And it looks bloody awful!
However it is very endearing in tone. Kinda Raymond Chandler meets typegeek:
“The redesign of The Economist was the reason to take a look at Officina Sans. While that was good as an “information” face, it was too goofy as a headline. Enter the Display version…”
[via whatdoiknow]
Filed under: Blog watch
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Steve Bowbrick ruminates on the pace of unmanned planetary exploration, and if I read between the lines a little; the torrents of telemetric information and simulation that the next generation have access to (cf. access to the Maestro simulations of Mars rover data, and more way-out “Why Starfleet”)
“My kids – before they’re my age – will know Mars better than I know, say, Tasmania or Patagonia. They won’t have been there but they’ll feel like they have. If they’re paying attention (unlikely), they’ll also have a pretty detailed mental image of two or three of our Sun’s other planets, submarine images from Europa’s salty ocean and – maybe – reasonable pictures of half a dozen small-ish, blue-ish planets orbiting other stars. I suspect they’ll also know that the solar system – and the universe beyond it – are greener and more hospitable to life than we could ever have imagined and that there’s as much water (liquid and otherwise) on distant planets as there is here on earth. They’ll also have a pretty good idea how it got there.”
Filed under: Technology and science
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“What happens to landmarks when every store is a chain? When we live life at 70 miles an hour we hand our navigation skills over to the government and place our trust in freeway signage. But what about when slow down to 35, stop and go, through the infinite “strip” feeds Americans and their cars?The preferred navigation is landmark. Follow the river, keep the mountain on your left, turn right at the large oak, veer left at the rabbit rock. Walk towards the walls, through the iron gates, left at inn, right at the bank. Towards the capital, left at the Starbucks, right at the Jamba Juice, you’ll see it right before the B of A… All of a sudden our landmarks are multiplying. And make no mistake plenty of effort goes into making sure those marks are memorable. But anyone who turns at a Starbucks is going nowhere but in circles…”
Puts me in mind of the franchised-landscape spread by the DNA of the 3-ring binders as described in Snowcrash.
Filed under: Navigation and wayfinding
2 Comments
Saul Steinberg’s iconic image depicting a New Yorker’s view of the world:
With Google Lab’s personalised search view of the world…
Well, it made me giggle anyway…
Maybe they’ll add the rest of the world to a vaguely-useful granularity once it gets out of beta.
Filed under: Interface innovations
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Ben Hyde on the magic of hypercard:
“It never competed with the installed base of developers. Instead it generated this amazing bloom of new tiny little applications. Instead it illustrated what happens when you manage to hand a useful tool over to a large unserved population of amateurs. The tail of the power-law curve.I wonder, if flash is the closest modern equivalent; maybe so.”
I really regret never playing with Hypercard that much. Back in around 1987 I suppose, I nagged for a copy back at the print shop I used to work at after school, but I never really had the time or the persistence to get into it. And now it’s gone… sniff
Filed under: Interface innovations
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My old school Porthcawl Comprehensive, in South Wales has introduced a SMS-surveillance system to stop truancy, with the delightfully honest name of “Informer”, that enables the school to text parents if kids are not present at class:
“Porthcawl Comprehensive School has had an Informer system for over a year.Head teacher Kenneth Dykes found that while not all parents were enthusiastic, the system has helped improve communication between school and home. He said, “Being able to communicate with parents to let them know that their child has not attended registration has helped us increase attendance and keep in touch with parents more often.”
I look forward to reading how the kids in Porthcawl Comp inevitably hack their way around this…
» icWales: Text messaging helps schools beat truancy
Filed under: Society and culture
3 Comments
Iambelledejour.com merch hits the fashion pages of The Telegraph, but they don’t seem to have twigged that it’s a spoof.
As Webb says “FFS”.
You can of course get your IABDJ thongs and trucker caps here.
Rockwell Extra Bold is so now!
Filed under: Misc.
2 Comments
Deep joy to be had from subscribing to Melvin Bragg’s “In our time” newsletter, that supports the Radio4 show of the same name.
