I was sitting at home at some point and caught a documentary about Iran and the West which really is worth watching. I was also of course reading news on the web and saw that some of the people being interviewed where at that moment having their family members put in jail or disappeared. Very hard to see this sort of thing happening.
So my reaction (after imploring you to watch that documentary) is to run away. Iran so far away. Something about this makes me think that this is one of the ways we should combat the posturing of insane dictators. Make fun of them until they become the laughingstock of the world. Unfortunately it just seems sad at the moment. Hmm, yes we admit that some of the regions had more votes cast than there were people in the region, but this was the best election we’ve ever had!
And then there is Michael. It is customary for us to point out the contributions to invention and design science made by our heroes after they have passed.
On to the list…
————Top Five—————-
1. An alternate use for shoes. Living by numbers is an excellent summary of the potential benefits of one small part of the pervasive computing world… sensing, feedback, and communities. Read this.
2. Cooking with greenscreen (yes that is the secret ingredient)! I really have no idea what is going on here.
3. Not sure I agree with everything he said but I like the moxie!
4. Infoporn du jour… Baseball infographic overload!
5. Low polygon count fashion, really well done (love the pants).
—————-The Rest—————
Probably still several weeks away from opening, but this is a bit of an in-depth piece about the Zaha Hadid pavilion for the Burnam Plan celebration in Chicago.
Doug Lenat’s (CYC) review of Wolfram Alpha…
Summary (graciously provided by Jeff)? I “like” WA, it is a “nice math engine” — it has potential… but it’s not CYC. It’s about 1/2 between google (which is merely mushy tripe) and CYC (which can’t (yet) answer very many questions). Not surprisingly he does not delve into the difficulties in building such a thing or the problems with it once you do have it built… (IMHO: that would require a lot of inwardly focused analysis…)
Then if we could harness the wisdom of the crows (err pigeons?) we could even have technology to help us figure out when art is good or bad! (try doing that Alpha!)
I think this is called design engineering. And this is has something to do with giving kids something to do with those utensils in the kitchen?
Pictures of a volcano from space.
Really nice way to get kids out into the world…
Prefab homes for the design savvy billionaire.
The architecture of data farming… Snippet… “it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent” and “Data centers worldwide now consume more energy annually than Sweden.”
A good recap of the latest AR ads, the best implementation sounds like Ray-Ban (in terms of actually hinting at value), and even better is what Coraline did.
Hard not to like this artist’s work… (sorry bad flash, go to portfolio section)…
Napping is an important corporate policy (I’m actually doing it right now).
But these are now available for pre-order (and I think much cooler).
Really nice tilt-shift calendar…thingy.
I can’t believe it’s not butter.
A nicely done multitouch, rfid enabled, and looks like actually useful, wall… This is part of what will be in the pervasive world.
I think its fair to say that the best decision Jimmy Fallon made was the Roots.