From a recent study: "In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies". This seems like a potential chicken/egg issue...is religion the cause of all this or do unhealty societies cause people to find religion?
Whoa, Ziploc makes giant bags now, up to 2ft x 2.7ft. When I told Meg about them, she said, "what do they hold, children?" (???) (via ghckr)
Todd Levin on the busy modern world: "I'm doing so much more, and getting so much less done".
Flowers don't smell as good as they used to and part of the reason is breeding...they're breeding flowers for looks and longevity, not for scent. I believe Michael Pollan discusses this in his excellent The Botany of Desire (tulip chapter).
A complete list of nicknames that George W. Bush has for people. A lot of people think the nicknames thing is stupid, but really it's the only sign of Bush having any sort of personality aside from that of Bad Speech Bot.
Ahhhhhh!!!! Why didn't anyone #$%(#&ing tell me that Boards of Canada is releasing a new album next month? My excitement for this, it could cut glass, it could!
When Teen Talk Barbie came out in 1989 saying things like "math is hard", could you imagine if blogs had existed at the time? The whole internet would have exploded with rage.
Dutch linguists are analyzing the origin of languages using the structure of the languages "such as where verbs appear in clauses".
Bats may be the source of SARS. "Researchers found a virus closely related to the Sars coronavirus in bats from three regions of China".
Google and NASA have announced plans to collaborate on projects like "large-scale data management, massively distributed computing, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry". In 6 months, Yahoo will announce a collaboration with the Russian Space Agency to launch original content into space. Microsoft will announce in a year that they've had space travel capabilities built into Office for years now but no one uses it...in two years time, they'll completely reorg around manned missions to Mars.
Awesome awesome awesome alternate trailer for Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (local mirror). Andy calls this "one of the best video clips I've seen all year" and he's not wrong.
This looks like an interesting book from O'Reilly: Practical Development Environments. "This book doesn't tell you how to write faster code, or how to write code with fewer memory leaks, or even how to debug code at all. What it does tell you is how to build your product in better ways, how to keep track of the code that you write, and how to track the bugs in your code. Plus some more things you'll wish you had known before starting a project."
AIGA Design Conference podcasts
The AIGA has podcasts and presentation materials up for some of the speakers from the Design Conference (my full coverage here). Several of the main stage speeches are up, as well as backstage interviews with some of the participants. In particular, I would recommend:
- Audio of the main stage presentation and interview with Juan Enriquez.
- Audio of the main stage presentation by Bill Strickland on The Design of Leadership.
- Audio of the main stage presentation by Milton Glaser and Nicholas Negroponte.
- Audio of the main stage presentation by Murray Moss, although I'm not sure how well this one would work if you listened to it without the slides.
- The PDF of Stefan Sagmeister's presentation doesn't make too much sense without the audio, but the last 50 or so slides are worth checking out for the design candy.
These aren't just for designers; they're perfectly fine for non-designers as well. Here's the RSS file with all the resources...it should work well with your favorite podcasting software or newsreader. It's great that the AIGA is making these presentations freely available...you're getting a lot of the conference for free here. If I remember correctly, not even O'Reilly offers the presentations or podcasts for download after their events like Etech.
Update: Wrong again! IT Conversations has several podcasts from the last Etech conference. (thx tim)
The Army's Be All You Can Be ads don't really work all that well, despite being the 25th largest advertiser in the US. Recruiting is actually correlated more closely with the economy...the economy goes bad and the number of recruits goes up. Here's a better way to spend that ad money: give it to incoming recruits as bonuses...the same strategy Amazon uses in offering free shipping to customers rather than spending that money on TV ads. (thx garrick)
Teenaged necktie maven Baruch Shemtov. He made his first tie for school and has since turned it into a business, selling his wares in Fifth Avenue shops and online for $100 apiece.
Here's the formula for a New Yorker cartoon: take a person/entity from Column A, and have them interact with a person/entity from Column B in a location from Column C. Voila, comedy jackpot!
Neat visual history of Nikon SLR cameras. It would be neat to make an animation of how the cameras changed through time.
The new $10 bill ain't too attractive. Why can't we have nice things?
Tim O'Reilly op-ed about the Authors Guild's lawsuit against Google regarding their Library Project. "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors than copyright infringement, or even outright piracy". The op-ed follows Tim's earlier post on the subject.
