Boundless Philadelphia :: gophila.com - The Official Visitor Site for Greater Philadelphia - things to do outdoors in Philadelphia! #
Deja Vu - WSJ.com Why didn't they imagine that more people might want to fly? How can I not ignore those opportunities? "The giant airplane of 300- to 400-passenger capacity, while technically possible," wrote a U.S. aviation official in 1944, "appears to offer little economic advantage and to involve a great sacrifice of convenience for the traveler, owing to the inevitable reduction in scheduling frequency which results from using such large units." #
Neatorama » Blog Archive » 13 Photographs That Changed the World. - photography is "a blazing poetry of the real" - Ansel Adams #
Martin Seligman on God - the idea that God is the culmination of infinitely increasing complexity in the universe, based on Robert Wright's Nonzero. "A process that selects for more complexity is ultimately aimed at nothing less than omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness. Omniscience is, arguably, the literally ultimate end product of science. Omnipotence is, arguably, the literally ultimate end product of technology. Righteousness is, arguably, the literally ultimate end product of positive institutions. So in the very longest run the principle of Nonzero heads toward a God who is not supernatural, but who ultimately acquires omnipotence, omniscience and goodness through the natural progress of Nonzero. Perhaps, just perhaps, God comes at the end" #
Creative Generalist - "The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand." --Frank Herbert #
Mixing Memory : Coolest... Experiment... Ever - "Eight out of fifteen direction-givers failed to notice that the person they were talking to changed in mid conversation!" #
The Mystery of Picasso - Google Video - timelapse of Picasso painting; fascinating to see when he takes something normal-looking and twists it! #
RSS Scripts Directory - interesting PHP-based tools to merge/render multiple RSS feeds into a website #
metathings - Connecting your metadata - similar #
Profilactic.com - preventing an online identity crisis - similar combination of online web services #
SuprGlu - Gluing your life together. - combine lots of web services on a single page #
Power of Myth - interviews with Joseph Campbell #
IAAF International Association of Athletics Federations - IAAF.org - Medical & Anti-Doping - Medical & Anti-Doping News - amateur cyclist takes drugs as an experiment #
ENTROPÍA - El túnel del tiempo - spiral calendar shows the linearity of time... #
Creative Generalist - "Let's Paint, Exercise, and Blend Drinks!" #
Invention: Skateboard meets Segway - tech - 02 January 2007 - New Scientist Tech - my skateboard =( #
Sanders Says: Start out with a fresh to-do list in 2007 - how to sort a to-do list, based on Stephen Covey's 4 quadrants #
Magpie RSS - PHP RSS Parser - reads RSS, uses PHP to display it as HTML. Good for MakingStuff combine? #
Marginal Revolution: My favorite things Brazil, music edition - cool Brazilian music selections... #
One Club / The Organization > The Alchemists Film - about 5 people who create powerful advertising messages... #
reBlog by Eyebeam R&D - perfect for MakingStuff? "reBlogs are useful to individuals who want to maintain a weblog but prefer curating content to writing original posts. They can also enable organizations to tap the contributions of their employees, members, and communities-at-large in order to easily redistribute relevant content." Good ol' Frumin... #
We Are What We Do - Do Something - Actions Listings - small things to do to learn a bit more and help out a bit #
The Medici Effect : Frans Johansson - game based around the Medici Effect book insights #
5 Things to Know About Users - "The user's intentions, context, knowledge, skills, and experience are the essential things that every designer needs to know." #
toddwarfel.com » Blog Archive » The Task Analysis Grid - interesting way of presenting use cases and matching them to features and designs #
Dangerously Fun » High FPS Slow Motion - cool videos "revealing incredible detail that we normally miss" #
Marginal Revolution: The One-Minute Rule - "Most people are neurologically programmed so they cannot truly internalize the scope and import of deeply significant, long run, very good news. That means we spend too much time on small tasks and the short run. Clearing away a paper clip makes us, in relative terms, too happy in the short run, relative to the successful conclusion of World War II.." #
The Six-Word Memoir Contest: presented by SMITH Magazine and Twitter - like WIRED's six-word novel #
Short videos about biology - learn something in 5 min... #
sawzall-20030814.gif (GIF Image, 1080x540 pixels) - very cool graph of Google search queries...like the world breathing... #
Worst analogies ever written in a high school essay - fake I'm sure, but still funny: "He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree." #
