Friday Links - 02/13/09

Mickey McManus
February 14, 2009 in

———-Top Five———-
1. We’ve got some new films posted up on our site to help explain what information and architecture really mean. The films are chock full of infographic goodness so even if you’re not that interested in my rambling stay for the artistry (and of course the silky smooth, ode to Ira Glass, voice-over)…

2. A wonderful new resource to find information about media and technology that is dedicated to helping kids learn and grow…

This is one of the best kids story making tools I’ve ever seen, developed by CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center and the Carnegie Library, it just works really well. It’s free! Give it a try (drag out a character, drag another one out, pick one of them and choose and action like fight… this apparently is one of the favorite things kids do, the other one is kiss… go figure)…

3. Ok, this is cool, just don’t drive too far off the lake or kink the hose… about $125,000 in case you were thinking of getting me one.

4. I just finished reading the Watchmen in anticipation of the movie, I found a bundle of clips that even have parts of the backstory that are just hinted at in the book, very nice attention to details…

5. There is nothing to worry about…

———-The Rest———-
Is usability obsolete?

Field shifting a laptop to a tablet…

Tangible bit porn (hmm, not sure if that sounds right)
Siftables has come along a little bit since last we met…

Roblocks is a bit more active variant…

And Topobo is actually for sale (in limited prototype form)…

Kern, finally an iphone game for graphic designers that don’t think typography is dead (silly graphic designers, next thing you know they’ll be trying to convince us that white space matters).

They come in small, medium, large, and American size… oh yeah there is also a version (at the very end) for those times when you’ve got a head cold…

An article in the New York Times has a brief mention of one of the projects we worked on, in the article its called Healthsense… the guys at Healthsense have got some pretty powerful evidence that just sensing if someone in their home has stopped doing what they do routinely you can reduce mortality substantially (unfortunately in a home without this sort of service, when someone at home is incapacitated the issue isn’t discovered for 8 or more hours… just reducing the time to discover trouble makes a huge difference, particularly with elderly home owners). They use a series of sensors including a bed sensor, toilet flush and shower sensor, motion sensor, and sometimes sensors on refrigerators and kitchen cupboards (and then software and people to monitor and check in on the users).

Agricultural Sabotage… or pharms of mass distruction…

Bullet dodging armor patent… looks like maybe if you throw some M&Ms at that guy you could watch him jump too…

Future watermarks…

Half the weight and drag coefficient of the best subcompact on the road, but 1970’s Luigi Colani look is a bit painful…

But this one’s even better, made out of cardboard!

New game with nice visual style (yes I’m a sucker for hand drawn, Lebbeus Woods style stuff)…

Envirosignals?

Spooky fun with medical devices…

Mood tiles…

I always wanted something like this for when I worked in photoshop or illustrator (well I’d actually love it for the students and college grads that come in to interview so I could actually see how they think instead of just an end product)… I guess what I’d really want is this plus a sketchbook or storyboard maker that automatically turns all my interstitial explorations into frames in a series. The value of this sort of thing is really in the pathway to a solution. The place I found this link noted that historians love to find notebooks from authors because they are a treasure trove of background about why something was phrased a certain way or how the mind of an author works.

Mark Cuban is always entertaining and provocative. He’s just come out with his own stimulus plan.

Unpack your adjectives…