February 2012
5 posts
1 tag
“A civil servant warning a minister that a decision would be “courageous” is...”
– Euphemisms: Making Murder Respectable (via iamdanw)
Lamborghini Countach, Urraco and Silhouette flat... →
Brilliant Mel Nichols article from the heyday of CAR. Be sure to read all the way to the end.
Clive Thompson on Why Kids Can’t Search →
This is not “why kids can’t search” so much as “why kids don’t have the literacy to assess the quality of what large corporate search engines serve them when they type in keywords”.
The answer, of course, is that they are kids.
Now, “why can’t 4th-year university students search”… That’s a different question.
January 2012
25 posts
Tales of a Sea Chef →
bloggedbybjorn:
My brother, a chef trained in French kitchen, has followed in our fathers footsteps by signing with the merchant marine. Tales of a Sea Chef is his account of life on the ocean, while practising his art.
Unnecessary Illusions and the Truth about... →
Truth bombs. Oh, how they hurt.
/via @timbomb
“After sex and sleep, bacon is one of nature’s most powerful primary reinforcers,...”
– In the middle of an article about games and “games”, this little gem.
The Zynga Abyss - Benjamin Jackson - Technology - The Atlantic
Design Ethnography Hothouse Summer 2012:... →
This looks awesome.
“These sites, once devoted to distributing attention to others, are increasingly...”
– Tim O’Reilly, Trading for their own account - O’Reilly Radar, back in 2007.
See also this article on CNN today.
/via @aneesha and @timoreilly
“A good actor-network theorist is able to take some existing system in which...”
– The ethnography of robots | Ethnography Matters (via iamdanw)
“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The...”
– Watts Martin quotes Stuart Brand and notes:
It’s interesting how the “information wants to be expensive” part of that axiom is largely forgotten these days, isn’t it?
christmasgorilla:
Sly and the Family Stone - Que...
“Just occasionally, the models let their faces slip, as if they’ve woken...”
– Why is the Detroit auto show still using female models as eye candy? | Dominic Rushe | The Guardian
The 2nd last sentence of the article is killer, too.
2 tags
Back at work
Technically I am still “on leave”.
Two days after I started my “leave” at the end of last year, I flew to Melbourne for a 6 hour meeting.
Four days before Christmas, an email came in from the Dean of the Faculty saying that something was due today (the 11th). My boss scored us an extension.
On Monday (the 16th), when I will still technically be on leave, I have a...
“We have spent a lot of time focusing on the obvious and the obviously sexy stuff...”
– » On Culture and Interaction Design: an interview with Genevieve Bell Johnny Holland – It’s all about interaction » Blog Archive
“Not everyone agrees that the months they spent cow-clicking have been for...”
– The Curse of Cow Clicker: How a Cheeky Satire Became a Videogame Hit (via ninakix)
The street stream finds its own use for things.
A Curmudgeon’s Lament →
G. Bruce Boyer on the clothing culture he grew up in.
And the one I aspire to.
The Rockford Style →
Clive James celebrates James Garner.
“In 2031, there are magazines but no kiosks, books but no bookshops, videos but...”
– Bruce Sterling in Frieze Magazine | Twenty Years Fore & Aft.
Social fiction at its finest.
“the post-developed world’s beloved bike lanes and pavement cafes depend on civil...”
– Infrastructure and the State | Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent
There’s a possibly apocryphal story that in order to be allowed to have sidewalk dining at Gus’s Cafe in Canberra, the eponymous Gus, sick of battling bureaucrats, wrote to the Queen.
“Cars have lost their allure of rarity and above all they can no longer perform...”
– From Franco Berardi aka Bifo’s, MANIFESTO DEL DOPOFUTURISMO [manifesto of post-futurism] via eipcp.net (via underpaidgenius)
December 2011
20 posts
1 tag
My new favourite conspiracy theory
Is that the United States has secret colonies on Mars and that Obama went there, via teleportation, as part of a covert CIA program in the early 80s.
“Everyone gets a drone now. The paparazzi get a drone. Iran gets a drone....”
– The Freelance Panoptiswarm | Quiet Babylon
You get a drone! And you get a drone! And you get a drone!
“Of course, Brown wouldn’t resort to anything as crass as Gears of War’s use of...”
– Kill Screen - The Game Design of Everyday Things: To Shape the Future (via iamdanw)
The Problem with the Too-Perfect Future
Is that it’s too perfect.
From Adam Greenfield’s review of Bill Mitchell’s book
What I really tripped over, as I read, was the titanic dissonance between the MIT vision of urban life and mobility and the one that I was immersed in as I rode the 33 bus across town. It’s a cheap shot, maybe, but I just couldn’t get past the gulf between the actual San Franciscans around me...
1 tag
“The world-enforced distinction between the practical and scientific worker is...”
– William Rogers, 1881 (via mjhoy)
“It looks like a human was involved in choosing what went where,” Marissa told...”
– Marissa Mayer addressing Google designers, as quoted in “In The Plex” by Steven Levy (via buzz)
There’s a type of person who secretly wants the T101 to catch Sarah Connor.
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design »... →
ciid.dk
Post-It Phone Students worked in teams of three to imagine new mobile interaction scenarios around a theme/context. Each partner applied a stack of twenty or so post-it notes to the screen of their personal hand-held and draw interfac…
Students worked in teams of three to imagine new mobile interaction scenarios around a theme/context. Each partner applied a stack of twenty...
“One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we...”
– William Gibson, in Rolling Stone.
/via NODE, which is a catalogue of various things from Gibson’s Spook Country.
Raygun Gothic →
2 tags
“Some documents assembled, the engineers get to work trying to get a handle on...”
– institutional memory and reverse smuggling
When I studied computer science, we did that. We were given 3 different versions of compiled, working code and told that only one version correctly implemented a particular algorithm and that we had to figure out which one was right and how the other two...
An Automotive Turandot →
One of my Espada’s four periwinkle-blue leather seats is cracked and dry-rotted. I can always reupholster it, but in order for it to match the other three, I must reproduce the leather’s original perforation pattern, which looks like Martian hieroglyphics. To do that, I have to send the new, unstitched leather to a man in Italy who runs it through the special hole-punching machine. Including...
I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore →
Another term that has lost its meaning is “Let’s exceed the customer’s expectations.” Employees who hear it just leave the pep rally, inhabit some kind of temporary dazed intensity, and then go back to doing things exactly the way they did before the speech. Customers almost universally never experience their expectations being met, much less exceeded. How can you exceed...
It was predominantly the collapse of the... →
Or so an article at the NYT argues.
If this is true, and it certainly seems truthy, the coming decline (that some commentators have mentioned) in Australian house prices will not be evenly distributed. Instead, inner city suburbs, and those within the central ring of public transport will either remain at the prices they are or will even increase beyond inflation. As the distance from the CBD...
“That [Christopher Paolini’s] books are this dependent on the Master [ie...”
– Adam Gopink in The New Yorker: “The Lord of the Rings,” “Twilight,” and Young-Adult Fantasy Books
Gopink pulls no punches for Stephanie Meyer, either:
Stephenie Meyer, the author of the “Twilight” series, is an awkward writer with little feeling for construction, but the intensity of emotion with...