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories - Turn an RC car into a floor sweeper! - ok, this would make me clean the floors... #
Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Quote of the Day About TV - "TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." - David Foster Wallace #
K'NEX Vertical Vengeance Coaster Play Set - Wal-Mart - cool K'Nex kit, 5-foot tall coaster #
Sanders Says: Say yes,and instead of yeah--but - Joe Pine video #
Charlie Rose - Fouad Ajami / Dov Charney - Google Video - Dov Charney on American Apparel #
FT.com / Weekend columnists / Tim Harford - Undercover Economist: Check this out - working with better people makes you better because you don't want to be accused of slacking off: "But why? There are, broadly, two explanations. One is that workers are spurred to greater efforts when contemplating the superior speed of their colleague. This is psychologically plausible but economically irrational. A more cynical explanation is that workers do not like it when faster colleagues are looking at them, because they fear being accused of slacking off. It might seem impossible to distinguish between these two possibilities, but at the checkout each worker is looking towards one colleague with his back to a second colleague who is looking at him. It turns out that facing towards a fast worker makes no difference, but having a fast worker face towards you encourages frenetic scanner-wielding. So the cynics have it. And next time you hear the beep of a supermarket scanner, remember that Big Brother is watching you - and he’s an economist." #
OddPeak - 10 Most Bizarre People on Earth "Nakamatsu: photographed and analyzed every meal for 34 years - Yoshiro Nakamatsu (born June 26, 1928), a.k.a. Dr. NakaMats, is the Japanese inventor claiming to hold the world record for number of inventions with over 3,000, including the floppy disk and "PyonPyon" spring shoes. He has being photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years (and counting). The goal of Nakamatsu is to live over 140 years old. " #
The Business Innovation Insider: Off the Grid Innovation - "People can be divided into three classes: the few who make things happen, the many who watch things happen, and the overwhelming majority who have no idea of what has happened" (more quotes in the video) #
Walt Stanchfield book: Gesture Drawing for Animation - printable PDFs #
"Forget the detail" and other animation-inspired lessons - (37signals) - cool sketching ideas #
d.school news - dschool blog #
Bachelor of Innovation(tm) - program at UColoradoCS #
CareerJournal | Business Schools Apply Lessons From Branding 101 - Berkeley biz school focusing on "innovation" #
roundedcorners (PNG Image, 500x500 pixels) - Google Groups generates dynamic rounded corners! #
ideo.com :: About Us :: Teams :: Environments - creative spaces? #
Wonderful Wizardry of %u2018Woz%u2019 - 10 Zen Monkeys (a webzine) - "If you look through history, a lot of geniuses and people of this ilk have also been pranksters. I couldn't get Steve to stop telling me about pranks. In fact, most of the time, I wanted to get all this Apple stuff, and he wanted to talk about the time that he pretended he was Henry Kissinger and called the Pope." #
Wonderful Wizardry of %u2018Woz%u2019 - 10 Zen Monkeys (a webzine) - interview about the Steve Wozniak book: "WILL BLOCK: What comes across in the bio is an incredible purity, innocence and delight in learning how the world works. GS: That's what the tapes of my interviews with Steve sound like. It's all, "Wow! And then I was able to develop the Apple I and...Wow! Then I was able to add color, and...Wow!" He hasn't lost that innocence. He hasn't lost that sense of enthusiasm. When he looks back, you can see that youthful kind of vigor in his face." #
In some cases, nothing succeeds like failure - The Boston Globe - idea of "innovation labs" for big companies...could it be outsourced? "She said some companies, such as mutual funds giant Fidelity Investments, have more success setting up "innovation labs" specifically charged with churning out new product or service concepts within 90 days to six months." #
Welcome to Sky High Sports - room full of trampolines! #
Jon Udell: Hunting the elusive search strategy - very interesting writeup about advanced searching... #
ChangeThis :: How To Be Creative - "We think weʼre “providing a superior integrated logistic system” or “helping America to really taste freshness.” In fact weʼre just pissed off and want to get the hell out of the cave and kill the woolly mammoth." #
ChangeThis :: How To Be Creative - "They’re only crayons. You didn’t fear them in kindergarten, why fear them now?" #
ChangeThis :: How To Be Creative - "Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, 'Iʼd like my crayons back, please.'" #
