October 2009
Charting the Final Frontier
Google maps are great for navigating to an address, but once you arrive, it’s up to you to find the office, meeting room or vendor inside. Now Micello takes over where conventional navigators leave off, mapping your route inside buildings, malls, convention centers and other points of interest.
“Micello is quite literally Google maps for the insides of buildings,” said Ankit...
“We don’t know what we know and what we don’t know, and we know it.”
– Benjamin H. Bratton
via Projectionist
Ironic Sans: So you think you can tell Arial from... →
let’s see if we learned anything from ragbag’s arial v helvetica chart.
September 2009
GPS: Got Plenty of Snow?
That’s when Larson’s team discovered something that no one had apparently noticed before: The snow slowed the reflected GPS signals, and the delay corresponded to the snow’s depth, which the team measured by hand and with ultrasonic sensors at the test site. Based on that data, Larson’s team reports this month in Geophysical Research Letters, the GPS signal echoes reveal...
“It’s not about calling attention to the technology. It’s about making the...”
– The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: We have your credit card info, and we are unstoppable
Fake Steve may be a joking spoof of the Real Jobs, but he is dead-on with this point. So many other companies still don’t get it.
(via chartier)
(via infoneernet)
Why Moleskine is the model for newspaper survival
But what if the desired niche was physical? What if there’s an audience out there who crave the aesthetic of the printed newspaper as much as Moleskine owners crave their little black and bound notebooks?
The Moleskine is a useful analogy for two reasons. Firstly, it is very tribal – the owner, likely urban, liberal and creative*, is saying something about themselves. If you feel alienated as a...
The Best Approach for Avoiding Zombies
Though the paper itself does not specifically refer to fleeing from zombies, it describes “the survival probability of immobile targets annihilated by random walkers.” The conclusions suggest that the people trapped in a mall in “Dawn of the Dead” may be better off than the folks stuck in a farmhouse in “Night of the Living Dead.”
Cassi found that the...
“You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be...”
– Bruce Sterling (via sansfin) (via reclusland)
Not really a problem for me man.
(via un)
hear, hear.
“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
– John Wooden (via reluctantbuddha)
“So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing...”
– Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)
caterina, on working hard
Cracking open the SharePoint Fortress
Despite – or maybe even because of – that nebulousness, SharePoint is a brilliant success, for a couple of reasons. In a way, it’s Microsoft’s answer to GNU/Linux: cheap and simple enough for departments to install without needing to ask permission, it has proliferated almost unnoticed through enterprises to such an extent that last year SharePoint Sales were $1.3 billion.
But as...
“An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in...”
– This quote is taken from Werner Heisenberg, Der Teil und das Ganze, 1969, as cited in John Keane, The Life And Death Of Democracy, 2009
*>
(via designtumblelog)
(via infoneernet)
“Seriously, stop it. I don’t care if Mac stuff is better. I don’t care if Mac...”
– A small piece of amazing from this article on the awfulness of Windows parties vs. the awfulness of Mac fanatics (posted by melanyouth) (via fatmanatee)
A hilarious read. Try it regardless of your strong moral stance on various computer platforms.
(via nerdgasms)
SatNav phones will be illegal (New Zealand) →
infoneernet:
The Transport Ministry has clarified the terms of a new law that restricts the use of cellphones in cars, saying that from November it will be illegal to use a mobile phone as a satellite navigation aid while driving.
…
The restriction does not apply to navigation systems that do not have a mobile phone function.
Seen at stuff.co.nz
and the difference is?
Gruen Transfer →
notemily:
bestofwikipedia:
In shopping mall design, the Gruen transfer refers to the moment when a consumer enters a shopping mall, and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, loses track their original intentions. Spatial awareness of their surroundings play a key role, as does the surrounding sound and music. The effect of the transfer is marked by a slower walking pace and glazed...
“I have an existential map; it has ‘you are here’ written all over it.”
– Stephen Wright (via reluctantbuddha)
WatchSpinning water droplets behave like black holes - New Scientist
wild.
How would Einstein use e-mail? Letter writers of... →
infoneernet:
A new Northwestern University study of human behavior has determined that those who wrote letters using pen and paper — long before electronic mail existed — did so in a pattern similar to the way people use e-mail today.
The study, published today by the journal Science, demonstrates the similarity of these two seemingly different activities, with the underlying pattern of human...
“Is the question “What is an example of a question which is not its own answer?”...”
– Zalcman’s Paradox | Futility Closet
What does your bookcase say about you?
It’s hard to escape the theory that there is an exhibitionist side to our bookcase obsession - it’s about showing off how much you have read, or plan to read, or pretend to have read. You are subtly suggesting that you are the sort of person who keeps Finnegans Wake handy, for example, just in case you ever fancy dipping in for a quick, albeit incomprehensible, catch-up.
via BBC
