Here’s some events that happened on April 27th:

• 1124 – David I becomes King of Scots.
• 1773 – The Parliament of Great Britain passes the Tea Act, designed to save the British East India Company by granting it a monopoly on the North American tea trade.
• 1810 – Beethoven composes his famous piano piece, Für Elise.
• 1941 – World War II: German troops enter Athens.
• 1977 – Designer Michael Mulvey emerges from his mother’s womb after a 24-hour labor
• 1981 – Xerox PARC introduces the computer mouse.

from Wikipedia:

It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions.

Brian Chen for Wired GadgetLab, 26 Feb 2009, Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone:

What’s wrong with the iPhone, from a Japanese perspective? Almost everything: the high monthly data plans that go with it, its paucity of features, the low-quality camera, the unfashionable design and the fact that it’s not Japanese.

Bloomberg Businessweek, 23 April 2010:

Apple Inc.’s iPhone shipments to Japan more than doubled in the past year, capturing 72 percent of the country’s smartphone market, a research firm said.

Granted, some of the missing items from the 3G iPhone Chen mentioned in the Wired article were subsequently added to the 3GS — like MMS messaging, a better camera and video recording — but the Wired article was still way off-base.

The trouble with easy listening:

In other words, I considered listening to an album an activity in and of itself. It was not something I did while working on homework, let alone while checking e-mail or thumbing out text messages.

From the NYTimes:

In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.

Jay Parkinson’s Awesomeness Manifesto:

The vast majority of companies — in my research, greater than 95% — can only create what I have termed thin value. Thick value is real, meaningful, and sustainable. It happens by making people authentically better off — not merely by adding more bells and whistles that your boss might like, but that cause customers to roll their eyes.

Heed to Design.

Edward Tufte on Windows Phone 7:

The WP7S interface has an extra sequence/layer added by big-button opening screens for the new ways of organizing stuff. Compared to the IPhone, most of the WP7S organizing screens have lower content resolution, which violates flatness and leads to hierarchical stacking and temporal sequencing of screens. In day-to-day use, maybe the panorama screens will solve the stacking/sequencing problem, or maybe they will just clutter up the flow of information. Of course Microsoft’s customers are already familiar with deep layerings and complex hierarchies.

I thought similar things when I watched a handful of demos of the new Windows mobile OS. It’s definitely different, un-iPhone, for lack of a better term, but not different in a good way.
It looks like a shell for an eventual mobile operating system, a working wireframe if you will.
On this note, Tufte nails it on the flatness and confusing ‘openness’:

The WP7S screens look as if they were designed for a slide presentation or for a video demo (to be read from a distance) and not for a handheld interface (read from 20 inches). For example, the headline type is too big, too spacious. One design lesson here is that most interface design work should be done at actual final scale and all internal demos should be on actual hardware rather than on pitch slides or big monitor screens. After all, users see the interface only at actual size, and so should interface designers, their managers, and so on up the management chain.

This piece by Matt Taibbi on Rollingstone.com makes me feel angry and helpless:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

Dalematic is into decay these days.

the photography of Alexey Titarenko (via)

A must-read post for designers, and he references a book I’m embarrassed to say I don’t own yet, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud:

The image on the left is a face of a specific person. The image on the right is the concept «face»; it could be any person. When designing user interfaces, we rarely ever want to show a specific entity; typically, we want to convey an idea or a concept. Details can easily distract from that idea or concept.

A great question posted by Matt over at 37Signals, Do Americans have bad taste?
He wonders:

Interesting question re: the taste of Americans. I think there’s def more of a culture of design in Europe and some parts of Asia/S America. Even little things tend to look designed. Even if it’s just a restaurant menu or signage for a bookstore. There’s an appreciation for details and things that look good.

Read the comments section too, there’s a lot of great points of view.

I don’t have a PS3 yet, but I want this game:

Playing the first sections of our preview disc of Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time, it was easy to become somewhat jaded. The platforming is, of course, wonderful. The graphics are attractive. The writing is well above average. We’ve long known that Insomniac knows how to create a strong 3D platformer, and for an hour or so, this feels like more of the same. The same is very, very good, mind you. But we’ve seen it before. …Then Clank, the robot sidekick, enters his own head, and the above-average takes a turn for the incredible.

(my emphasis)

This has been sitting in my Instapaper queue forever:

When one becomes obsessed with a beautiful object, it isn’t because we want that object to come into our own personal world. It’s in fact the reverse. We want to enter its world. Of course, that thing that we found to be so beautiful at first glance may actually have some awful flaws. Really expensive yet excruciatingly uncomfortable shoes come to mind. We want it to work out so badly.