The Gnomon Workshop - Scott Robertson - sketching instructional DVDs #
Hacking vs. Research. Many-to-Many: - Howard Rheingold: "If I was a Nokia or a Hewlett-Packard, I would take a fraction of what I’m spending on those buildings full of expensive people and give out a whole bunch of prototypes to a whole bunch of 15-year-olds and have contracts with them where you can observe their behavior in an ethical way and enable them to suggest innovations, and give them some reasonable small reward for that. And once in a while, you’re going to make a billion dollars off it. " #
Create the Medici Effect - HBS Working Knowledge - "This is what I mean when I say that Marcus Samuelsson has low associative barriers. He makes unusual associations outside the field of Swedish cuisine. When Samuelsson thinks of, say, tomatoes, his associations reach further than for most Swedish or European chefs. When I say pesto, he doesn't think basil; he says dill. If I say tandoori, he doesn't instantly think chicken; he says smoked salmon. This can go on all day. "Lingonberry?" I ask. "Chutney," he answers. "Caesar salad?" I suggest. "Caesar salad soup," he responds." #
Doug Engelbart's INVISIBLE REVOLUTION - great videos of Doug... #
Koffski Wallet | Uncrate - holster wallet #
Custom printed toilet paper - wow #
Shimano MW02 Winter Boot Shoes MTB 84.99 USD Free P & P to UK & Ireland, Cheap International Rates. Next day delivery from Europes Largest Online Bikeshop. - cheap source for these #
Slipstreamz Cycling Earwear for Headphones (Everything Else for all) - blocks wind noise? #
Breaking cycles (at Fury.com) - "I'd like to live like I'm in a foreign country when I'm at home" - Kevin Fox #
- "So every one of your cells, every one of the cells of your friends, of the prime minister, everyone, is a town of bacteria, and you yourself are a gignatic city, a megalopolis, of cells, each one of which is a town of bacteria. If when you look at somebody, you realise that, then immediately your seeing....you've stripped away the anaesthetic of familiarity, you're seeing something which is true, and always has been true, but which you didn't realise, and I think your life is enriched for realising that. " - Richard Dawkins #
Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and... - Google Book Search - "There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative or ordinariness, which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence." - Richard Dawkins #
Beyond the Information Revolution by Peter Drucker; print and read! #
Milton Glaser on creating - "All I ever wanted to do was to make images and create form. This instinct for form-making seems to be something that is very characteristic of our entire species. It's one of the things that almost defines humankind." #
The Business Innovation Insider: Michael Michalko on creativity and innovation - "It is not possible to think unpredictably by looking harder and longer in the same direction." #
The Business Innovation Insider: Michael Michalko on creativity and innovation - "A DuPont chemist working on the problem enjoyed looking for connections and associations between unrelated subjects. He recalled stories his grandfather used to tell him about building mine shafts to mine gold. He forced associations between a mine shaft and Nomex." #
Archie McPhee® Toys, Gifts & Novelties - Cubes Set 1: Bob #
OneButton FTP - cool ftp for the mac #
My Boring Ass Life » Apparently, less IS more - kevin smith's interesting "celebrity playlist" #
Flickr Photo Download: busy airport - tons of planes in the sky at once! #
NEED Magazine - about world humanitarian efforts #
Scott Adams on noticing funny things - "As a professional humorist, I read the news differently than you do. I’m mining it like the old guy on the beach with a metal detector. You see miles of sand and sea shells and used condoms, but I see a potential windfall of 35 cents in coins plus half an earring. That’s why my life has more meaning than yours. But my point is not to brag. I’m just saying." #
3 Silverlit Picco Z XRotor RTF Electric RC Mini Helicopters Version 2 (3 Channels and 3 Colors) - cool new aero-ace-style helicopters #
Flickr: Camera Finder - see what cameraphones people are using for Flickr #
SF Neighborhoods - A Local's Guide for Visiting or Moving to San Francisco - finally, a good map and description of SF #
Michael Michalko on idea quotas and Edison - "Thomas Edison guaranteed productivity by giving himself and his assistants idea quotas. His own personal quota was one minor invention every 10 days and a major invention every six months." #
The Business Innovation Insider: Michael Michalko on creativity and innovation - good idea-generation games--idea lottery, idea quotas, "yes, and" brainstorming tactic, etc #