Hot indie band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (who I like quite alot) has sold 17,000 copies of their self-released debut. The band sends out the CDs to customers themselves and makes $8/disc (compared to $1/disc for major label groups). Their CD is available here and you can listen to some samples before buying (1, 2, 3).
First photos of the giant squid ever captured. In capturing the photos, they ripped one of the squid's tentacles off, which has made the squid a bit angry.
Book reviews based on a random sentence from each book. On Moby-Dick: "People who enjoy witty banter will love this tale of two unlikely friends, Ahab and Stubb."
An intrepid New York magazine reporter waits for meals at various NYC restaurants and reports back as to whether they were worth the wait or not. Shake Shack? Worth the wait. (via meg)
7 Habits of Highly Successful People. I think this may be one of my favorite McSweeney's lists ever. (Crap, the McSweeney's RSS feed doesn't seem to be working properly...gotta check into that later.)
Richard Dawkins on Gerin oil, a highly addictive drug that's dangerous to society. You may find the Internet Anagram Server useful in understanding what Dawkins is getting at.
Charlie Trotter bails out of his planned restaurant in the Time Warner Center and it seems that Vongerichten's steakhouse might not be far behind. As I can attest from a fantastic birthday gift dinner, Per Se is doing quite well.
If public parks (like NYC's Bryant Park) offer free wifi, why don't expensive hotels? I can't find the link right now, but I remember reading something awhile ago (possibly on Boing Boing) arguing that free wifi was easier and cheaper for businesses to offer than a paid option because you don't need the ecommerce bit (sort of like a free grocery store not needing cashiers, etc.) and the free internet will bring people in.
Update: Here's that Boing Boing post: "Operating a WiFi hotspot that you charge money for costs $30 a day. Operating a free WiFi hotspot costs $6." (thx alex)
The streets of Marin are slick with potatoes au gratin. Terrorist attack? If so, how long before possessing a bag of Yukon Golds wins you a free trip to exotic Guantanamo Bay?
Eliot's stalking of The Donald finally pays off with this shot from Fashion Week of him and his newish bride. (Note to Mr. Trump's lawyers and/or law enforcement: Eliot is not really stalking Donald Trump. Well, at least I don't think he is. I mean, he could be, but probably not. Probably.)
Buried treasure worth $10 billion (!!!) is found on the Robinson Crusoe Island by a robot invented by a Chilean company. The loot is comprised of gold and jewels stolen from the Incans by Spanish conquistadors. The estimated 2004 GDP of Chile is $169.1 billion. (via mm)
Troyis is a game that utilizes chess moves (just the knight/horsey actually). Easy to start, difficult to master.
Birthday hooky
Today is my birthday -- I'm 2^5!** -- so I'm taking the day off. No posts or links, aside from this one.
** That's ! as in exclamation point, not ! as in factorial. I'm not 1.33 x 10^36 years old today.
Moreover to be purchased by "much larger multi-national company". I worked at Moreover as a web designer for 10 months back in 2000-1.
An ode to the NYC subway's 7 train. "What is remarkable is the sense of transference that occurs. Manhattan is an international place but it brings all the world into its orbit. Queens reverses that."
Profile of Google's Marissa Mayer, Google's answer to Apple's Jonathan Ive. She grew up about 100 miles from me in northern WI.
"Floating Island" is a mini version of Central Park being towed around Manhattan by a tugboat (photos here)...it's a conceptual art piece by Robert Smithson. This weekend, a group of folks in a motorboat tried to board the floating park and install a miniature version of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates. When the captain of the boat towing the island "looked out across the East River Thursday afternoon and saw another piece of conceptual art gaining on him, he did not view the development kindly".
The co-screenwriter of War of the Worlds on getting credit for said screenwriting (he wrote early drafts which were later rewritten by someone else) and then going to the NYC premiere of the film. (thx stephanie)
Awesome set of food photos with little people on them. They're buried in a Flash interface (grr, Flash), but it's worth the trouble to find them. Skip the intro, click on "minimiam", and then select one of the "galeries" (primeurs, gourmandise, etc.). (via dtb)
Many of these super slow motion movies are quite entertaining, moreso than the standard milk-drop and bullet-through-apple ones. My favorite is the bursting water balloon...the water retains its shape for several moments before giving into gravity. So cool.
