Never tell me the odds.

&#8212Han Solo, Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back
via magalomania

Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw on the the future of gaming consoles and the false promise from 3D:

3D is not the future. It’s not “immersive.” At best it makes everything look like a six-inch paper cut-out, and in order to create that effect it has to reduce the quality of the image. After years and years of the entertainment industry working towards making bigger and crisper images, suddenly they’re trying to make us forget about all that because, holy shit, a thing looks like it’s in front of another thing because of an exploitable quirk in binocular vision. Well, they can’t do it. You either need glasses or you need to keep your head still at all times, and no new technology has ever lasted that’s less convenient to use than what it’s supposed to replace.

I finally have my my copy of Feltron’s 2010 Annual Report.
Instead of a standard report of his own activities during 2010 (like he did in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 & 2009), he decided to traverse his father’s timeline from 1929-2010.
Incredible work once again.

Ben Brooks reacts to Justin William’s reasoning on why Apple’s going to keep it’s lead in tablets for a while:

Justin Williams has a nice take on why Apple won’t be losing its lead in tablets anytime soon. The bottom line is that too many companies are shipping incomplete products with the promise of updates that will fix all the problems to come later — except that those updates are shipping.

It reminds me of photographers that snap a picture, look at it and realize it isn’t very good — then go on to state: “Umm, I’ll fix it in Photoshop later.” Except that “fixing” a photo in Photoshop takes just about as much talent as creating a great photograph to begin with would — often it takes even more talent in my book.

Technology Review: Will the Next Zuckerberg Be a Designer, not a Hacker?

A designer-founder can bring user-focused insight to everything from interfaces and Human Experience to information architecture to branding. We think that the world would be a better place were more designer-founders building products that rapidly grow to large scale.

What is this ‘design’ thing I hear everyone speaking of?

NYTimes: A New Generation’s Vanity, Heard Through Hit Lyrics

Now, after a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs, Dr. DeWall and other psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesized, the words “I” and “me” appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in “we” and “us” and the expression of positive emotions.

“Late adolescents and college students love themselves more today than ever before,” Dr. DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, says. His study covered song lyrics from 1980 to 2007 and controlled for genre to prevent the results from being skewed by the growing popularity of, say, rap and hip-hop.