Idea lottery - IDEA LOTTERY. Have a monthly "idea lottery," using a roll of numbered tickets. Each time a person comes up with a creative idea, he or she receives a ticket. At the end of each month, share the ideas with the staff and then draw a number from a bowl. If the number on anyone's ticket corresponds to the number drawn, he or she gets a prize. If no one wins, double the prize for the next month. #
leather wrap journal - Google Search - good search to find other leather wrap journals (no kidding, eh?) #
Amazon.com: Lama Li Classic Leather Journal 5"x7" 100 Pages: Office Products - another cool one, handmade in Nepal... #
Tool Belt Systems - could maybe go sling-style #
xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe - "Rationalizing the familiar is easy" #
Amazon.com: Delta CDRIVE 26-Inch Belt Drive Hybrid Bicycle: Sports & Outdoors - commercial belt drive bike #
Products - Shimano Cyber Nexus; an electronically shifting version of my favorite commute hub? Comes in coaster brake too... #
Bicycle Design on Squidoo - cool resources... #
Dangerously Fun - very cool site #
Personal recommendation software predicts consumer choice - November 27, 2006 - Interesting goal for Slide, the weird photo slider app: "Instead of quantifying the odds of your stealing money, he's building a "machine that knows more about you than you know about yourself."" #
(Frank) Gelett Burgess quote - To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life. - Quotations Book - "To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life." - Burgess, (Frank) Gelett #
Leonardo da Vinci Quotes - "Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen." - Leonardo da Vinci #
russell davies: Account Planning School Of The Web - interesting concept #
On Simplicity, Complexity and Human Design "Complexity is another word for simplicity unfolding in time." - Cliff Crego #
FlickrExport - export directly to Flickr from iPhoto #
Flickr: Create a new group - private groups are possible; not sure if photos are hidden too #
bookofjoe: 'If we wait until we're ready, we'll never get started' - Eleanor Roosevelt "If we wait until we're ready, we'll never get started" - Eleanor Roosevelt #
Design by Fire "The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring." - Paul Rand #
MPR: Minneapolis church at the forefront of a cutting-edge religious movement - " Pastor Doug Pagitt sits on a stool that he slowly turns 360 degrees to make eye contact with everyone at the service. This is by design. Before the service, Pagitt explains there is no hierarchy within this church or with other churches. "This tendency for Christians to see themselves as the most elite of the spiritual people in the world is not only distasteful to a lot of us but it's sort of maddening, because that image has been well-earned over the last 50 years -- that Christians speak as if they're the elite, they're the believers and everybody else are the non-believers," Pagitt says. " #
Moleskine - Cristobal - a photoset on Flickr - great example of a sketchbook posted online #
NPR : Rock, Paper, Scissors! - amazing intricate psychological tricks at play here #
russell davies: how to be interesting - write things, do things--be "interested" #
YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. - Jacque Fresco's YouTube profile! #
Movie about Jacque Fresco, futurist inventor - "The process with which you think about things is based by indoctrination, what you're given by society. So your range of thought is limited by the dominant values of society." - Jacque Fresco #
This Blog Sits at the: Rachael Ray: branding goddess? - Rachel Ray, experience designer: :In the post-Rachael era, a new approach emerges. Now we want to sell what food turns into, the meals, the social occasions, the brimming kitchens, people communing, families eating..and talking...and being a family. And from this point of view, the consumer is not a cook, she is a very different kind of problem server." #
The Dilbert Blog: Affirmations - sounds kind of like many explanations for prayer...and anyway it seems like a good way to remember what God has done: "My best guess about what really happens when you use affirmations is that several normal phenomena come together to create what seems abnormal. I’ll describe a few theories of what might be behind affirmations. Maybe there are more." #
Ready.gov: Get A Kit - good basic kit for emergencies #
Tech Talk: Real bikes for real people - Tom Ritchey's new Project Rwanda stuff #
Search For Amazon Prime Items - shows only Prime items! #
The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way... - Google Book Search - Robert Wright: "Your brain may give birth to any technology, but other brains will decide whether the technology thrives. The number of possible technologies is infinited, and only a few pass this test of affinity with human nature." #
Interview with Michael Lewis about The Blind Side - I'm about halfway through #
Cool sky photo - good for a painting? #
