Skype is not profitable. It’s really more like a moderately good post-impressionist painting than a company: it only makes money for people when it changes hands.

—Andy Ihnatko

via Ben Brooks

All these years of living and I’m still surprised to see Q come before R, S, and T. Q should be hangin with V, W and X. I’m sure of it.

via my brother on Twitter

NYTimes: How Manhattan’s Grid Grew

via Kottke

A big congratulations to my team at Roundarch and the team at Bloomberg Sports on the new Trade Analyzer 2011 app for iPad – especially my design colleague Silvia Brown for the beautiful work she did on the interface design.
With that said, what makes this application great isn’t just the great interface design but all the technology and databases and algorithms working behind the scenes. It’s the transitions between screens, the reaction of buttons to your touch. It’s about all the data getting pulled from MLB for the player cards.
Details, details, details.
As Steve Jobs has said, design isn’t just about how it looks, it’s about how it works.

From a comment on Phillip Greenspun’s review of the Motorola Xoom (via Daring Fireball):

I invented a drinking game a while ago.
For any article or other written piece about Android, take a drink if any of the following are in the article:

“Open” (take two hits for this one)

“expected to…”

“soon”

“when ____ arrives…”

“will be able to when…”

“update will enable…”

“in the next few ____…”

I have noticed many people seem to be less fans of Android and more anti-Apple. Microsoft is barely hanging on with its phone OS and they’re nowhere to be seen in the tablet game, so PC people have nowhere to go but Android, with all it’s inconsistencies and excuses – like why having Flash is great, except Flash doesn’t always perform great.

Why Leaders and Innovators Need Solitude to Do Good Work

Forty years of research on brainstorming shows that individuals produce more and better ideas than groups do. Studies also suggest that the path to excellence in many fields is not only to practice, but to practice alone. And creativity researchers have found that many highly creative people were shy and solitary in high school, and recall their adolescence with horror. (I explain all this in detail in my forthcoming book, QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.)

This is one of many reasons that introverts — who are more likely than others to carve out solitary time — are often very creative, and make unexpectedly fine leaders.

While a different idea, this brings to mind having one decision maker on on a project versus design-by-committee. As anyone who’s been on a project (design or otherwise) knows, when there isn’t a go-to person and everyone’s voice has to be heard and incorporated into the product, that product inevitably ends up a watered-down mess. Barely competent at many things, great at nothing.

We work because it’s a chain reaction, each subject leads to the next.

—Charles Eames

via Frank Chimero who has some interesting words in reaction to the quote:

The Eames were sharks. One just has to read what Charles said. In work, it’s not that one project leads to the next, it’s that one subject leads to the next. If we’re really sniffing out solutions to the problems of people, then we’ll be going down some serious rabbit holes.

We don’t need to say “multi-disciplinary designer” any more. If we’re truly trying to make things that help all of us to live better, it’s implied and redundant.

*I stole that title from this isn’t happiness. I laughed my ass off, it was too perfect.

Bill Cunningham New York, a film by Richard Press:

The “Bill” in question is 80+ New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham. For decades, this Schwinn-riding cultural anthropologist has been obsessively and inventively chronicling fashion trends and high society charity soirées for the Times Style section in his columns “On the Street” and “Evening Hours.” Documenting uptown fixtures (Wintour, Tom Wolfe, Brooke Astor, David Rockefeller–who all appear in the film out of their love for Bill), downtown eccentrics and everyone in between, Cunningham’s enormous body of work is more reliable than any catwalk as an expression of time, place and individual flair. In turn, Bill Cunningham New York is a delicate, funny and often poignant portrait of a dedicated artist whose only wealth is his own humanity and unassuming grace.

I love documentaries, I love photography, I love New York, and this looks great.

Without play, there is no experimentation.

—Paul Rand

via this isn’t happiness

Chrysler Turbine Car

The fourth-generation Chrysler turbine engine ran at up to 44,500 revolutions per minute, according to the owner’s manual, and could use diesel fuel, unleaded gasoline, kerosene, JP-4 jet fuel, and even vegetable oil. The engine would run on virtually anything and the President of Mexico tested this theory by running one of the first cars–successfully–on tequila.

We like to think of electric cars and hybrid cars and cars that run on alternative fuel as new concepts but there’s been people working on these technologies for a long time.
via Good Old Valves