cosmic fish

Look closely and comprehensively at these pictures. Integrate your reactions with all your spontaneous recalls of the other experiential information of your life as well as of other lives as reported to you. Think and think some more. From time to time, humans are endowed with the capability to discover just a little more regarding the significance of their role in the cosmic scenario. You too might catch of these ‘cosmic fish’.

-R Buckminster Fuller

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what you make

Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you make of what happens to you.

-Aldous Huxley

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Rise Of The Machines

Good Magazine has a scary/sad/inevitable piece on how Robots Are Replacing Middle Class Jobs.

The culprit, in other words, is technology. The hard truth–and you don’t see it addressed in news reports–is that the middle class is disappearing in large part because technology is rendering middle-class skills obsolete.

And:

We may be heading toward a future with plentiful high-end jobs and plentiful low-end jobs, and not much in the middle. What if only doctors, lawyers, engineers, and managers can live a decent life, buy a house or apartment, and pay for their children to get specialized degrees? What if a liberal-arts degree on its own prepares you for little more than work as a security guard? What if the skills that prepare one for a job with decent pay get increasingly hard to attain?

Scary shit to say the least.

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Do you really need an app for that?

Zeldman: iPad as the new Flash

I’m not against the iPad. I love my iPad. It’s great for storing and reading books, for browsing websites, for listening to music and watching films, for editing texts, presentations, and spreadsheets, for displaying family photos, and on and on. It’s nearly all the stuff I love about my Mac plus a great ePub reader slipped into a little glass notebook I play like a Theremin.

But:

I’m just not sold on what the magazines are doing. Masturbatory novelty is not a business strategy.

I’ve thought the same thing for a while now. There’s many iPhone and iPad apps that are adding negligible value to their website-viewable counterparts.

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Heed to Design

The designer must see the periphery as well as the core, the immediate and the ultimate, at least in the biological sense. He must anchor his special job in the complex whole. The designer must be trained not only in the use of materials and various skills, but also in appreciation of organic functions and planning. He must know that design is indivisible, that the internal and external characteristics of a dish, a chair, a table, a machine, painting, sculpture are not to be separated…

There is design in organization of emotional experiences, in family life, in labor relations, in city planning, in working together as civilized human beings. Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: ‘design for life’.

-Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, from the book Vision in Motion (via 37Signals)

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designers is getting all growns up

Great post by Jon Kolko over at frog on the maturation of the discipline of design.
He starts out with the observation:

It would appear that we’ve arrived: design has emerged as the discrete discipline of problem solving and cultural change, and the designerly ability described by Nigel Cross in 1995 as “a distinct form of intelligence” is now considered with some degree of respect in disciplines such as the sciences or the liberal arts.

But is also hesitant to apply design thinking to everything:

Simply, as important as the core ideas of “cultural immersion”, “rapid prototyping”, and “abductive reasoning” are, a cure for poverty this does not make. Teams need to execute and follow-through, and that execution takes the care familiar to most designers who were trained in (not ironically) the above type, composition, color, and two and three dimensional design activities. This is the iterative, careful, methodical, and articulate approach that designers inherited from movements of arts and crafts. It’s hard, and it takes time, patience, and experience. And while you may learn about it in business school or in the Harvard Business Review, it will take a lot more than some articles from some truly incredible thinkers to become capable of actually executing successfully.

One thing is for certain – design, in all it’s meanings and interpretations, is becoming more and more important. You see it in the categories of national magazines like HBR, BusinessWeek, Fast Company to the dashboards of new cars to new approaches in healthcare.

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Google’s tax rate

Gizmodo: Google’s Shady Tax Evasion Practices Screw the Government (and You) Out of $3.1 Billion

Google’s startlingly low rate–how much do you pay every year?–goes back to a deal brokered with the IRS itself. The feds let Google license its search and ad tech to a subsidiary in Ireland–Google Ireland Holdings–which begins a long, international cash siphon that ends in Bermuda. Licensing tech from Google racks up expenses, which allow Google’s dummy company to duck Irish tax law. The money generated in Ireland is shuttled to the Netherlands, which, because of EU law, further keeps government hands out of Google’s earnings. From here, revenue is paid to another subsidiary in Bermuda, where it becomes virtually invisible–under Irish law, this tropical tail end of this money snake isn’t required to disclose any financial documents.

