If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.
—Henry Ford
(Maybe the customer or customer survey or customer based algorithm is NOT always right?)
Twitter Code Swarm
Twitter Code Swarm from Ben Sandofsky on Vimeo.
I love this amazing video, it visualizes the complex process that goes on behind the scenes of a project in development. I love how clumps of data fly around form person to person and when huge amounts of new bits fly in. Trying to correlate that to my own dev experience is fascinating.
You can see more code development visualizations at
vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm
Three Fun Reads
You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier
The line between a quack and a great thinker is very thin. I found much of this book hard to follow, but if you just let the ideas wash over you Jaron has a lot to offer. His critique of current digital trends, especially in the web 2.0 world, are definitely worth pondering. He is in direct opposition to people like Clay Shirky, whom he calls hive enthusiasts. Lanier believes The Hive will never amount to anything because of the old computer science adage: Garbage In, Garbage Out. His remarks that for all the hoopla about our “new” digital world, things are not that much fundamentally different from when he first started in this field more than 20 years ago, were interesting as well.
What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
More great and thought provoking essays. There is always a lot of fascinating stuff to learn from a Malcolm Gladwell book. This one is a collection of shorter essays, they don’t loose anything in their brevity and you get a lot more breadth. So far I was fascinated to learn why there are so many brands of mustard but really only one ketchup brand and more about the Popeil family history and their secret to success.
Death By Black Hole by Neil DeGrasse Tyson
A great, fun, and science filled romp through the cosmos. Not only do you get a detailed description of what happens when you fall into a black hole, you get some kind of scientific inquiry into almost any apsect of our cosmos. As an astrophysicist Neil touches on everything from our five senses, which in retrospect, seem to be very limited, all the way to the far reaches of the cosmos, which now seems even more mysterious and sublime.
p.s. some really good thoughts in this review of lanier’s book.
google ad
kind of artsy of google this commercial is. but does google really need to make commercials?
FRONTLINE: Digital Nation
This was on the other night but I missed it, I was stupidly watching LOST. Thankfully it’s available online. The video of course is emblematic of its own subject matter.
espresso
Quote
Always think about practice … theory is not the endpoint of work, it is the work along the way to work.
— Félix González-Torres
Aakash Nihalani
marching bands! (ok go)
OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.
Also an explanation of why the you tube version is not embeddable and how badly the music industry is screwed up.
Poe Mystery
For at least the past 60 years, on Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday, a mysterious man would leave a bouquet of roses and a bottle of cognac at his grave. Each and every year, except this year! Fascinating.