September 30
Carl Sagan - ‘A Glorious Dawn’ ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed) (via melodysheep)
I can’t stop listening to this. I’m a huge fan of Carl Sagan and still miss his passion and honesty.
July 30
“[A]rchetypes are what you use to communicate with people. The idea of making a truly original design makes about as much sense as coming up with a totally original word. The problem is that it doesn’t have any meaning.”
April 13
“[Of] interest to me was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people’s willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone.”
This makes me think of the uncanny valley and how quickly it ramps up. We seem very willing to project human traits onto something that we catch a glimpse of humanity in, but that projection quickly diminishes as the object appears more human.
Another example is Faces in Places, it’s surprising how endearing two dots and a line can be.
April 9
“Quite a few people seem to be focused on safety issues with their criticisms of [the P.U.M.A.]. Even on websites with an environmental focus, comments about crash test data, lack of airbags, and the general danger of driving such a small, slow vehicle seem to be very common. Unfortunately, those types of comments reflect the “survival of the fittest” attitude that many Americans seem to have about driving on our roads. If you want yourself and your family to be safe, you simply buy a bigger SUV, all decked out with airbags and other “safety” features. That way, in an “accident” you can kill someone else instead of them killing you.”
Bicycle Design: GM/ Segway P.U.M.A.
When I first saw the P.U.M.A., I scoffed for the same reasons I scoffed at the Segway: impressive technology— another excuse for our under-exercised population. I like the focus on points other than price or “green-cred” that the P.U.M.A. brings up, namely fundamentally changing our ideas of transportation.
April 7
“Everything can’t be important. If they are nothing is.”
“If you don’t need to complicate things, don’t do it. Only automate stuff once it’s a pain in the butt for a long time and you know exactly what should be automated and how…”
Ryan Singer/Andre, Value Judgements in Interface Design @meshu09
Todo.txt Command Line Interface
“Task tracking for CLI lovers”
Continuing my journey through the archives of The Setup (not sure why I didn’t add it to my feed list before). Via Gina Trapani
This seems like an implementation of an idea I’ve been batting around, based on my newfound love for Git and the power the command line gives you.
Statistics trained or not, this is a fascinating read for anyone working on the internet.
April 6
May 17
I Love Stars, is a slick little application that might just get me to finally rate all my music in iTunes. When music is playing you see the rating in your menu bar, where you can also adjust/assign it. Bonus points for the playful animation when the app disappears, which happens when iTunes stops playing. Very smart.
Amnesty International’s United Nations of War
This map is definitely disheartening, and war is certainly one of the worst qualities of humanity, but this quote provides a little perspective.
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” (John Stuart Mill)
May 6
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody
Great article, I love this bit:
And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.
This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in the introduction, I’ve finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”
I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus—“How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article—fighting offstage all the while—from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
May 5
April 20
“Google avoids causing a disruption in flow by reducing the mental cost of taking an action, thereby promoting more engaged use of the site.”
From Designing For Flow - A List Apart. Emphasis added.
February 5
“The “randomness” of a die roll isn’t about actual indeterminacy, but rather just a way of talking about your ignorance of how the deterministic processes that control the die operate. Quantum physics, on the other hand, has things that as far as anyone can tell are really, objectively random, with no mechanism producing that randomness and nowhere apparent to stick one.”
There’s also an intriguing video; visualization of the Many Super Mario Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics.
