May 2012
4 posts
“We experiment; we assume; we fail; we experiment some more. Finally,...”
– Megan Garber on the City of Tomorrow and the dead dream of the dirigible. She continues, “[They are] a timely reminder not just of the short, happy life of airship hegemony, but also of the crazy contingency of history. …. Like the hot-air balloons that preceded it and the wing-thrusted...
The something else approach →
[Y]ou don’t begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or a masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other.
That’s Annie Dillard in her 1989 book, The Writing Life. In it, she tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student:
“Do you think...
A shape of design
Frank Chimero and I came together over a shared commitment to jazz. But not only exchanges of music. We emulated the form. He would write a blog post. I would respond. I would improvise one of his hunches. He would iterate one of my posts. A call-and-response approach to a developing friendship.
We wrote like this alongside one another without ever meeting or speaking directly – much like many...
April 2012
9 posts
Time after time →
Ephemeral New York chronicles the worthiness of timepieces on New York’s Fifth Avenue:
A grand avenue like Fifth should be adorned with lovely, stately street clocks, right?New York business owners whose shops were located on this pricey stretch of real estate seemed to think so. These towering timepieces (which also functioned as advertising vehicles) sprouted up in the late 19th century...
Everything you know lost in translation →
The forest of symbols,
The eye beguiled:
Tree of smoke
Through the language glass,
Everything you know
Lost in translation.
That’s Stan Carey with a #bookmash, visual poetry via book spines. Adjacencies change the reality of how people see in the world. A more tangible example from Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass:
Japanese used to have a color word, ao, that spanned...
So. →
During a fairly riveting analysis of the discourse marker “so,” the Lexicon Valley podcast gives an unexpected definition of discourse analysis:
Discourse analysts view language as a kind of infrastructure. Just as a city needs roads and telephone wires and computer connections, and its that infrastructure that provides for the possibility of social living, our relationships and...
“No one is a foreigner in New York. And in New York, you walk. Your rapport with...”
– Emmanuel Schalit cf. “By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only traveling; namely, the strange.” —Jane Jacobs, via Jonah Lehrer
The gift of intersections
“It doesn’t matter the work — it matters that you work with care and hard and long and farther and keep learning. Always learn.” That’s my taxi driver speeding toward JFK today as I’m en route to Seattle. He’s telling me his story, as typical for these drives. I look forward to them. Saudi Arabia, hard years in Pakistan (but “most beautiful views”),...
Entrepreneur designers in final form →
It’s spring. And in schools across neighborhoods everywhere, students are wrapping up projects. This semester @svaixd, Gary Chou and Christina Cacioppo are teaching first-year students Entrepreneurial Design (they’ve even made the syllabus open to all). The final class project: students must raise $1,000.
Projects have taken different forms:
Projects that introduce a new service,...
The age of noise →
Marc Weidenbaum on forms of noise:
I am very much the sort of person who is aggravated by sounds as seemingly tiny as the hard drive chatter on the Tivo in my living room, and by the throb of one particular fluorescent bulb that’s recessed into cabinets in my kitchen. When I bought my first iPod, I was stunned by how “loud” the hard drive was when I first turned it on (I was also a little...
March 2012
2 posts
On the Salvador Dali of magic →
Career advice from one half of magician duo, Penn & Teller:
Have heroes outside of magic. Mine are Hitchcock, Poe, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Bach. You’re welcome to borrow them, but you must learn to love them yourself for your own reasons. Then they’ll push you in the right direction…
Love something besides magic, in the arts. Get inspired by a particular poet, film-maker, sculptor,...
Happiness is not a destination →
Tony Chu, MFA candidate, turns around a Quora answer for first-time entrepreneurs that answers “what part of the process are people often completely blind to?”
An idea is not a design, but it is an invitation to a journey.
A design is not a prototype, but it is a plan for moving forward.
A prototype is not a program, but it is a test for your assumptions.
A program is not a...
February 2012
15 posts
Risk as feelings thesis →
Stanford economist George Loewenstein on how the brain makes decisions and something called the Risk as Feelings thesis:
He argued we overreact emotionally to new risks (which are often low-probability events), and underreact to those risks that are familiar (although these events are more likely to occur). So, as Loewenstein explains, “this is why people seemed to initially overreact to the risk...
For spontaneity's space →
Jonah Lehrer on the value of hurling people together told through a story of MIT’s Building 20 [referred to by MIT people as “the magic incubator”]:
The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right — enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways — the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions...
“To be a writer I think you’re kind of constitutionally disposed toward optimism.”
