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...
November 2011
25 posts
1 tag
