via Just A Car Guy

The beautiful designs and illustrations of André Meca.
via Forgotten-hopes

Boston Globe: Gym-Pact bases fees on members’ ability to stick to their workout schedule

Every year, we resolve to hit the gym more often and get fit. And by the end of January, many of us have missed workouts or given up altogether.

According to Yifan Zhang, a 2010 graduate of Harvard College, part of the problem is that customers see gym membership fees as money spent, or “a sunk cost, especially if you pay at the beginning of the year.” That prompted the idea for Gym-Pact in Boston, which she created with Harvard classmate Geoff Oberhofer.

Gym-Pact offers what Zhang calls motivational fees — customers agree to pay more if they miss their scheduled workouts, literally buying into a financial penalty if they don’t stick to their fitness plans. The concept arose from Zhang’s behavioral economics class at Harvard, where professor Sendhil Mullainathan taught that people are more motivated by immediate consequences than by future possibilities.

via PSFK

YouTube: Mr. Jones’ Tengu
via PSFK

asymco: Calling the end of innovation in mobile computers

People are lining up to call the market for mobile phones. Analysts and amateurs alike are connecting points on charts and predicting with confidence the future of mobile platforms. Consensus is forming that there is no future but a quiescent state. By the acclamation of pundits, the survivors are declared to be iOS and Android. They are also predictably arranged in a way similar to OS X and Windows. End of story.

Except for one thing.

3.5 years ago neither of these platforms existed. In fact, it was only two and a half years ago, in mid 2008, that one of the finalists even became a platform with the launch of an app store. The other “winner” only launched in a handset later that year and had no significant volumes until a year ago. In other words, these suddenly predictable platforms have been in existence for less than the life span of one device that runs them.

Have I mentioned how fucking useless analysts are?
Must be nice to have a job that revolves around guessing about the future.
It takes much larger balls to bet the future on a product you actually have to build and sell.

Ars Technica: Electrical current to the brain can get people to think different

What does it take to think different? Changes in the activity of the anterior temporal lobes, if a new study has it right. Thinking the same is actually very useful, since we can use existing mental frameworks to rapidly solve typical problems. But, on occasion, we’re faced with an atypical problem, one where our past problem solving techniques don’t apply, and we need to think of a new way of doing things. At those moments, applying a small electric current to the temporal lobes might just do the trick.

Although having a toolbox of problem-solving techniques can be very valuable, the authors describe how it can make us a prisoner of our past experience. When faced with a simple task, we sometimes keep trying to use one of our existing tools, even if it’s the wrong one for the job.

1961 Mercedes 190SL aka the Mercedes “Bent”
via Just A Car Guy

From a Swann Galleries auction in 2010:

very rare. An original poster from the sanitation workers’ strike that drew Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis, Tennessee the first week of April 1968. This poster and one other, “Honor King, End Racism” were carried by the sanitation workers. Later that week, as King walked out onto the terrace at his motel, he was cut down by a shot purportedly fired by James Earl Ray.

via Still Life

I’ve read articles in the tech news about RIM has a long history of creating great business software and devices – specifically the famous Blackberry messaging devices and smartphones.
The thing is, these last few years for RIM haven’t been good and they’ve just slashed their outlook for Q1 2011.
I’m not sure why RIM doing poorly should be the slightest bit surprising. From a user interface perspective there hasn’t been any breakthoughs. I’ve used my wife’s Blackberry enough to know how stiff and devoid elegance it really is. Yes, the home screen has some unique iconography, but once you get into the email program – the Blackberry’s bread and butter – it’s like taking a time warp back to the 90’s.
Just to put it in perspective, when RIM was winning, this was the smartphone competition:

Just sayin’.

via Instagram

via Girlfriend

via Girlfriend

If you’re an image junkie like me, this means you’ve known about FFFFOUND! for a while and you regularly follow Tumblr and Posterous blogs, or you have one of your own.

This also means you know the animated GIF.

Like it’s more technologically advanced cousin, Flash, the animated GIF started off life getting a bad reputation for being the driving force behind obnoxious, animated banner ads. Like Flash though, the animated GIF was discovered by artists and designers as being capable of much more than selling stuff.

Co.Design has a great post on the work of Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg.

They call their animated GIFs ‘cinemagraphs’ which are, in their words, “something more than a photo but less than a video.”

Another great source of cinegraphs is, if we don’t, remember me.

Like the work of Beck and Burg, the slivers of cinema on IWDRM aren’t just sequences exported from the films. If you look closely at the GIFs, only one element has been isolated and animated, giving them a completely different feeling than many GIFs that feature excepts from films. I discovered IWDRM last year and I’ve been collecting their GIFs ever since.

Here’s one from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

And another one from The Shining:

Perhaps this GIF renaissance has to do with that fact that we’re all moving onto mobile devices like iPhones, iPads where Flash was never designed to work well and thus, has been banished. And if it hasn’t been banished it doesn’t work well.

While expression, storytelling and animation are possible now with the emergence of HTML5 and advanced Javascript classes and frameworks, there’s something beautifully simple about the animated GIF. It requires no plug-in and works as good now as it did 14 years ago when it was conceived.

It’s an autonomous nugget of awesomeness.

An airstream camper of expression.