Creating Passionate Users: Ease-of-use should not mean neuter-the-software - the perils of designing for the lowest common denominator. #
Sanders Says: A Mission Statement that rocks: The End of Suffering - all mission statements should be this ambitious, e.g. "Organize the world's information", "End suffering". Specifically how you do it can be more focused and narrow, but your *mission*, *why* you're doing it, should be broad and ambitious. #
The Shopper Bicycle / Bike Trailer - BicycleR Evolution - cool, simple, cheapish #
Still Playing After These Years on Flickr - Photo Sharing! - James Watson on making models: "It was a symbolic gift, since Watson’s breakthrough technique in 1953 involved fiddling with 3D metal models. 'We needed a shortcut, so we build a model instead of solving a formula. Our three strand model was crap, so I was told to build no models… So, it all happened in about two hours. We went from nothing to thing.'" #
RealClearPolitics - Articles - Bring Them Freedom, Or They Destroy Us - fascinating alternative article on how the Middle East works #
Filed Notes - ZIBA Design's ethnography work in China for Lenovo...which led to their purchase of IBM! #
Einstein on what counts - "Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted." #
t-list: T-shirts - another of my ideas hits the streets... #
Plan, organize, store and share. Get Zoho Planner - looks really good for external todos #
Stuck In Customs » Blog Archive » HDR Tutorial - Focus on Clouds - great tutorial from my favorite HDR photographer...gotta do this! #
The Seeds of Ahimsa - "Gandhi gave up most his possessions because he felt it unjust for even one person to claim ownership of property while others remain unjustly dispossessed. "If I take anything that I do not need," he said, "I thieve it from somebody else." #
:::: : Solomon's Porch - A Holistic, Missional, Christian Community in Minneapolis, Minnesota : ::::: #
mozdev.org - ietab: index - gotta install #
MercuryNews.com | 08/17/2006 | Sheriff plans crack down on bicyclists breaking road rules - idiotic sheriff's department doesn't understand the rules of the road #
Google Product Releases | Yahoo Without Motto | Angela Merkel Video Blog? | Google Coupons? - what happens when you don't have a clear company mission...even the CEO doesn't know it. #
Red Cross Store - emergency kit, probably pick up a couple #
American Red Cross- Food and Water in an Emergency - great tips; print out and save #
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Rwanda: archive special - amazing and tragic; stories written live during the genocide; motivation for me to work every day. #
Core77 Design Blog - cool interview b/tw Merholz and Beirut #
dk_iiid_experience_design_2006_download.pdf (application/pdf Object) - good summary of experience design issues and strategies; print it out #
Investing articles :: Why Do People Buy Stocks? | Investing articles for websites - best explanation I've hear, but I still don't get it..."No one buys shares because he expects to collect an uninterrupted and equiponderant stream of future income in the form of dividends. Even the most gullible novice knows that dividends are a mere apologue, a relic of the past. So why do investors buy shares? Because they hope to sell them to other investors later at a higher price." #
Action Treadway Cummerbund Bag | Uncrate - dang it, someone beat me to market. Well, at $500 I can still beat them on price... #
Vintage Wine Merchants - interesting shop in SJ, carries Bennessere #
Quotes: George Bernard Shaw - A Splendid Torch - "This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy." #
Has Americans' Charity Waned Since 9/11? - John Wesley: "Do all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, At all the times you can, To all the people you can, As long as ever you can." #
The Dilbert Blog: Sleepless in California - "Life is half delicious yogurt, half crap, and your job is to keep the plastic spoon in the yogurt." #
All U Can Eat - Ben Folds Lyrics Database - wow...cool. #
Welcome to Zinn Custom Cycles - time to get some loooong cranks! #
CNN.com - Ricardo Semler, Semco SA - Oct 7, 2004 "The purpose of work is not to make money. The purpose of work is to make the workers, whether working stiffs or top executives, feel good about life." #
CNN.com - Ricardo Semler, Semco SA - Oct 7, 2004 On first day, renamed company Semco, fired two-thirds of management and eliminated all secretarial positions. #
George Kennan's State Dept. quote from 1948 - really can't imagine why, given this information, they chose "dominance" - "We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. The day is not far off, when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts." #
myEarthLink Reader - All Recently Updated - new RSS reader, pretty clean, nice "river" view #
Gliffy.com - Create and share diagrams online. - like linkstuff...but real =) #