This week our hero, Melvin, describes having his mind blown early one morning by a bunch of physicists explaining string theory to him:
“HelloThis morning’s programme was a tough one for me. I gave up physics at
the age of 14 because the school to which I went was very small and at
that time, in the mid-Fifties, you had to make what proved to be
crucial decisions ridiculously early. I was also not much good at
physics.About 15 years ago when, as I discovered like many people in my
generation, I saw that some of the most intense, vivid and beguiling
ideas around were to be found in general books about science, I tried
to get some sort of grip on what I had left behind quite happily at
the age of 14.It’s proved to be extremely difficult and this morning was clearest
proof. Sometimes you hold on by your fingertips. Sometimes you hold
on by your fingernails. I was holding on by what could be called a
planck length which is so infinitesimal as to make the head of a pin
look like Wales.”
Read the full newsletter below:
(more…)
Filed under: Technology and science
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Here’s the thought of Matt Locke’s I was trying to find, prompted by the announcement of cheapo wifi-enabled hard drives a few days ago: Public Caches:
“[I] thought of the idea of installing ‘Public Caches’ – stand alone devices embedded into street furniture or trains that people could use to upload or download content. You could send an e-book or avantgo article that you had finished with, or browse the cache to see what people have left behind…...In such a network, information would have to travel physically between people’s devices in order to jump from cache to cache. The cache on your train or street corner would be full of stuff that only people who physically travelled through or visited your neghbourhood could access. This would mean it would take a long time for ‘memes’ to migrate through a network, but it would also increase local specificity, and so enhance a sense of place and community.”
The Ouroborosian nature of my outboard brain becomes apparent here, as Locke’s post links from some previous thought here about deliberately engineering slowness in networks. Need to revisit this… again…
Filed under: City magic
3 Comments
Sorry about the pun.
Via Smartmobs, Techdirt picks up on Uncle Jack’s piece on “Smart places” in today’s Guardian Online and runs with the RFID / NFC* aspect of the piece.
“The writer [of the Guardian article] suggests that RFID may be the missing ingredient to make such services even more valuable, by allowing more pinpoint use of location info. This certainly beats some of the applications that people were originally predicting for location-based services – where the restaurant you were walking by would spam you with a coupon. When the content is both interactive and user requested, things begin to get a lot more interesting.”
Indeed.
I would also add that when the content is both user-requested, and authored by other end-users/peers/individuals/whatever it gets a HELLUVALOT more interesting.
See also Chris Antimega’s RDFGeowarchalking, and Jo’s Spacenamespace for less commercial and more interesting applications of annotating space.
Filed under: City magic
4 Comments
Found from one of my Google newsalerts:
“Taiwanese hardware and motherboard supplier Asustek Computer is to launch a wireless Ethernet-accessed hard-drive in May.Its WL-HDD will offer fast WiFi access by using 802.11g, which provides up to 54Mbit/s. The actual drive will be a 2.5-inch unit and its capacity is as yet unspecified. The device will cost $150 about £90. It will have a Web-based management interface through which the drive can be accessed. Files will be freely shareable, have read-access only or be restricted to password-owning users.”
» Macworld Daily News: March 23, 2004: Wi-fi hard-drive unveiled
Filed under: City magic
2 Comments
From Design Observer, “Michael McDonoughs Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School”
“9. It all comes down to output.
No matter how cool your computer rendering is, no matter how brilliant your essay is, no matter how fabulous your whatever is, if you cant output it, distribute it, and make it known, it basically doesnt exist. Orient yourself to output. Schedule output. Output, output, output. Show Me The Output.”
Filed under: Design industry and people
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UPDATE: Got it now – thanks to Anne G, and Robert Andrews!
Does anyone have a scan of the diagram that accompanied a story in Wired 11.06 about the fight for colour spectrum in corporate identity called: “The battle for blue”???
It featured in the Rem Koolhaas guest-edited issue. If you still have it and have an itchy scanner finger or have a digital version of the diagram, I’d be very grateful if you could let me know by commenting here.
There’s a reason…
Filed under: Misc.
2 Comments
From Corante Brainwaves:
“Today’s movie release of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stars Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey who want to have their bad memories erased. While memory erasure inc. doesn’t exist yet, the issues presented in this movie do.I am sure the actors and producers would be very interested in CCLE’s work. Should you have access to them through your network please let them know about CCLE’s real life fight to protect their cognitive liberty. Now in their fourth year, they have many accomplishments, including arguing for freedom of thought in the U.S. Supreme Court. Please help them protect your cognitive liberty.”
