The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.

—Jessica Hische
via The Brooks Review

The streamline Mercedes of Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss lead the field through the banking, Italian Grand Prix, Monza, September 13, 1955

via asaucerfullofwheels

Ars Technica: Adobe throws in towel, adopts HTTP Live Streaming for iOS
I used Flash as a tool to create great interactive experiences for clients for many years and it’s still superior to HTML5 & Javascript for creating said experiences, but i have yet to read an article that has convinced me that having Flash on my iPhone or iPad is a good idea.
Seems Flash and portable computing weren’t meant to be.
I’m sorry Adobe, but you and Flash don’t own online video. I’m glad you’re coming to realize this.

Oh yes, let’s check out the technical specifications:

16-bit microprocessor • 16K RAM • 26K ROM • up to 30K ROM in Solid State Software™ Command Modules • built-in BASIC • sound effects, five full octaves of music and 16-color graphics • built-in equation calculator. Accessories: 13″ color monitor • Solid State Speech™ Synthesizer • disk memory drive and control • telephone coupler (modem) • thermal printer • RS 232 interface • dual cassette cables • wired remote controllers.

via Modern Mechanix

Games Beat: Will Wright says games are headed toward ubiquity, diversity, and art

“Almost every new technology is an amplification of our body,” Wright said, “Computers, the internet, social networks expand everything. The most important thing they expand is our imaginations and our brains. I think of games as imagination amplifiers. We can construct these elaborate worlds, play with them, share them back and forth, and this is one of the culturally most impactful things that our medium can offer.”

Maybe it’s why some of us are trying to archive it like it’s art.
I’ve been tuned to the importance of gaming in our culture ever since my brother turned me onto Jane McGonigal‘s book, Reality Is Broken.

On YouTube:

Immediately after the 2011 national Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, a machine built by the Purdue’s Society of Professional Engineers team completed a flawless run of 244 steps setting a world record now featured online by the World Records Academy.

It doesn’t have the poetry of other Goldberg pieces I’ve seen (like OK Go’s video, or that Honda commercial), but impressive nonetheless.
via The Escapist

via Comically Vintage

Scientists are talking about replacing spark plugs with frickin’ “lasers”:

Engines make NOx as a byproduct of combustion. If engines ran leaner — burnt more air and less fuel — they would produce significantly smaller NOx emissions.

Spark plugs can ignite leaner fuel mixtures, but only by increasing spark energy. Unfortunately, these high voltages erode spark plug electrodes so fast, the solution is not economical. By contrast, lasers, which ignite the air-fuel mixture with concentrated optical energy, have no electrodes and are not affected.

Lasers also improve efficiency. Conventional spark plugs sit on top of the cylinder and only ignite the air-fuel mixture close to them. The relatively cold metal of nearby electrodes and cylinder walls absorbs heat from the explosion, quenching the flame front just as it starts to expand.

Despite rocky intiatives like it’s new paywall, it’s good to see there’s interesting work happening at the New York Times:

For the past several months, the R&D Lab has been working, quietly, on a time-based representation of how the Times’ news content is being shared in Twitter’s social space. Its name: Project Cascade. Superficially, it’s a data visualization, but it’s actually a tool that could, ever so slightly, change the way we think about online engagement.

It’s the product of a collaboration among Mark Hansen, the UCLA stats professor who spent a spring 2010 sabbatical working at the Times as what Zimbalist calls the paper’s “futurist-in-residence” — that casual title alone offers evidence of the scope of the R&D Lab’s ambition — along with Jer Thorp (data artist in residence) and Jake Porway (data scientist). And it has, despite its pragmatic uses, a firmly artistic attitude: Hansen, along with the artist Ben Rubin, designed the “Moveable Type” screen installation in the Times’ lobby, and Thorp, whose work we’ve written about previously, has converted data from the Times’ API into visualizations that are both revealing and stunning.

The team had access to a trove of usage data for Times stories, and wanted to figure out a way to see and understand the life those stories adopt once they leave the newsroom’s confines and go out into the world. The tool, which focuses on Twitter and uses information from the Bit.ly URL shortener, is their solution. “What it attempts to do,” Zimbalist says, “is dimensionalize and make really physical and tangible the way that news is shared.”

via FishbowlNY

Wired has translated and posted an academic essay by Italian film scholar Federico Giordano on the problems with archiving video games:

Videogames come to us as a form of media which have, on the one hand, some affinities with other previous forms such as cinema, television, technological parks, board games or role-playing games, and even panoramas and dioramas. It is this aspect in itself that makes videogames a medium that can be “archived.”

On the other hand, videogames seem to be a decisive break from these forms. They develop themselves as a specific system of relationships between the text and users.

He identifies three guidelines (borrowed from the KEEP project) for archiving – a) storage, b) transfer and c) emulation.
Here’s a section on emulation:

The “emulation” of Bionic Commando, as with other such games, is not the same as its “storage.” Emulation fails to preserve in detail the experience of the original game, and it certainly cannot store the physical support which was part of the game experience. Generally, emulated games alter the game rhythm, the rendering of the graphics, and the sound, changing the spatial and temporal performance of the original games.

Amiga can be reproduced only partially by WinUAE or other emulators, due to the internal limits of the software. The response time of old joysticks and keyboards, which are different from Gamepads and today’s controllers, make it intrinsically impossible to reproduce the game experience.

via The Escapist

Seth Godin: The realization is now:

I regularly hear from people who say, “enough with this conceptual stuff, tell me how to get my factory moving, my day job replaced, my consistent paycheck restored…” There’s an idea that somehow, if we just do things with more effort or skill, we can go back to the Brady Bunch and mass markets and mediocre products that pay off for years. It’s not an idea, though, it’s a myth.

John Gruber on the slack all the reviewers are giving to iPad’s competitors:

I don’t understand why so many reviewers bend over backwards to grade these things on a curve. If the iPad 2 had the problems and deficiencies the Xoom and PlayBook have, these same reviewers would (rightly) trash it, and declare (again, rightly) that Apple had finally lost its Midas touch.

These aren’t “beta” tablets. They’re bad tablets. It’s that simple. It’s true that their hardware seems closer to iPad-caliber than their software, but improving software is the hardest part of making products like these. By the time RIM releases “a serious software update or three” the entire market will have changed. The truth is, Motorola, Samsung, and now RIM have released would-be iPad competitors that pale compared to the iPad. Just say it.

I’m obviously a fan of car metaphors and they seem to be going around lately in the tech world.
To rephrase Gruber’s response, if the PlayBook was a Ferrari (I’m partial to the 458), it would be a Ferrari that can’t make left turns and doesn’t have adjustable seats. Yes, it’s a Ferrari, and it’s fast and grips the road like a jungle cat, but it’s incomplete. It’s missing important features.
To digress a bit, this is one of the reasons I love BBC series Top Gear (not the crap US version) – they don’t pull punches. If a Bentley handles like shit, they say so. The tech world would be wise to take some notes from Jeremy Clarkson and team*.
* For a great example see Top Gear’s review of Alpha Romeo’s 8C, at around the 3:40 mark is when Clarkson lets the honestly flood gates wide open.

I came across some great pictogram posters while hunting around The Noun Project’s blog. There’s a whole set of posters up on Flickr.

The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world’s visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way.