How awesomely not evil.

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old media

The future of media is unclear. Things are very volatile. New revenue models are needed where ‘traditional’ (I hate that word) models are still in place, getting old and crusty.
Yesterday, news broke that Google TV is being blocked by TV studios ABC and CBS over piracy concerns. Maybe the heads of the TV studios should spend some some with Larry and Sergey at Burning Man next year so they can open their minds man, and like, understand that information wants to be free? K? They need to understand the Google will never be satisfied. It has serious dependency issues on all zeros and ones.
You can’t have a television relationship with someone with data dependencies, but at the same time TV needs to figure shit out, unless they want their breakfast, lunch and dinner eaten by iTunes like the music industry. It’s all-around unhealthy. The TV studios are hoarding, grumpy, old recluses who won’t leave their houses, while crack-fiend Google is knocking on all their doors for a hit.
Then we got News Corp. dropping it’s aggregated news content delivery platform, aka – Alesia. Rupert, like the TV studios, doesn’t want to disrupt current revenue streams.
Old media can’t get in the race with a chain wrapped around their axle.
Innovation doesn’t have a safety net to catch you with.

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So that’s where they come from

I’m thoroughly enjoying Steve Johnson’s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From (I was originally introduced to Johnson by my friend Victor with the book Ghost Map).
I’m about a third of the way through the book, and it’s been a constant process of reading and underlining, reading and underlining.
I’m not going to quote the whole book, but there’s one nugget I found very interesting because it’s something I’ve done for years with my sketchbooks and now something I (and many others) do with this blog:

Darwin’s notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in the Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining “commonplace” book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters–just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. The great minds of the period–Milton, Bacon, Locke–were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations.

Wow. A commonplace entry about commonplacing. How meta.

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prohibiting the cleaner fuel

It took 25 % of the fuel market in the midwest.. it was made from corn, it was basically white lightning.

John D. Rockefeller, founder and head of the Standard Oil Company didn’t appreciate Ford cutting into his oil profits, and started funding the ammendment we know as Prohibition.

Because if the constitutional ammendment cut off all alcohol production, all of Fords ethanol alcohol automotive fuel would be wiped out of business, and Standard Oil would increase profits immediately by 25% or more (due to increased growth in car sales) .

Ford continued to make Ethanol compatible vehicles for 12 of the 13 years of prohibition, and then he gave up.

Right after prohibition was over President Teddy Roosevelt broke up the Standard Oil company due to its monopoly of the energy market and interference in Government.

The two parts recombined 88 years later, and now Exxon Mobil have bigger profits than any other company, corporation, or business in the world… consecutively, year after year.

source: documentary “Fuel” by Josh Tickell (via Just A Car Guy)

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being found

SEO And The Long Tail – How Jon Hamm Keeps Bringing New Visitors To My Site

But what this does show is how the Long Tail works for search and SEO. While most people will concentrate on clear search terms and take the first results that Google delivers up to them, others will search with what makes sense to themselves alone. And because of that, they find themselves here. That means that those who optimize their search term for a vary narrow search are missing out. People are searching in the oddest ways and using their own ways of thinking and writing. The only way you’ll get to your desired audience would be to publish really good content as frequently as possible. Publish no less frequently than once a week and ideally, five days a week or more.

I’ve had similar discoveries on my site. The first of which was when I found how popular my Hand & Arrow Icons post was in Google Image searches for “hand cursor icon”. The post ended up achieving my intended goal which was great. Then it got picked up by some big design blogs almost a year after I posted it and I got a huge surge in traffic.
The internet is fun. Anything is possible.

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