March 2010
69 posts
Pencil genealogy →
The latest micro-recommendation over at Pencil Talk:
These pencils aren’t aimed at writing, yet they are all superb at the task.
Sold to students facing multiple choice exams, they are specialty test pencils. These specific ones are made in Japan, and called “Mark Sheet” pencils. All are first rate, but writing with the Pentel CBM10 Mark Sheet pencil in B is an experience I especially recommend...
You guys →
From a long list of peeves, Erin McKean isolates the one that annoys women the most when being addressed:
Some people hate to be called “honey,’’ or “sugar.’’ A few feel that any use of “hey’’ as an attention-getter is rude (with the classic retort being “Hey is for horses’’). Others believe that being called “ma’am’’ ages them 10 years. But one of the more widespread vocative peeves, at least...
The enthusiasm currency →
Frank Chimero on enthusiasm as currency:
Blogs are free to read. What that means is that you reward places with your attention and enthusiasm. … Audience enthusiasm may be our new currency as long as many things on the internet are free. …. Read [a blog]. Email them and say you enjoy the blog, and tell them what you like about it. Recommend it to friends. If a blog starts to suck, you...
Deliverable undesirable →
Ralph Caplan on the murky term that is “deliverable:”
I don’t remember when I first heard someone demand to know the “deliverables.” It was at a meeting, and while I didn’t understand exactly what that meant, I knew it wasn’t pizza that you didn’t have to go out for. He seemed to be saying that a proposal must contain some indication of tangible results, which I had assumed was...
Two four-letter words →
Four Letter Words, custom electronics that display all 26 letters of the alphabet with fluorescent lights:
The piece displays an algorithmically generated word sequence derived from a word association database developed by the University of South Florida between 1976 and 1998. The algorithms take into account word meaning, rhyme, letter sequencing, and association. The algorithm’s tendency...
Presidential thank-you pens →
President Obama used over 20 different pens to sign the health care legislation:
The pen used to sign historic legislation itself becomes a historical artifact. The more pens a President uses, the more thank-you gifts he can offer to those who helped create that piece of history. The White House often engraves the pens, which are then given as keepsakes to key proponents or supporters of the...
Office in motion →
Andy Polaine recently emailed, noting a work habit I wasn’t familiar with:
Some of my Swiss colleagues even take the train somewhere for a couple of hours just to use it as an office. They have lunch in their destination city and then come back again, work done. There’s an interesting aspect to this — they all have a General Abonnement, which is like a season ticket.
More on this on...
In praise of nothingness →
Scott Berkun on “the cult of busy,” that by always seeming to have something to do, we assume you must be important or successful:
[P]eople who are always busy are time poor. They have a time shortage. They have time debt. They are either trying to do too much, or they aren’t doing what they’re doing very well. They are failing to either a) be effective with their time b) don’t know...
Trial and error 101 →
Ferran Adrià — formerly of world-famous restaurant El Bulli — will teach a first-of-its kind course at Harvard, culinary physics:
Students will attend chef demonstrations, physics lectures and labs that explain the structure and characteristics of a classic emulsion (a liquid dispersed into another liquid) and more recent inventions such as Adrià’s famous foams (air bubbles surrounded by...
“To speculate in Wall Street when you are no longer an insider, is like buying...”
– From Bouck White’s 1910 The Book of Daniel Drew is a semi-fictional biography sometimes mistaken for an autobiography of American financier Daniel Drew (1797-1879). The book contains two popular sayings: “To speckilate as an outsider, is like trying to drive black pigs in the dark,” and “To...
Negentropy is more →
On a different sort of editing:
There’s a term in physics, negentropy, which means a reduction in entropy resulting in an increase in order. Most editing is a kind of negentropy because editors generally try to make things orderly.
But:
[T]here is another kind of editing which is not very negentropic: editing public signs. Some are polite, suitable corrections, some are plainly just graffiti,...
Some things old →
My friend Rachel Sussman and her collection of photographs for the “Oldest Living Things In the World:”
My main driver for doing this work is really to have to think about sort of bigger-picture things — everything from environment to existentialism.
See also: Jomon Sugi, Japanese Cedar (2,180 to 7,000 years old; Yaku Shima, Japan). The tree that started it all. “I had...
Improvisation and design, video →
I’m done talking about improvisation and design. Okay, perhaps not. My talk on improvisation and design from the Interaction 10 conference is online, so you can see and hear it directly. Details:
People are improvising. Whether intentional or not, designers are putting forth opportunities for people to engage in frameworks, giving them connections to take advantage of (or not). This session...
Signed, sealed, dirigibled →
On the first piece of mail ever delivered:
The first bits of mail were delivered among the first balloon flights ever made — in the U.S., the first quasi-official piece of airmail was a letter from president George Washington that went aloft in the first balloon flight (1793) in this country, deliverable to whomever it was that first came to greet the balloon in wherever it landed. The first...