Ditch Monkey: Thank you and goodbye - his final post; maybe I should donate now... #
Reflections On Gandhi by George Orwell: - interesting remarks about his autobiography... #
metacool: metacool Thought of the Day "Strange but true: The more specific a film is, the more universal, because the more it understands individual characters, the more it applies to everyone." - Roger Ebert #
Philips HTS9800 Home Theater System | Uncrate - very cool home theater system... #
The business of giving | Economist.com - need to activate Economist online subscription... #
QBike | Shop for Bikes - Find Low Bike Prices - aggregates prices from lots of online stores! #
SQUID Labs :: Engineering Design and Technology Innovation - "We're not a think tank, we're a do tank" #
design matters: Skeet shooting in the dark - "Design consists of creating things for clients who may not know what they want, until they see what you've done, then they know exactly what they want, but it's not what you did." #
AskTog: Multiple Mistakes Drown Dishwasher - "Not only does a simple visual appearance not automatically result in a simple interface, it usually results in the opposite, unless the task domain is equally simple--and foolproof." #
Web navigation is about moving forward: New Thinking: Gerry McGovern - once people choose a direction, stop insulting them by showing them links in other directions... #
Memorable Quotes from The Time Machine (2002) - A good explanation of time-travel causalilty and why you can't go back in time before a time machine was created (or decided upon): "You built your time machine because of Emma's death. If she had lived it would never have existed, so how could you use your time machine to go back and save her? You are the inescapable result of your tragedy, just as I am the inescapable result of you." #
Specialized Bicycle Components : Equipment - Toupe Saddle - pretty cool minimal saddle #
Map Amazon(.com) - amazing infovis of all Amazon categories/books uses scroll wheel to zoom in/out #
Collexis - Information Retrieval - interesting professional search tool #
Ellington | The online publishing platform for newspapers. - cool "pro" interface; just a lot of controls... #
Carbonmade: Show off your work. Your free online portfolio. - very cool, slick portfolio app #
Perspective: The endangered joy of serendipity - "The harder the conquest, the more glorious the triumph. 'Tis dearness only that gives everything its value." - Thomas Paine #
Rotman Magazine - archives of all their excellent issues on design, business, etc. #
WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Future-making - "If we want to change the world, one of the most powerful things we can do is show how the future could be better. One of the most exciting forces for change these days is the speed with which people are making and sharing tools for doing just that." #
Bianchi USA 2006: Rollo™ - Awesome townie bike "with attitude" #
Noise Between Stations » Blog Archive » Innovation must be top-down and bottom-up simultaneously - "Innovation needs to be top-down and bottom-up at the same time. Good ideas come from everywhere. An open and participatory process yields more and better ideas. Learning from any part of the organization should be proliferated throughout. And support from top officers is vital in setting the tone and commitment to qualities of innovation." #
Global-i from Infomagnet - 3D globe full of world data - like Google Earth but specifically meant to show data; in a web browser too! #
CSSVista: Live CSS editing with Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously - gotta try on Windows machine #
Visible Earth: January, Blue Marble Next Generation w/ Topography and Bathymetry - great huge desktops...good for work computer? #
TerraTrike Cruiser - another option, $1299 #
ActionBent Recumbents - Tadpole Trike - current model of that trike, $1350 in the U.S. #
Photos: Spinning new ideas for bikes and trikes | CNET News.com - nice compact recumbent trike; good for commuting? #
bookofjoe: Color-Cycling LED Frisbee - much nicer than breaking glowsticks and spreading radioactive glass on the frisbee... #
Real-time Domain Search - much easier than using networksolutions or godaddy itself... #
The New Yorker: The Critics: Books - "Marriages thrive on stories. They die on conventions." #
Signum sine tinnitu--by Guy Kawasaki: The Art of Driving Your Competition Crazy - crazy bold business ideas: "During the Korean War, the U. S. Army Office of Strategic Services left a supply of condoms for the Communist Chinese to find. The condoms were specially manufactured in an extra-large size. The label on the boxes, however, said, 'Made in the USA Size Medium.'" #
Signum sine tinnitu--by Guy Kawasaki: Six More Crazy Stories - great crazy stories about bold business moves #
m03.gif (GIF Image, 300x214 pixels) - cool bike pivots in the center along the bike's axis #