Smart toast
I had this idea the other day that instead of having to open my laptop or turn on the TV to check the weather report, my toaster could burn that information onto my breakfast toast as a passive information delivery mechanism. I knew that people had wired toasters to print images on them, but I didn't remember that someone had done the weather thing already. That got me thinking about what other information a toaster could print on bread. A graph of the previous day's DJIA activity? Photo of your kids? The Red Sox score from last night?
There are constraints, of course. Bread is not exactly a high resolution medium. A course wheat bread would be difficult to print on while a dense rye might give you a couple dozen ppi to work with. But then you run into a contrast problem...toasted rye bread isn't much darker than untoasted rye bread. Now, if you were to use Pop Tarts, they're a little more high-res, a finer grained paper. You might even be able to print a few lines of text if the heating elements were precise enough...your stocks, meeting schedule for the day, top news stories, shopping list, the 5-day forecast, or a serial short story that you read over a few breakfasts (you could call them Breakfast Serials™!!). Or maybe toasters will be free in the future, with the toaster companies making their money from advertising printed on your morning toast, not unlike the free newspapers they hand out in the NYC subways.
Though what would be even better is wifi-enabled Alpha Bits. Just connect the box to your local network, pour yourself some cereal, and view the five most recent headlines from your RSS reader floating in your milk. Then right click your bowl to open up links on the screen in your refrigerator. That and a rocket-powered hoverbike, please.
If you spend any time in restaurants, you might find May We Tell You About Our Specials This Evening? as hilarious as I did.
Send in a photo showing your profile, and Turn Your Head will produce a wooden pedestal with the outline of your sillouette (the photo on the site makes more sense...).
I had more than a few of the cards in this worthless baseball card collection. Ah, commons.
Praise be, someone's picked up the development of the MTAmazon plug-in for Movable Type. (thx jason)
Not sure if this is new or not, but Moodgrapher tracks the moods (worried, happy, depressed, sick, etc.) of LiveJournal users in order to determine what the overall mood of the world/internet/blogosphere is. (thx ben)
The Onion: Tiger Woods Signs $15 Million Deal To Endorse Alex Rodriguez. "Now that beloved, recognizable superstar Tiger Woods is the new face of Alex Rodriguez, we hope to see some [endorsement] offers start rolling in."
Paula Scher: "My favorite job is the one I’m going to do tomorrow".
Update on the Million Dollar Homepage...it's actually starting to fill up. He's sold almost $100,000 worth of space so far. This is beginning to look like an absolutely brilliant idea.
Fascinating and disturbing realistic drawings of Mario and Luigi. Some things you can't unsee. (via alice)
Six Apart announces Comet, which at this early stage is hard to define exactly, but seems to be some kind of overall repositioning/refocus of their existing products toward consumer user-friendliness. Or is it an entirely other product/platform? Anyway, I doubt whether it will be the promised "next generation blogging software"...that's been guaranteed many times by many people/companies and has yet to be lived up to. IMO, blog tools are still in the Blogger generation (although I might be the only one who thinks that at this point).
Cory Arcangel has gone INSANE and is offering original signed posters of his work for like $20. The posters feature the haunting landscape of the old school Famicom driving game F1 Racer.
Patrick Pittman makes a good case for Homicide: Life on the Streets being the best TV show ever. I loved Homicide and am convinced it would have found a great audience in this age of TiVo and quick-to-DVD (it was a difficult show to catch on Friday nights). Re: best TV ever, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and M*A*S*H have to be near the top of the list...what are your favorites?
Interview with Sidney Frank, the guy who brought Jagermeister to the US in a big way and sold his Grey Goose vodka brand to Bacardi for more than $2 billion.
Scientists have explained the Cheerio Effect, answering why things like Cheerios floating in milk tend to clump together.
Subway has gotten rid of their Sub Club cards and stamps, citing the greater ease of fraud these days with color printers and such. Before they stopped it, my dad cashed in his entire supply of cards, eating free for about two weeks.
Interview with Edward Castronova, video game economist. Quite an interesting thought from him about using MMORPGs to test economies and social systems. "I think the smart thing for the US state department to do today is build a game about Islam but make it a democracy. And set it up so that every 16-year-old from Morocco to Pakistan can go into that world when they get a computer. Not say anything overt about democracy but have them play -- have them vote, for example." (via bbj)
The science behind shyness, an "affliction" shared by 30% of the population (the lurkers in real life). Reminds of the fantastic Caring for Your Introvert from The Atlantic Monthly a couple of years ago. Sadly, the article has disappeared behind the Atlantic's pay wall, but I posted a short excerpt here.