1 tag
Normals →
Spencer Fry on the definition of “normals:”
A Normal is maybe not an everyday person in every way, but has limited Internet knowledge. They certainly don’t read TechCrunch, they haven’t heard of RSS feeds, they probably don’t have a smart phone or at least don’t have many apps installed, and although they surf the Web a lot, they have little clue what a web...
The universal 12th language →
Artist Susan Woolf depicts the complex hand signals of the taxi-bus in Johannesburg, almost its own language:
In a nation with 11 official languages, the hand signals are a universal “12th” language that crosses cultural lines. Each signal pinpoints a specific route in street-side finger lingo that is used to bring jam-packed minibuses to a swift, traffic defying halt.
The burden is...
“If you want to get lucky … it pays to be ready.”
– Michael Bierut in The Art of Looking Sideways. cf. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: “The more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known.”
@ at the MoMA →
MoMA has acquired the @ symbol into its collection:
It relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary, and therefore it sets curators free to tag the world and acknowledge things that “cannot be had” — because they are too big (buildings, Boeing 747’s, satellites), or because they are in the air and belong to everybody and...
The head bump and other retail challenges →
Paco Underhill shows six videos from retailers to explain how each can be used to improve their operations. One example, “The Head Bump:”
Here’s a window display where they’ve [retailers] got something in it at the wrong height, and person after person approaches the window and bumps their head on the glass.
The issue:
We’re talking about information architecture. How am I...
“Even though life is disgusting sometimes, I’ll get up again.”
– Carl Berner, New York City’s oldest man and a former toolmaker, toymaker, factory owner, and civic activist at 108 years old. [via]
Happiness is working hard →
Jane McGonigal on happiness and work:
We know when we’re playing a game that we’re actually happier working hard than we are relaxing or hanging out. We know that we’re optimized as human beings to do hard meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time if they’re given the right work.
Elsewhere, happiness studies in the most recent New Yorker reveal...
Ideal bookshelves →
Jane Mount paints people’s bookshelves:
For a few years now I’ve been painting portraits of people’s bookshelves, because you can learn a lot by their grouped covers. Recently I’ve been painting “Ideal Bookshelves”: a collection of someone’s favorites, often around a particular subject matter.
I was honored when she asked if she could paint mine to the...
Most abandoned yet available →
Nick Carr of Scouting New York fame is taking questions this week at NYTimes.com. He names the best abandoned places that are still there:
First, I love the building at 4 East 43rd in the heart of Midtown that is thankfully being saved in the next few years. Fort Totten in Queens, a former Army base, has some amazing properties, including a farm house in sorry shape. Staten Island’s Sea View...
Attribution effect in transportation choice →
It turns out, infrastructure shapes transportation choices:
In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error refers to the tendency for people to over-attribute the behaviour of others to personality or disposition and to neglect substantial contributions of environmental or situational factors.
Thus:
[T]he fundamental attribution error in transportation choice: You choose driving over...
Under the skyscraper patterns →
Ever notice a pattern to New York City’s skyscraper location? (No tall buildings in Greenwich Village, but midtown and downtown are full of them.) It’s related to the city’s second-oldest bedrock:
Most of Manhattan is underlain by the Manhattan Schist, the bedrock that supports New York’s towering skyscrapers. …. Manhattan schist is found 18 feet below the surface in Times...
The etymology of a shake →
The Shamrock Shake, which has developed a sort of cult-like following in the United States since its start in 1970, began with a story that most don’t know:
When Philadelphia Eagles tight end Fred Hill’s 3-year-old daughter, Kim, was being treated for leukemia in 1974, his life changed. He and his wife, Fran, camped out on hospital benches and sat in cramped waiting rooms during Kim’s three...
Harmony, a procedural drawing tool →
Ricardo Cabello talks about creating the simple drawing tool, Harmony:
The whole thing is quite modular so I can keep adding more brush styles whenever I get inspired. … Take a look at the code, play with it and if you come up with a nice brush you think should be added to the default pack, please, send it over!
Simple and great fun, especially on the iPhone.
Lookalike avatars encourage exercise →
You’re more likely to imitate the behavior of an avatar in real life if it looks like you:
Researchers found that study participants who saw their own avatars running were more likely to exercise after they left the lab than participants who saw someone else’s avatar exercising or saw themselves hanging out in a virtual room.
And:
Seeing their face on an avatar was the driving factor....
A window into David Foster Wallace's mind →
The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has acquired the archive of David Foster Wallace (and numerous collections of stories and essays):
The archive contains manuscript materials for Wallace’s books, stories and essays; research materials; Wallace’s college and graduate school writings; juvenilia, including poems,...
“The nearest kind of association is not mere perceptual cognition, but, rather, a...”
