INFRANGIBLE | Porch – beautiful, unexplained combination of image, word, and sound. A song for each page…
Scott Adams on cubicles “Reason: What do you hate about cubicles? Adams: I think it’s the symbolism more than anything–the fact that you’re a grown adult and well into your career and you have to sit in a box. There’s just something inherently degrading about that.”
Scott Adams interview in Reason – on making tangible stuff: “If you’re on the assembly line, at least you’ve made something. Whereas Dilbert is like I was in my career: work 17 years and never do anything for anybody. Nothing tangible came out of anything I ever did…You never really get the feeling that you’ve…more
Marginal Revolution: The Economics of Declining Architecture, Once Again – restricting innovation in the name of higher “resale” value; I know people who do this with their careers…
LA Weekly: Features: Memory and Manipulation – memory is malleable, much like perception
SIMPLICITY at the MIT Media Lab; John Maeda, Bill Moggridge, etc.
Baxley Design :: – unified theory of interaction design; a good set of checkpoints, and an order to approach the design of a site with.
Jante’s Law: Anti-Ambition (Signal vs. Noise) – Scandinavian culture tries to play down individual success; not because of an autotelic emphasis, but to try to level the playing field.
The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan – McLuhan on the difference between cultures of oral tradition and those of textual information. Has the change created Jane Jacob’s Dark Age Ahead by de-emphasizing conversation and shared society? “Tribal cultures even today simply cannot comprehend the concept of the individual or of the separate and independent citizen. Oral…more
Robert Frank on How not to buy happiness – buy “free time”, not material goods. His main example compares a big house and long car commute with a smaller house and short mass-transit ride. “The less we spend on conspicuous consumption goods, the better we can afford to alleviate congestion; and the more time we…more