An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future.
This map shows you the wind flowing over the US in real time.
Check it out here http://hint.fm/wind/
Wind map
An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future.
This map shows you the wind flowing over the US in real time.
Check it out here http://hint.fm/wind/
How to Avoid Idea Plateaus
Do you come up with an idea, spend an evening / a week / a month working on it and then let it stop, something else get in the way of finishing that idea? Human nature is to allow the brain to reward ourselves for the creation of an idea only to not follow it through because it is easier to simply come up with a new idea.
"The project plateau is littered with the carcases of dead ideas that have never happened. What do we do? We just generate a new idea. We do it again and again and again. What we continue to do is we escape this project plateau with a new idea, and instantaneously we return to this high of excitement, this willingness to execute. And this is why there are more half-written novels in the world than there are novels.” ~ Scott Belsky
Check out Scott's book, Making Ideas Happen, it draws on years of research and interviews and is an excellent guide to improving your productivity.
"The project plateau is littered with the carcases of dead ideas that have never happened. What do we do? We just generate a new idea. We do it again and again and again. What we continue to do is we escape this project plateau with a new idea, and instantaneously we return to this high of excitement, this willingness to execute. And this is why there are more half-written novels in the world than there are novels.” ~ Scott Belsky
Check out Scott's book, Making Ideas Happen, it draws on years of research and interviews and is an excellent guide to improving your productivity.
Perpetual Ocean
Using a computational model called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II (ECCO2), the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio visualizes surface currents around the world.
Read more here.
Screenshots of despair
Love this tumblr dedicated to only the most depressing messages experienced when using online services.
http://screenshotsofdespair.tumblr.com
http://screenshotsofdespair.tumblr.com
Turning pretty girls ugly
This is interesting. These faces have not been altered in any way.
It's a new scientific finding called the "Flashed Face Distortion Effect".
When cycling through the faces on a computer screen, each face seems to become a caricature of itself and some faces appear highly deformed, even grotesque. The degree of distortion is greatest for faces that deviate from the others in the set on a particular dimension (eg if a person has a large forehead, it looks particularly large). This new method of image presentation, based on alignment and speed, could provide a useful tool for investigating contrastive distortion effects and face adaptation.
Read more about it here
and here
Thoughts on social networks
It was the start of 2007 and I had just moved to London to start my Masters in Interactive Media when I signed up to MySpace. I was a fairly late adopter of social media since I favoured (and still do) using the mobile phone when I want to speak to my friends. It immediately annoyed me that people stopped using their mobiles when they realised that they could message each other through MySpace for free. It got to a point where some friends would only contact me on MySpace and if I didn’t check it, I would miss things. For about five months, I enjoyed using MySpace and spent time crafting my page using html to make sure that I was completely happy with it. I quickly became aware of how important it is to edit your ‘details’ to ensure that you present yourself properly to your friends online. The popular thing to do was to fill in all sorts of ridiculous information about yourself such as your favourite bands and who were your ‘top friends’. This was awkward and put quite a lot of pressure on me and my friends to appear to be cool. A little too much concern was given to editing and re-editing this information, and it was great fun to edit someone else’s entire page when you discovered that they’d forgotten to sign themselves out.
Then, one day I saw a friend logging out of his MySpace and then logging in to his Facebook account. I asked what it was all about and he said, “it’s like MySpace but better. Things don’t look as good, but it’s easier to use’. I doubted this, and was immediately against the idea of having to re-enter all of my carefully selected information about myself. My friend told me, “trust me, once you’re on Facebook, you’ll forget all about MySpace”. For another two months I resisted as more and more of my friends started signing up to Facebook. I even deleted my MySpace account as I was fed up with people relying on it to get in contact with me. Then, one Monday in July 2007 I crumbled and signed up to Facebook. Immediately, I wasn’t impressed. It was confusing and felt incredibly sterile; there were no custom pages, or music playing on people’s ‘walls’. However, after a month of using it, I had made ‘friends’ with almost everyone I have said more than five words to in the last twenty years. I then was shocked to discover that photos of me were popping up and that everyone could see them. Censoring myself became a daily chore as I untagged myself from entire albums of nights out that my friends were enthusiastically uploading.
