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"The best way to predict the future is to design it."
Buckminster Fuller
July 9th, 2010 | 93 notes | Permalink
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“Google PAC-MAN consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6M daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day). $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, if the average Google user has a cost of $25/hr. (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate). For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get six weeks of their time.” Turns out it was (a). According to the New York Times’ Bits blog, Chatroulette’s founder is a 17-year-old in Moscow named Andrey Ternovskiy — and judging by his e-mail to them, he seems awesome. He loves “minimalism” and wants to keep the site from being dominated by ads. He codes everything himself, so as Chatroulette’s user population has exploded, he’s had to recode over and over to keep up. He says amazing things like, “Bandwidth bills show sums which shock me as a teenager, but I am not very worried.” He hosts the site on servers in Frankfurt, Germany, mainly as a symbolic gesture, because it’s roughly halfway between Russia and the U.S. (He’s never been to America but would like to visit.) And, for the record, he’s not onboard with all the masturbation and mock suicides: “Some people are using the site in not very nice ways — I am really against it.”
"Facebook’s coming at it from a corporate position. It’s basically like AOL in 1997 — everything is there and there’s no need to go anywhere else. I don’t know if they’re even considering what users want anymore. It’s all about how to maximize revenue and all that crap. It’s wanting to be everything to everybody possible so they won’t have to go anywhere else."
Matt Haughey (via marco)
March 4th, 2010 | 60 notes | Permalink
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"The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice."
Adam Smith (The Theory of Moral Sentiments)
In both the almanac Der blaue Reiter and the book The Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky attempts to construct a theory of pictorial harmony by analyzing the effect color has on the viewer. “If color is a means of influencing the soul, you can than say that pictorial art in the future will use colors as sounds, and canvases will be divided into two categories: simple compositions (or melodies) and complex (or symphonies).”
"It has been my experience that those with no vices have very few virtues."
Abraham Lincoln Salon People Feature | The 7 vices of highly creative people “These books are in no particular order, so do not read their position as preference. Books are very much like fonts, each person’s list is personal. Enjoy.” - Doyald Young
"There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Mahatma Gandhi
"An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s."
J.D. Salinger (via bmdesign)
January 29th, 2010 | 7 notes | Permalink
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"We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too."
Nick Bilton, “‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web” (via brynnshepherd)
January 23rd, 2010 | 4 notes | Permalink
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Alex AinslieI'm a recent Cornell CS MEng graduate interested in data, computation, design and their intersection. In 2009 I graduated early with an independent BA in Computing, Cognition & Aesthetics and a minor in French. My honors thesis examined the traces our Bluetooth-enabled devices leave behind in public space. I have spent the past three summers as an intern at Google working on mobile maps and gmail, suggest, query refinements, social search, and most recently goggles and mobile local search. I will join Google fulltime in August 2010. This site was born as a personal photo journal during a semester spent abroad in Paris and has evolved into a curated collection of links, text, and images. |
