July 2010
1 post
Sitting is bad for you →
Men who spent more than 23 hours a week watching TV and sitting in their cars (as passengers or as drivers) had a 64 percent greater chance of dying from heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours a week or less. What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised.
June 2010
2 posts
2 tags
1 tag
PCs are going to be like trucks →
Steve Jobs at D8, on the difference between PCs and the iPad:
When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.
May 2010
2 posts
3 tags
New York MTA redesigns subway map →
Less cluttered with fresher colors and shadowed lines to aid clarity.
In a world of mobile GPS and Google Maps, it seems increasingly logical to place stops in context vs. abstracted, angular subway maps used around the world.
2 tags
“The ice caps are melting…in the future swimming isn’t going to be...”
– Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory
April 2010
7 posts
3 tags
3 tags
“Software cries out for personality, for ornamentation, for delight. To reflect...”
– Amy Hoy
2 tags
Avoid aliens
In a series for Discovery, Hawking believes aliens would exist, but reckons we should lie low and avoid contacting them:
We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.
I couldn’t agree more. (via BBC)
3 tags
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
– Clay Shirky
Steve McQueen →
“I live for myself and I answer to nobody.”
March 2010
4 posts
“Perfection is attained, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is...”
– Antoine de St. Exupery
“The bulk of humanity doesn’t want a computing experience it can tinker with; it...”
– Jeffrey Zeldman
Pirate Business Model →
UN report on criminal activities in Somalia details the pirate business model, including their criteria for share distribution:
To be eligible for employment as a pirate, a volunteer should already possess a firearm for use in the operation. For this ‘contribution’, he receives a ‘class A’ share of any profit. Pirates who provide a skiff or a heavier firearm, like an RPG or a general purpose...
January 2010
1 post
2 tags
iPad Shock →
The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS. The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the...
December 2009
1 post
“I don’t understand why I have to go to school at all, the internet knows...”
– Seb Bin David Thorne, 27b/6
September 2009
1 post
1 tag
20-Dollar Millionaire →
I could have stood in line at the airport cabstand for fifteen minutes like every other mook in the world, freezing my balls off, but such is not the way of the twenty-dollar millionaire. I walked straight to the front of the line and offered a woman twenty bucks for her spot. She took it with a shrug.
The first of a series, on the art of spreading $20 bills:
Then I realized something else: Most...
Nocebo Effect →
An additional list of 13 things adds on to the original 13 things that don’t make sense compiled by New Scientist, one of which covers the power of negative suggestion.
The Nocebo effect is the opposite of the Placebo effect (see the original list) and refers to cases where “putting someone in a negative frame of mind has an adverse effect on their health or well-being.”
Tell...
August 2009
1 post
Human Mortality Rates →
Imagine that within your body is an ongoing battle between cops and criminals. And, in general, the cops are winning. They patrol randomly through your body, and when they happen to come across a criminal he is promptly removed. The cops can always defeat a criminal they come across, unless the criminal has been allowed to sit in the same spot for a long time. A criminal that remains in one...
April 2009
1 post
1 tag
March 2009
4 posts
Costly Living →
Asia is home both to the cheapest city in the survey, Karachi, as well as the priciest, Tokyo…
Economist surveys living costs in February 2009.
4 tags
Thinking the Unthinkable →
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.
Clay Shirky on the future of newspapers and journalism.
1 tag
“If you want to have someone naked in the middle of the exhibition, fine, but...”
– Jack Persekian, Artistic Director, Sharjah Biennial.
2 tags
February 2009
3 posts
1 tag
Untitled Document Syndrome →
Friction is a problem for software in general, not just programming languages specifically. There’s the stuff you want to do, and there’s the stuff you have to do before you can do what you want to do. People have a natural tendency to skip the have to do stuff to get right to the want to do stuff if they can get away with it.
Don’t fight human nature.
1 tag
“Sustainability is not just a line item.”
– Valerie Casey
1 tag
Global Trade Freeze →
All encompassing view of the economic meltdown and its impact on one shipping port. Toyota is leasing 165-170 acres for parking non-selling cars, a reminder of the mammoth losses facing Toyota.
The U.S. isn’t buying anything to be manufactured over in China, so therefore the paper mills don’t need to buy any recycled paper to make the boxes to bring the material back over to the U.S....
January 2009
1 post
3 tags
“Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.”
– David Gelernter, Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology
December 2008
3 posts
3 tags
MacBook, Meet Asphalt →
4 tags
Internet Explorer Sinks Into A Hole →
Unpatched vulnerability causing a range of issues: password stealing, keyboard logging (password stealing and more), trojan horse deployment and other nasties like ‘Win32/SystemHijack’ (heck, password theft is only a teeny problem!).
The company recommends setting the Internet zone security setting to “high” and using access control lists to disable Ole32db.dll to provide...
4 tags
Even Bankers Are Human →
Financial ‘investors’ discover they’re part of a Ponzi scheme.
November 2008
3 posts
4 tags
4 tags
The Criterion Collection Relaunch →
Website design is a constant honing process but every so often a complete relaunch is required. The challenge is to then communicate these new initiatives to the users.
Criterion tackles this via an absorbing orientation video, with Jason Polan (of MOMA Art Book fame) drawings to accompany the narration.
3 tags
Broken Windows Theory →
Numbers talk.
July 2008
4 posts
TARANTINO|S MIND →
Superbly crafted short movie by Brazilian duo 300ML cracks the Tarantino Code.
The Shape Of Song →
Gallery of visualisations attempting to answer the question: “What does music look like?”
Back in architectural college, one of my favourite assignments aimed to capture space and time, by deconstructing a piece of music and rebuilding it as ‘frozen music’ or architecture.
3 tags
$14,000 mobile bill shocks youngster. The only real surprise, here, is the continued Aussie-support of Telstra, a company that fleeces its customers in the presence of more economical competitors!
“After years of sportswriters declaring that Roger Federer is the best player of...”
– Kottke on the Federer-Nadal Wimbledon final
March 2008
2 posts
“You can’t have art without resistance in the materials.”
– William Morris
“To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing...”
– Agnes Martin
February 2008
4 posts
“When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a...”
– Paul Cezanne
Toyota Gets Clever
Or how not to offer an ‘eBrochure’:
Please select your preferred file format below to download the reader and eBrochure to your computer.
That would be a *.dmg file on a Mac; PDFs are so lame.
All eBrochures or eBooks you download will be saved in a folder called ‘My EBKs’ in your ‘My Documents’ directory. Once downloaded, a shortcut to the eBrochure will...
4 tags
Ancient Rocks Harbour Life →
Microbial fossils in the Pilbara region date back to 3.4 billion years — the earliest known evidence of life on earth.
2 tags
January 2008
6 posts
3 tags
There is only make. →
Art Department Rules (via HI+LOW)
3 tags
IE, Standards Optional
Ruckus over the IE8 controversy has Gruber fed up:
“I’m more likely to deliberately start blocking traffic from IE users than I am to add this bullshit tag to my markup”
What if developers dumped support for IE users, offering only a a basic (IE) user experience while exposing ajaxy goodies to non-IE, acid-tested browsers? It should take one gutsy Amazon/Facebook to kick off a long...
3 tags
WatchHow a Mini (what else!) gets built. Wait for the ominous, eerily lifelike robots 2 minutes in…
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