Update: The complete Caring for Your Introvert article is available on the author's web site. (thx chris and several others)
@ the movies
War of the Worlds
I used to be a real stick in the mud when it came to big Hollywood action movies; I had no love for them at all. Since about XXX, I've grown to enjoy them for what they are and add them to my balanced movie-going diet. Come to think of it, the recent Star Wars movies may have contributed to this shift as well...after all, I somehow had to reconcile my childhood love of SW and the not-so-goodness of the prequels (well, minus Episode III, which I flat out loved and will fight anyone who says different to the death).
War of the Worlds, aside from all the tabloid crap that accompanied the film and its (nutball) star and his new store-bought fiance, is pretty damn entertaining to watch once you accept that it's a cheesy Hollywood action movie.
The NY Times Magazine has launched The Funny Pages, their comics+ section. PDFs of the comics are available online...here's the first Chris Ware strip. They're also podcasting and the first episode is an interview with Ware by John Hodgman, assisted by organist and radio-man Jonathan Coulton.
For what seems like the last 2 hours, I've been reading Kevin Smith's blog (Flickr photos here), and I have no idea why. He calls it "Kevin's Boring Ass Life" and that's what it is...a typical entry is not much more than "got up, checked email, dropped off kid at school, lunch, dinner, sex with wife, then watched movies/Simpsons until asleep". Couldn't stop reading though...
What should I read next? is what it says...you enter the title and author of a book you like and the site will suggest something for you to read next.
Interview with Hayao Miyazaki about Howl's Moving Castle and his films in general.
As discussed previously, there's a whole lot a restauranting going on in Chelsea on 10th Ave these days. If two is a trend, what do you call all of this?
For those who are lazy about their religion, there's the 100-Minute Bible, sort of a Cliff Notes version of the Good Book. "The 100-Minute Bible is primarily intended for people who have an interest in Christianity but not the time (nor tenacity!) to read the whole Bible. As the title indicates most people will only take 100 minutes to read it, making it ideal for an upcoming rail or aeroplane journey."
Epicurious lists ten hated restaurant trends. "To enjoy the brioche bread pudding, it's really not necessary to know the name of the farm that supplied the eggs." (via tmn)
Quick interview with Bobby Henderson, Prophet of the church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
This is most insane travel deal I've ever seen...Caribbean cruise during the winter for as low as $5/person/night. Those low fares are probably difficult to find and are also all sold out by now, but still. The company behind the cruises also does easyJet and the newly opened easyHotels in London and Switzerland (rooms from 15 euros a night).
Merlin's excellent advice for writing sensible email messages. This one is excellent advice for email and blog comments: "Emails to a thread are like comments at a meeting; think of both like your time possessing the basketball. Don't just chuck at the net every chance you get. Hang back and watch for how you can be most useful. Minimize noise."
Interesting rumination on the possibility of flash memory-based computers. "In two years I have a feeling that Jobs will announce an Intel-flash iBook that will be the thinest laptop ever made boasting the best battery life of any current machine".
Nobody's talking about the anal sex portion of a recently released survey on American sexual habits. "Evidently anal sex is too icky to mention in print. But not too icky to have been tried by 35 percent of young women and 40 to 44 percent of young men -- or to have killed some of them."
Kurzweil's new book on the singularity is out at the end of the month. It's a sequel to the excellent The Age of Spiritual Machines. "By 2045, we'll get to a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it".
Typetester is a web-based font comparison tool which somehow (I'm assuming JavaScript) can preview text in the fonts you have installed on your local machine. Pretty cool.
Neat article on Charlie Ayers, Google's former chef, and his future plans to open his own eco-aware restaurant.
How to make X-wing fighters (from Star Wars) out of Paris Metro tickets. I gotta try this...I've got about a zillion of these laying around because they make great bookmarks.
Profile of Robert Trivers who "came up with the first Darwinian explanations for human cooperation, jealousy and our sense of justice that made genetic sense, and he showed how these arose from the same forces as act on all animals, from the pigeons outside his window to the fish of coral reefs".
Scientists are having a bit of fun wondering about the genetics of wizardry in Harry Potter. "This suggests that wizarding ability is inherited in a mendelian fashion, with the wizard allele (W) being recessive to the muggle allele (M). According to this hypothesis, all wizards and witches therefore have two copies of the wizard allele (WW)."
