True designers understand the design isn’t about how something looks, but how it works.
Every product that is designed is usually intended to be built and when it’s built, the look and style usually follow from the design. Of course this doesn’t always happen, as some companies merely apply a style to a product without thinking about the design.
The screenshots below are a great example of being able to tell how much design – not engineering – went into the software on each mobile operating system.
Android’s default media player:

iPhone OS’s media player:

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle:

In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states by precise inequalities that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot simultaneously be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known. In other words, the more you know the position of a particle, the less you know about its velocity, and the more you know about the velocity of a particle, the less you know about its instantaneous position.

This principle is like a woman, I don’t understand much of it, but it intrigues me.

Man do love the Beastie Boys and I always will (It’s like what Chris Rock said – whatever music you were listening to when you started getting laid, you’re gonna love that music for the rest of your life). I was sad when I heard Adam Yauch (MCA) has cancer.
Then I got pissed when I found out his moron plan to beat it:

“We are visualizing taking the energy away from the cancer, and then sending it back at the cancer as lightning bolts that will break apart the DNA and RNA of the cells,” he added. “If you have the time, please join us in whipping up this lightening storm. Mind over matter …”

Seriously MCA, what the fuck. I got news for you, meditation is not going to kill your cancer. Regardless, I wish you the best and I hope you prove me wrong.

From the Telegraph:

They set up a controlled experiment in Punjab earlier this year comparing the behavior and productivity of bees in two hives – one fitted with two mobile telephones which were powered on for two fifteen minute sessions per day for three months. The other had dummy models installed.

And:

After three months the researchers recorded a dramatic decline in the size of the hive fitted with the mobile phone, a significant reduction in the number of eggs laid by the queen bee. The bees also stopped producing honey.

Via Analogue

From ScienceDaily:

The stimulatory effects of caffeine may be nothing more than an illusion, according to new research that shows there is no real benefit to be gained from the habitual morning cup of coffee.

I’ve noticed when I’m out of my normal workday routine, like on a vacation, I get headaches from what seems to be coffee withdrawals. Then I find myself a cup of coffee and boom – headache is gone.

Via Creative Review:

The free app, called StreetMuseum, has been developed with creative agency Brothers and Sisters and makes use of geo tagging and Google Maps to guide users to various sites in London where, via the iPhone screen, various historical images of the city appear …

Awesome. It’s also a natural evolution of the Flickr group A Look Into the Past that was made it’s way around the blogs earlier this year (via Johnny Juice):

And according to Laughing Squid, A Look Into the Past was inspired by Michael Hughes’ “Souvenir” photoset on Flickr:

What a great chain of influence.

From the NY Post:

The term “walled gardens” refers to a service or technology that restricts access only to those using that service, as is the case with Apple’s iTunes, in which music can only be played on Apple devices or through iTunes itself.

What the hell are they talking about? Apple has been selling music as DRM-free MP3’s since April 2009. I can play my tracks on any computer I want.
A more accurate slam would have been Apple’s DRM-protected video content.

via Good Old Valves

Vonnegut: How To Write With Style

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

Vonnegut’s advice is great and echos advice I’ve heard about/from other writers like Hemingway and Stephen King.
The pieces of advice that have helped me the most have been on keeping things simple and writing like myself. No matter the size of the post on this site, I usually reread them at least 5-10 times, each time paying attention to where I can eliminate redundancies and gain more clarity in the idea being conveyed.

I couldn’t pass this up (via SciFi Wire):