– Malcolm Gladwell cf. The Optimism Bias, or Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
The discipline of making →
The difference between making and meeting:
If you’re rushing to make a train, you have to be there before the last moment. Five seconds too late is too late. The cost of error is absolute.
If you’re hurrying to meet a train, though, there’s a soft deadline. Five seconds is no big deal. Thirty seconds might be annoying, particularly for someone returning from a long journey....
The love list
We are our own best advisors. Often, the best discovery of myself, then, comes from a serendipitous archeology of my own writing.
Today, as I consider love, I did some excavation on my writing to discover what I’ve loved.
The list:
Pronouns. Editing. Being edited. Pencils. Experiments. Superlatives. Gravitation. Almost happiness. Not being sure. Saying no. Illogical resolutions. Boobs....
The genesis of browser names →
Martin Beeby on the origin of popular browser names. On my browser of choice:
While there was a codename vote early in Chrome’s development, none were finally chosen (I’d love to know what they were). Instead, it’s said by Glen Murphy that they chose Chrome because one of the design leads liked fast cars. They then ended up sticking with the codename for the final project launch because 1. they’d...
Linguistic relativity →
How language affects economic behavior has been hotly discussed of late, primarily due to an unpublished paper from Yale economist Keith Chen on the same:
Chen […] thinks that if your language has clear grammatical future tense marking […], then you and your fellow native speakers have a dramatically increased likelihood of exhibiting high rates of obesity, smoking, drinking, debt, and poor...
Odes to iPads →
iPad poetic practicum:
I prefer to fall asleep while reading, an excellent way to avoid those nocturnal thoughts that can suddenly jerk you into wretched wakefulness. On chilly nights, I love to pull the covers over everything but my head and read a book propped up against a pillow until I drift off.
You can only do that with the light on, of course, which means that I’d either wake up at 4 am...
Teammates →
Somewhere among E.B. White and Adam Gopnik there is Cord Jefferson:
I’ve never felt more important than when I lived in New York. I was poor and my work was neither very good nor very well-read, and yet every day I’d wake up in my 10 by 10 room, its window looking out over my building’s rusted trashcans, and somehow think I’d achieved another great victory. …. Eventually my fellow New...
In commons →
Chris Mizes on the seemingly quiet dredge as co-creation between the natural and its urban counterpart:
[T]his massive assemblage of global weather patterns, regional tourism, lunar gravitational forces, transportation infrastructures, urban escapism, geologic displacement, and ocean-floor ecosystems, the dredge becomes only a single point, a transient infrastructure of human desire. The dredge...
Weathering weather derivatives →
Reportedly, “weather derivatives” are not only a thing, but a growing market:
Financial contracts based on the weather have been around since at least the late 1990s. The contracts, many of which trade like stocks, are typically pegged to such things as rainfall and temperatures. But in the past few years, contracts specifically tied to snowfall have started to take off in popularity....
10 ways to be invisible, or rules for making →
Elmore Leonard with rules to remain invisible when writing a book that help show rather than tell. Number 10 and the unofficial number 11:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating...
“Happiness is the most important metric in personal tech. If it improves lives,...”
– Brian Lam, The Wirecutter. cf. Informationally, we are becoming lard-asses. In the pageview and ratings driven media economy, too much of the content these days is designed to be just like junk food to quickly boost quantifiable viewership. If you make content that is the intellectual equivalent of...
The hill approach →
Seth Godin on the hill approach to career development:
Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills.
The craft of your career comes in picking the right hills. Hills just challenging enough that you can barely make it...
Itself the revelation →
I’ve become very interested in making a whole object. And providing a window into a memory and a time or a place where I like to be.
That’s Eric Cahan, photographer of “equal parts flat color and limitless space.” Or, skies:
The photos were taken at either sunrise or sunset at bodies of water in California, Florida, and New York. The process of finding the right shades to...
January 2012
10 posts
[A]t 150 years old, this particular rendition of...
I love the wild not less than the good →
Jeremy Denk writing an account of editing during the making of a recording of the playing of the “Concord:”
[W]e find ourselves trying to cobble together a note-perfect devil. Part of me wants to keep the wildest one, with all its imperfections; as Thoreau said, “I love the wild not less than the good.” But Adam [the recording editor] is convinced that we can have the...
The Two Things game →
Economist Glen Whitman on The Two Things:
A few years ago, I was chatting with a stranger in a bar. When I told him I was an economist, he said, “Ah. So… what are the Two Things about economics?”
“Huh?” I cleverly replied.
“You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two...