The MacArthur Foundation has announced their 2005 Fellows...the so-called genius grant. Fellows "will be given $500,000 in 'no strings attached' support over the next five years".
Suroweicki on gas prices and Katrina: "Americans are happy with the free market when it allows them to buy cheap T-shirts and twenty-nine-dollar DVD players, but they tend to like it less when they have to pay fifty dollars to fill up their gas tanks."
Two new airlines are about to start offering all-business class service to/from NYC and London starting at prices more than half than those offered by existing carriers like AA and BA.
Kenneth LeVay has invented a new type of screw (designed using computer modeling) which works even in concrete or plastic.
The citizens of World of Warcraft are being infected by a disease that got out of hand, just like in the real world. "Blizzard recently added the Zul'Gurub instance to the game, where Hakkar, the god of blood, uses a devastating disease attack on anyone who dares fight him. Seeing as how it's a disease and most diseases are contagious, it shouldn't be shocking when some players come back and haven't been cured." (via waxy)
And, the rest of the (AIGA Conference) story
Here's a sampling of the rest of the AIGA Design Conference, stuff that I haven't covered yet and didn't belong in a post of it's own:
- Juan Enriquez gave what was probably my favorite talk about what's going on in the world of genetics right now. I've heard him give a variation of this talk before (at PopTech, I think). He started off talking about coding systems and how when they get more efficient (in the way that the Romance languages are more efficient than Chinese languages), the more powerful they become in human hands. Binary is very powerful because you can encode text, images, video, etc. using just two symbols, 1 and 0. Segue to DNA, a four symbol language to make living organisms...obviously quite powerful in human hands.
- Enriquez: All life is imperfectly transmitted code. That's what evolution is, and without the imperfections, there would be no life. The little differences over long periods of time are what's important.
- Enriquez again: The mosquito is a flying hypodermic needle. That's how it delivers malaria to humans. We could use that same capability for vaccinating cows against disease.
- Along with his list of 20 courses he didn't take in design school, Michael Bierut offered some advice to young designers:
1. Design is the easy part.
2. Learn from your clients, bosses, collaborators, and colleagues.
3. Content is king.
4. Read. Read. Read.
5. Think first, then design.
6. Never forget how lucky you are. Enjoy yourself. - Nicholas Negroponte: If programmers got paid to remove code from sofware instead of writing new code, software would be a whole lot better.
- Negroponte also shared a story about outfitting the kids in a school in Cambodia with laptops; the kids' first English word was "Google", and from what Negroponte said, that was followed closely by "Skype". He also said the children's parents loved the laptops because at night, it was the brightest light in the house.
- Christi recorded Milton Glaser's mother's spaghetti recipe. "Cook until basically all of the water is evaporated. Mix in bottle of ketchup; HEINZ ketchup."
- Ben Karlin and Paula Scher on the challenges of making America, The Book: Books are more daunting than doing TV because print allows for a much greater density of jokes. In trying to shoot the cover image, they found that bald eagles cannot be used live for marketing or advertising purposes. The solution? A golden eagle and Photoshop. And for a spread depicting all the Supreme Court Justices in the buff, they struggled -- even with the Web -- to find nude photos of older people until they found a Vermont nudist colony willing to send them photos because they were big fans of The Daily Show.
- Bill Strickland blew the doors off the conference with his account of the work he's doing in "curing cancer" -- his term for revitalizing violent and crime-ridden neighborhoods -- in Pittsburgh. I can't do justice to his talk, so two short anecdotes. Strickland said he realized that "poor people never have a nice day" so when he built his buildings in these poor black neighbohoods, he put nice fountains out front so that people coming into the building know that they're entering a space where it's possible to have a good day. Another time, a bigwig of some sort was visiting the center and asked Strickland about the flowers he saw everywhere. Flowers in the hood? How'd these get here? Strickland told him "you don't need a task force or study group to buy flowers" and that he'd just got in his car, bought some flowers, brought them back, and set them around the place. His point in all this was creating a place where people feel less dissimilar to each other...black, white, rich, poor, everybody has a right to flowers and an education and to be treated with respect and to have a nice day. You start treating people like that, and surprise!, they thrive. Strickland's inner city programs have produced Fulbright Scholars, Pulitzer Prize winners, and tons of college graduates.