I haven’t seen the film, but can’t wait. Kaufmann is a flawed genius – his films give me a buzz equivalent to reading a Morrison comic, a Webb post or an Egan novel.
I’m sure he would appreciate the CCLE’s attempts to protect his cognitive liberty, and yet would probably debate whether there can ever be such a thing.
» Corante Brainwaves: “Neuroethics Non-Profit Calling Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet”
Filed under: Sufficiently Advanced Technology
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“Basically, Jaynes argues that consciousness, as we understand it today, has only been possessed by human beings for the last four thousand years or so. (By “consciousness” he means, not the primary perceptual awareness that all mammals, and perhaps many other ‘lower’ organisms as well, seem to possess, but what I would prefer to call self-consciousness, or second-order consciousness: the ability to reflect upon oneself, to introspect, to narrate one’s existence).Jaynes proposes that, in the second millennium BC and before, human beings were not self-conscious, and did not reflect upon what they did; rather, people heard voices instructing them in what to do, and they obeyed these voices immediately and unreflectively.
These voices were believed (to the extent that “belief” is a relevant category in such circumstances) to be the voices of gods; their neurological cause was probably language issuing from the right hemisphere of the brain, and experienced hallucinatorily, and obeyed, by the left hemisphere (which is where speech is localized today).
This is why Jaynes calls the archaic mind a non-conscious, “bicameral” one. Thought was linguistic, but it did not have any correlates in consciousness; people didn’t make decisions, but instead the decisions were made automatically, and conveyed by the voices. One half of the brain commanded the other, so that decision-making and action were entirely separate functions. Neither of these hemispheres was “conscious” in the modern sense.
It was only as the result of catastrophic events in the second millennium BC that these voices fell silent, and were replaced by a new invention, that which we now know as self-conscious, reflective thought.
Jaynes introduces his theory by making reference to the Iliad, in which there is almost no description of interiority and subjectivity, or of conscious decision-making; instead, all the characters act at the promptings of the gods, who give them commands that they obey without question.”
Blimey.
» The Pinocchio Theory: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Filed under: Society and culture
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Locative media workshop
29 March-3 April 2004, Helsinki
http://www.pixelache.ac/locative/
“The workshop is a community of interest, where members of different communites of practice come together. In this case, an international group of artists, writers, and researchers will gather in Helsinki with disciplines of expression ranging from textual, aural, digital film, performance, architecture, and contemporary archaeological theory. The workshop process will – through practical engagement – elaborate the relationships between documentation, content, and context.To this aim, a large portion of the scheduled workshop time will be dedicated to exploring the specific site, subterranean and surrounding area of the Rautatieasema.”
Thanks to Marc Tuters for letting me know about this…
Filed under: City magic
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Technorati, the web service for monitoring links between websites has redesigned. And it’s a nice evolution: there are some good things like the clear technical writing, the progress indicators (good to have as the site can chug a while at times) and some incremental improvements to results layouts as far as I can tell.
There are two things however which are getting “on my wick” to use a UK industry term.
(more…)
Filed under: Interface innovations
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A full(ish) CeBIT round-up on the way, but first, vanity!
Here’s a picture of me obviously making my “I can’t work my digital camera at this angle” face while trying to get a snap of me and Sony’s QRIO robot, which was just about the most mindblowing thing I have seen inside a giant noisy exhibition hall ever.
Filed under: Uncategorized
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Found via the Spool, Yoz nails US ‘cyberculture’ journalism and “that whole smartmobs thing” nicely. Go read.
Filed under: Misc.
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From Space and Culture:
“What makes the urban available to the gaze? Cities are an example of phenomena too extensive in scale to be empirically visible to the human eye in one glance, yet are taken on a sort of visual faith which makes the overall unseeable city part of what Taussig calls a ‘public secret’.”
From “The Invisibles: Say you want a revolution”:
“Cities have their own way of talking to you; catch sight of the reflection of a neon sign and it’ll spell out a magic word that summons strange dreams.Have you ever sean the word ‘IXAT’ glowing in the night? That’s one of the holy names.
Or make tape recordings of traffic noise and listen to them at night. You’ll hear the voices of the city coming through, telling you things, showing you pictures.
Sometimes they’ll show you where they came from.”
Filed under: City magic
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