ODO | There Is No Rewind

Slow motion dogs captured by the 1000 FPS Phantom...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 07:43:00 +1030

Slow motion dogs captured by the 1000 FPS Phantom camera.

I’ve loved such photography/videos since reading an article in National Geographic on Doc Edgerton.

iPad Shock

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:04:00 +1030

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 party.

If you’ve seen Apple’s launch video, it’s obvious that this is how simple computing should be!

"I don’t understand why I have to go to school at all, the internet knows more than all the..."

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:36:22 +1030

“I don’t understand why I have to go to school at all, the internet knows more than all the teachers there put together.”

- Seb Bin David Thorne, 27b/6

20-Dollar Millionaire

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:15:21 +0930

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 people aren’t willing to lose their job for twenty bucks, but if they have something they already take for granted—a place in line, a seat, a ticket to a show they’ve already seen—they’ll jump on a twenty like a possum on a wet bag of groceries.

Nocebo Effect

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:20:35 +0930

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 people a medical procedure will be extremely painful, for example, and they will experience more pain than if you had kept the bad news to yourself. Similarly, experiences of side effects within the placebo groups of drug trials have shown that a doctor’s warning about the possible side effects of a medicine makes it much more likely that the patient will report experiencing those effects.

Human Mortality Rates

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 23:25:59 +0930

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 place for long enough (say, one day) can build a “fortress” which is too strong to be assailed by the police. If this happens, you die.

Lucky for you, the cops are plentiful, and on average they pass by every spot 14 times a day. The likelihood of them missing a particular spot for an entire day is given (as you’ve learned by now) by the Poisson distribution: it is a mere .

But what happens if your internal police force starts to dwindle? Suppose that as you age the police force suffers a slight reduction, so that they can only cover every spot 12 times a day. Then the probability of them missing a criminal for an entire day decreases to . The difference between 14 and 12 doesn’t seem like a big deal, but the result was that your chance of dying during a given day jumped by more than 10 times. And if the strength of your police force drops linearly in time, your mortality rate will rise exponentially.

A perfect analogy.

Flu motion.

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:12:42 +0930

Flu motion.

Costly Living

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:42:05 +1030

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.

Thinking the Unthinkable

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:00:00 +1030

Thinking the Unthinkable:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

Clay Shirky on the future of newspapers and journalism.

"If you want to have someone naked in the middle of the exhibition, fine, but what are you trying to..."

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:18:07 +1030

“If you want to have someone naked in the middle of the exhibition, fine, but what are you trying to say? There’s no point in slapping someone in the face.”

- Jack Persekian, Artistic Director, Sharjah Biennial.

People around me often wonder: What’s Twitter? Common...

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 22:21:00 +1030

People around me often wonder: What’s Twitter? Common Craft clearly explains this with ‘Twitter in Plain English’.

Untitled Document Syndrome

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 16:19:06 +1030

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.

"Sustainability is not just a line item."

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 12:55:00 +1030

“Sustainability is not just a line item.”

- Valerie Casey

Global Trade Freeze

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:20:00 +1030

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.

Maybe that’s a good thing—recycling paper into cardboard is an incredible waste!

"Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity."

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:52:52 +1030

“Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.”

- David Gelernter, Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology

MacBook, Meet Asphalt

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 13:29:00 +1030

MacBook, Meet Asphalt

Internet Explorer Sinks Into A Hole

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 12:59:00 +1030

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 the most effective protection against an attack.

Now would be an excellent time to upgrade to another browser. Try Firefox or Safari.

Even Bankers Are Human

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 10:21:00 +1030

Even Bankers Are Human:

Financial ‘investors’ discover they’re part of a Ponzi scheme.

Part of this year’s Nikon’s Small World Competition...

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:54:00 +1030

Part of this year’s Nikon’s Small World Competition 2008, Lily of the Valley by Albert Tousson. 2009 entries are still open.

The Criterion Collection Relaunch

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 11:17:00 +1030

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.