- I caught 30 minutes of David Peters' presentation of Typecast: The Art of the Typographic Film Title and realized I should have gotten there in time to see the whole thing. I could sit and watch cool movie titles all day long. Among the titles he showed were Bullit, Panic Room, Dr. Strangelove, Barbarella, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Superman. The title sequence for Napoleon Dynamite (which was discussed on Design Observer last year) was shown later in the main hall.
- At the closing party at the Museum of Science, we checked out the cool Mathematica exhibit that was designed by Charles and Ray Eames, two designers who were also pretty big science/math nerds.
- And some final thoughts from others at the conference. Peter Merholz says that "form-makers", which make up the vast majority of the AIGA audience, "are being passed by those who are attempting to use design to serve more strategic ends". (That's an interesting thought...) A pair of reviews from Speak Up: Bryony was a bit disappointed with the opening Design Gala but left, like everyone else, in love with emcee John Hockenberry while Armin noted that the preservation of digital files is a big concern for museums in building a collection of graphic design pieces...in 35 years, how are you going load that Quark file or run that Flash movie?
For more of what people are saying about the conference, check out IceRocket. There's a bunch of photos on Flickr as well.
The list of the 100 greatest theorems in mathematics is topped by The Irrationality of the Square Root of 2 from that nutball Pythagoras. Jesus, who does Godel have to sleep with to get higher on this list...I mean, all the man did was destroy math! (I know, I know, oversimplification, please don't send me any email....) (via cyn-c)
Planned Parenthood in Southeastern Pennsylvania is running a unique pledge drive. The idea is that you pledge an amount of money for each anti-abortion protestor that shows up outside of the PP health center. "We will place a sign outside the health center that tracks pledges and makes protesters fully aware that their actions are benefiting PPSP". That's genius. (via freak)
Marginal Revolution recently experimented with opening up comments on their posts and here are their results. I've noticed the same pattern on kottke.org, especially "the more that comments are regularly available, the more rapidly the quality of comments falls".
Hillman Curtis has added some new (to me) videos to his series of interviews with designers, including interviews with the folks at Pentagram and David Carson.
Cymothoa exigua is a crustacean parasite that eats the tongue of the host fish and then attaches itself to the mouth of the fish and functions as the tongue would have, sharing in the food that the fish brings in.
Local man uses Google Maps to find the undiscovered remains of a Roman villa near his town in Italy.
Stefan Sagmeister
I quite enjoyed Sagmeister's presentation on happiness...where else but a design conference would you find a talk on that topic?[1] Early in, he suggested that visualizing happiness with design is easy (photos of someone laughing or a smiley face will do it) but that creating design that provokes happiness in the viewer is something else entirely. He then shared three designs that have made him happy recently:
- Emma Gasson made a day-planner with room for 82 years, the current life expectancy of a British citizen. It looked to be about a foot thick.
- Omnivisu. Richard The and Willy Sengewald constructed a kiosk in Berlin with video cameras inside. When you look into the kiosk through the viewfinder (very much like peering into a pair of binoculars), the cameras record your eyes and beam the video to a nearby location where the images are projected onto a building which rather looks like it's got a head. When you blink into the kiosk, the building's head blinks also.
- Ji Lee pastes empty speech bubbles over advertisements on the streets of Manhattan, people often fill them in, and Lee returns to photograph the results.
Sagmeister wrapped up his talk with a list of things he has learned and how he's used that list in a recent series of projects:
- "everything i do always comes back to me"
- "trying to look good limits my life"
- "everybody thinks they are right"
- "money does not make me happy"
- "thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. i have to live now"
- "complaining is silly. act or forget."
- "having guts always works out for me"
"Complaining is silly..." is my favorite, both as advice and his implementation of the design. A few of these are in this video shot by Hillman Curtis.
[1] Ok, maybe at a clown conference, but still.
PopTech announced their speakers and program recently, but it looks like they've sold out already.
Conference sketches
At the beginning of the conference, sketchbooks were distributed to every attendee. We were urged to sketch our thoughts during the sessions & panels in our books and then tape the results onto the Sketch Wall in the Design Fair. As I was too busy typing into my virtual sketchbook (plus, I can't draw), I left the drawing to others, but I did head down to the Design Fair to see what other attendees had done. Here's a couple I found interesting:
In addition to the sketches, the wall was also being utilized more generally for graffiti, both written (with marker and paint) and created with the tape used to fasten the sketches to the wall. Here's a favorite bit of tape graffiti (tapeffiti?):
![I [heart] undo](http://www.kottke.org/plus/misc/images/aiga-sk-undo.jpg)
That would make a great tshirt.
