The Graffiti

in Barcelona is colorful, artful, so expressive and anything but:

The Irony of Beauty

This is an astounding metaphor for our culture and the gravity of our situation as lifeforms on a planet we know next-to-nothing about: enveloped by the inelegance of our current technology, with wires and all kinds of ugly schwack running up and down the walls surrounding and protecting him, Ed Lu is aboard the International…

Rules

Bruno Faidutti has written his thoughts about the merits of designing rules simply and with particular clarity: The essence of a game is in its rulebook – the rules of the game are autonomous, complete, finite and known by all players. This may even be what makes games different from most other human activities, whose…

The Perfect City

David Byrne is spot on with his thoughts for a perfect city: A Talking Head Dreams of a Perfect City The Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2009 By David Byrne There’s an old joke that you know you’re in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it’s the other way…

Michael Pollan and The Botany of Desire

Author Michael Pollan says: The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow…

Humans Swimming

Are you a human? Do you like to swim? How about free-diving? How about static free diving?

satellite browser

NASA hopes we enjoy J-Track 3-D. Clicking on the thumbnail below or here or there will activate JTrack3D and it will appear in its own window and begin loading a database of over 900 satellites. What you will see (presuming the system you’re on supports Java) is a plot in 3-dimensions showing the position of…

MIT Media Lab: Personas

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Here’s…

Remembering the contributions of Phil Dodds

Mark Oehlert, an acquaintance of mine via Twitter, turned me onto his friend Phil Dodds, who turns out was not only in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but contributed a great deal to our culture in his short life, including, but not limited to, SCORM: From Wikipedia: He was the chief architect…

DavenSarah’s pad de la rad

Welp, our dear pals DavenSarah [yes, it’s usually pronounced as one word] have at last found, bid on and acquired the perfect home back in our old neighborhood of Seattle. Congratulations!!! The place is suhweeeeet to say the very least. Once you two get your hands on it and in it, no doubt the rad-factor…