This is when I began to understand the allure of the site; it’s all about you, the user. You are encouraged to interact under the premise that the more you put in, the more you get out of it. Logging in becomes an exciting activity as you eagerly anticipate seeing just how many people have interacted with you in some way (tagging, poking, sharing a link, sending you a message). Herein lies the problem – Facebook’s users become hooked on all the little features available to them and it soon becomes part of the routine’ to check in on your account and see what’s new. This sucks as it is siphoning off the time that should be spent catching up with someone in real life. I would rather spend one evening a week catching up with an old friend than spending that time flipping through Facebook to see how many people have ‘liked’ my link of a dog running into a wall. Facebook has become a serious problem because too many people take it too seriously; for example, a friend of mine became incredibly agitated recently when I didn’t bother responding to their invitation to birthday drinks, I figured I would just turn up to it, and when I did, I was confronted with “I didn’t expect to see you here because you didn’t reply to my event invitation on old FaceyB”. Ridiculous.
Recently I went on a Facebook friend ‘cull’ and decided that I’d had enough of people that I spoke to one afternoon when I was sixteen being able to track my every movement through my wall. I now only have ‘friends’ on Facebook that I speak to regularly in the real world, and am very careful to not add anyone I work with. I’ve worked it out: keep your friends on Facebook, and your colleagues on Linked In and everyone else (including family) can email me.
Then, one day I saw a friend logging out of his MySpace and then logging in to his Facebook account. I asked what it was all about and he said, “it’s like MySpace but better. Things don’t look as good, but it’s easier to use’. I doubted this, and was immediately against the idea of having to re-enter all of my carefully selected information about myself. My friend told me, “trust me, once you’re on Facebook, you’ll forget all about MySpace”. For another two months I resisted as more and more of my friends started signing up to Facebook. I even deleted my MySpace account as I was fed up with people relying on it to get in contact with me. Then, one Monday in July 2007 I crumbled and signed up to Facebook. Immediately, I wasn’t impressed. It was confusing and felt incredibly sterile; there were no custom pages, or music playing on people’s ‘walls’. However, after a month of using it, I had made ‘friends’ with almost everyone I have said more than five words to in the last twenty years. I then was shocked to discover that photos of me were popping up and that everyone could see them. Censoring myself became a daily chore as I untagged myself from entire albums of nights out that my friends were enthusiastically uploading.
This is when I began to understand the allure of the site; it’s all about you, the user. You are encouraged to interact under the premise that the more you put in, the more you get out of it. Logging in becomes an exciting activity as you eagerly anticipate seeing just how many people have interacted with you in some way (tagging, poking, sharing a link, sending you a message). Herein lies the problem – Facebook’s users become hooked on all the little features available to them and it soon becomes part of the routine’ to check in on your account and see what’s new. This sucks as it is siphoning off the time that should be spent catching up with someone in real life. I would rather spend one evening a week catching up with an old friend than spending that time flipping through Facebook to see how many people have ‘liked’ my link of a dog running into a wall. Facebook has become a serious problem because too many people take it too seriously; for example, a friend of mine became incredibly agitated recently when I didn’t bother responding to their invitation to birthday drinks, I figured I would just turn up to it, and when I did, I was confronted with “I didn’t expect to see you here because you didn’t reply to my event invitation on old FaceyB”. Ridiculous.
Recently I went on a Facebook friend ‘cull’ and decided that I’d had enough of people that I spoke to one afternoon when I was sixteen being able to track my every movement through my wall. I now only have ‘friends’ on Facebook that I speak to regularly in the real world, and am very careful to not add anyone I work with. I’ve worked it out: keep your friends on Facebook, and your colleagues on Linked In and everyone else (including family) can email me.
Cell Lets You See Your Own Digital Aura
Cell is a project about online identity. It began as a conversation about how people represent themselves on the Internet. "The idea of the 'digital aura’ became central to the project-a cloud of information that is associated with us, our virtual double," he says. When visitors enter a room rigged up with Cell, keywords float out of the air and attach themselves to an individual. They follow you around as you move through the area, like a virtual mirror of your reputation.
Read more over at FastCodeDesign
Pictures of People Scanning QR-codes
Great new website called Pictures of People Scanning QR-codes.
No posts yet.
http://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/
and this is just as entertaining wtfrqrcodes
Behind the Screen Overlay Interactions
Behind the Screen Overlay Interactions: Behind-the-screen interaction with a transparent OLED with view-dependent, depth-corrected gaze.
A project by Jinha Lee and Cati Boulanger, former intern and researcher respectively, at Microsoft Applied Sciences would change all that. They’re using a special transparent OLED screen from Samsung and a series of sensors, along with custom software that reshuffles the keyboard to the back of the screen. So you can work with your hands inside the virtual desktop.
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