Coming soon to the MoMa: Safe: Design Takes on Risk "presents more than 300 contemporary products and prototypes designed to protect body and mind from dangerous or stressful circumstances, respond to emergencies, ensure clarity of information, and provide a sense of comfort and security".
Update: Business Week has a preview of the exhibition as well as a slideshow of some of the objects in the exhibit.
A couple of guys calculated the average color of the universe to be turquiose. Then it turned out they had made an error and the actual color of the universe is beige.
AIGA conference badges and programs
As part of my ongoing series of thoughts about conference badge and program design (Poptech 2004, Web 2.0 2004, PopTech 2003), here's a quick review of the AIGA conference badges and programs. The badges are pretty good. Both first and last names are printed in large type for easy glancing and the schedule fits in the badge holder.
The badge lanyards are not the usual string/cloth, but a simple length of thin hollow plastic tube that's looped together with a small piece of plastic that fits inside the tube like so:
If the lanyard is too long (as they often are at these things) and your badge is hanging down to your belt buckle, just grab a scissors, cut a bit off one end of the tube, and stick it back together. The program is a small thick book which I've left in my hotel room the entire time, preferring to rely on the Web site for event descriptions and the smaller schedule that fits in the badge holder for times, room numbers, etc. The schedule is actually not a booklet, but a series of folding pieces, one for each day of the conference, so when Friday is over, you can take the Friday schedule out of your badge holder and leave it behind, which is kind of handy.
Music video for Breathe Me by Sia, that song at the end of the last episode of Six Feet Under.
Nicholas Negroponte spoke this morning about the MIT Media Lab's $100 laptop initiative. "One does not think of community pencils--kids have their own. They are tools to think with, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, and mathematics. A computer can be the same, but far more powerful." More info at BBC News and Technology Review.
I must be living in a cave because I hadn't really heard of the Daily Show's America the Book (more here) before today's presentation by Paula Scher and Ben Karlin.
Designboom interview with designer/citizen Milton Glaser. Glaser is responsible for one of my favorite sayings: just enough is more.
Clip of Dj Spooky's "Rebirth of a Nation", a remix of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" adapted from a Ku Klux Klan propaganda piece.
Going all city is graffiti slang for putting your graffiti on trains in all five boroughs of NYC.
"I/O Brush is a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by 'picking up' and drawing with them. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside."
Friday round-up
Some miscellaneous bits I haven't had a chance to post yet about the conference:
- Congressman Barney Frank didn't talk at all about "Design and Civic Leadership", but he did say he was in favor of limiting free speech in one small way: he would ban the use of metaphors in the discussion of public policy.
- Dj Spooky on the standarization (i.e. Gapization, Starbucksification, etc.) of American retail (paraphrased): If you think about it, the US is almost more totalitarian than the Soviet Union was; we buy our own uniforms.
- Peter Merholz on the death of user experience: What people not call "user experience" used to be called "design" (by the Eames generation). The term "user experience" was necessary because "design" had become associated almost exclusively with the way something looked. The pretty, the aesthetic. Who did Peter blame? Professional organizations (including the AIGA) and designers themselves. Peter notes that design is making a comeback, particularly in the business press, something I noted in earlier in the week.
- From the Three Minds blog, a summary of a presentation by Murray Moss of 10 things that he likes right now. Well, not so much things as ideas or trends. Or commerce...all of the items he showed are on sale in his Soho store/gallery.
- More blog action from the conference: Peterme has some quick thoughts, David Panarelli has several posts from Friday (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) and UnBeige tells us about Ellen Lupton, Dj Spooky, a David Carson sighting (I totally didn't know he was here...seeing his work for the first time made me want to be a designer, so I may have to accost him and gush a little), and then promptly goes off to nap. Nap!? That's allowed??
More tomorrow, already the last full day of the conference.
OPENSTUDIO was announced at the conference today by John Maeda. Keith sez about the project: "described as an experiment in creativity, collaboration, and capitalism, Open Studio is designed to simplify tools for the creative process and provide a pseudo-currency model for tool use and sharing." Gotta go check this one out in the Media Lab space here.