On the patience of looking →
On this snowless winter in New York, I ran across an etymology of “no two snowflakes are alike.” It comes from a 1925 report that predicts, “Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated.” The author — Wilson Bentley:
In 1885, at the age of 20, Wilson Alwyn Bentley, a farmer who would live all his life in the small town of Jericho in...
Daylit astronomy →
I have been inseparable from The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds after receiving it as a gift a few days ago. In it, I’ve just learned of “cloud streets:”
Low clouds can line up parallel to the wind to form Cumulus radiatus. Also known as ‘cloud streets’, they’re the Roman roads of the cloud road.
See also: So...
Right noise →
White noise is common. In fact, we seek it out, purchase it, manufacture it. But:
What surprises, and engages, in Phil Julian‘s “Recent Errors” is when, at around two minutes in, the track suddenly shifts states. It goes from grey drone to scintillate whine in a split second. And that subsequent section itself has reveals transformations as it progresses, dipping down in volume, sending out thin...
Happinomics →
Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, answers how it’s possible to measure something as subjective as happiness:
See also: A recent study showed that very few experiences affect us for more than three months.
Measuring subjective experiences is a lot easier than you think. It’s what your eye doctor does when she fits you for glasses. She puts a lens in front of your eye...
Every life thing →
Reminded of Shel Silverstein and his absurdity and disobedience toward childhood:
I think he wanted to give kids a sense of life as a fairy tale, but a dark one. He didn’t want to whitewash things. Or leave kids unprepared to deal with trouble.
That’s his nephew, Mitch Myers, one of the managers of his collection. He and a team are preparing for the release of a new Silverstein book,...
“Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1)...”
– C. S. Lewis, in a letter to Sarah, his godchild, on 3 April 1949 via Stan Carey
December 2011
10 posts
A system of irreconcilable regularities →
German pre-Romantic philosopher, Johann Georg Hamman, held that music was given to man to make it possible to measure time:
We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates of speed. In the complexity of today’s experience, it often seems as if simultaneous events were unfolding with different measures. These different measures coexist and often blend but are not...
“The question of repetition is very important. It is important because there is...”
– Gertrude Stein cf. the science of linguistics cf. “A failure is a project that doesn’t work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn’t move you directly closer to your goal. A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second...
Where the borders are →
I contributed part of the Icograda Design Education Manifesto 2011 update. I explore the dissolving/ed borders between consumer and producer, collaboration as primary form of interaction in design, and “beautiful seams” as a response.
The updated Icograda Design Education Manifesto and supporting essays — including this one — is available for download. To obtain a printed copy of the...
Sudden rejuvenation →
Everyone has it. For some, it’s a place. For others, a religion. Others, a sidewalk cafe. A cocktail. A best friend. A familiar painting. Or, a vice. For some, a dark place. For me, it’s a text. Specifically E.B. White’s Here is New York. You see, whatever it is; whatever happens in the city — small, large, flittering, scented, sterile, crushing, tragic, magic — that...
Love not help →
A pair of French researchers propose that adding the text “loving” to a collection box almost doubled the amount of money raised:
Some [collection] boxes had this additional text in French just below the money slot: “DONATING=LOVING”; others had the text “DONATING=HELPING”; whilst others had no further text below the slot. …. The text on the donation...
The visual truth of Barbie →
A group of Swedish neuroscientists determined that the perception of your whole body is affected by the size of your body image. How? By “tricking” people into being Barbie:
A research group at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has managed to make people feel as though they actually inhabited bodies of vastly different size — either that of dolls or of giants. The researchers...
Right as rain →
Research suggests that leaning to the left encourages people to underestimate things from the height of buildings to Michael Jackson tracks (in cultures that count from left to right):
See also: Spatial versus narrative navigators
To find out whether body positions influence value estimation, Anita Eerland and her colleagues at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands asked 33...
Small pieces, joined →
Stripping out the Gospel miracles and inconsistencies to demonstrate parts he found interesting, Thomas Jefferson created a book representing his own views:
Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John....
Lessons according to salt
In the kitchen where I grew up in a non-popular town in Pennsylvania — the kitchen where my parents still live and cook and all important Danzico Family Conversations take place — there is a saltbox. It hangs just to the right of the stove, a handmade walnut wooden box, made for my grandmother by my grandfather, who himself was a furniture designer.
The saltbox itself as an object is...
Intuition, printed →
It was hard for me to approach even a little old lady. There’s a barrier between people riding the subway — eyes are averted, a wall is set up. To break through this painful tension I had to act quickly, on impulse, for if I hesitated, my subject might get off at the next station and be lost forever. I dealt with this in several ways. Often I would just approach the person: “Excuse me. I’m doing a...