– Martin Heidegger
New vehicles for design →
ArchiTakes weighs in on some new house rules inspired by the vehicle:
No product of design is more quintessentially American than a first generation Corvette. Much of its appeal lies in just how little it puts between its occupants and the road and open air. The Corvette’s reductiveness is arguable far more American than the prevailing national tendency toward bigness. Today’s ubiquitous SUVs...
The potential of the comic trajectory →
A position for bringing comics to the classroom, told by one student in a contemporary comics history course:
Starting in elementary school, children are already learning to associate images with words to put together how to tell a story. After all comics are, at their most basic, pictorial storytelling. Utilizing comics in a classroom of emerging readers can really connect with them on several...
The deconstructed taco →
A recent study of the taco revealed something larger:
Look closely enough at anything and you can start to see the sum of its parts. Even, for instance, a single taco, which, when examined recently by a group of architecture students, became a window into the complexities of globalization.
The goal:
[T]o map the local “tacoshed,” which, much like a watershed, establishes the geographical...
Slow to the touch →
People are slower to respond to tactile words (e.g., “itchy”) than words from the others senses:
Psychologists think the answer may have to with attention. Perhaps we’re not so good at keeping our attention focused on the tactile modality compared with the others. Now [reseachers] have added to the picture by showing that the tactile disadvantage extends to the conceptual...
From Safire to Zimmer on language →
The New York Times announced today the venerable Ben Zimmer, linguist and lexicographer, will take over for William Safire in “On Language,” a standing column from 1979 through 2009:
Mr. Zimmer succeeds William Safire who was the founding and regular columnist until his death last fall. The column is a fixture in The Times Magazine and features commentary on the many facets — from...
Chunk of print frightens nation →
The American public this week:
Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text. Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration,...
Relaxing the no-applause rule →
Alex Ross on the unnatural etiquette that guides applause (emphasis mine):
In the eighteenth century listeners often burst into applause while the music was playing, much as patrons in jazz clubs do today. The practice seems to have died out in the course of the nineteenth century, although audiences almost always applauded after movements of large-scale works. Then, in the early years of the...
States of perfection →
The state of perfection for 1954 refrigerated food:
Like Greek statues, orders of architecture, the golden ratio and Vitruvian man, these ads from LIFE Magazine in 1954 measure a sort of highest-attainable-state, though directed at middle class America. The ads are for refrigerators, but the interest really is in what is displayed inside of them: they offer an insight into what was seen to be the...
“A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.”
– Alfréd Rényi cf. “Dodgson [better known as Lewis Carroll] most likely had real models for the strange happenings in Wonderland … He was a tutor in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and Alice’s search for a beautiful garden can be neatly interpreted as a mishmash of satire directed at...
1 tag
The face-time theorem
As I sprint through my inbox toward Austin later this week, I have an observation about how issues get resolved:
Note: This is by no means a prescription (or a real theorem for that matter), but an observation and a nudge for more people to meet in person more of the time.
If distance among people is greater than X miles + question Y cannot be resolved by email, than email results in...
Cartography for an audience of one →
Paul Stiff, a reader in typography and graphic communication, has been studying wayfinding — not in the maps from professionals — but in the handmade maps that people draw for one another:
Stiff believes that we amateurs have something to teach the pros. Our maps are efficient — they edit out unnecessary information. They often include what Stiff calls “an error detector, something that...
Marathon by memory →
Simon Pope, artist and expert walker, walked 26 miles to build a collective memory of the Olympics:
[He] walked 26 miles through the five east London boroughs that will play host to the 2012 Olympics. Along the way he talked to over 100 local residents about their memories of the Games, and from that made a new film, Memory Marathon…
He didn’t walk alone. Each of the 100 London...
Public park presence in absence →
Rob Holmes uncovers that for six months in 1969, Niagara’s American Falls were “de-watered” while engineers surveyed the falls’ rock face for erosion. But it didn’t stand idle:
For a portion of that period, while workers cleaned the former river-bottom of unwanted mosses and drilled test-cores in search of instabilities, a temporary walkway was installed a mere twenty feet from the...
When every minute is constructed →
70 workers are building a wooden display of time that mimics “digital” time in real time over 24 hours. From Mark Formanek:
Standard Time is a performance lasting exactly 24 hours and recorded on film. However, this film is much more than just the recording of an action, the recording of something that has taken place in the past; it is also a clock. A clock for use right now and in...
Bound provocations →
Mickey Smith, photographer, and her process:
The act of hunting for and photographing bound periodicals and journals is fundamental to Mickey Smith [sic] process. She does not touch, light, or manipulate the books and words — preferring to document them as found in the stacks, created by the librarian, and positioned by the last unknown reader. Her work focuses on simple, provocative titles that...
MBA is for Monday →
If you haven’t been following along with Fred Wilson’s MBA Mondays, the day’s not over yet:
I’m making up the curriculum for MBA Mondays on the fly. The end game is to lay out how to look a businesses, value it, and invest in it. We started with the time value of money and interest rates, we then talked about the corporate entity. Now I want to talk about how to keep track...