I can’t remember how I found SkyVector. All I know is it has some great chart porn.

Google sees you as a user, Amazon sees you as a consumer, Microsoft sees you as an employee (though they’re trying to change that).

Apple sees you as a person, but one at leisure who doesn’t want to be using a computer in the first place.
—Drewbot

This new wave is also opportunistic. But in a much hotter real estate market with lower start-up costs, it’s driven as well by a taste for “authenticity,” “character” and other buzzwords today’s tech firms love. At the same time, constructing anything new here is a major headache. The city is crippled by an obstructionist set of city planning rules — the consequence of local activism and a Talmudic bureaucracy. Legislation from the mid-’80s caps the total amount of new office space that can be built here. All this contributes to why adaptive reuse has taken hold.
—Michael Kimmelman, Urban Renewal, No Bulldozer, NYTimes.com
So is Kimmelman saying these “obstructionist” rules are a good thing? Seems the tech nerds moving in would likely pass over new buildings and offices anyway (if they did exist) for “authentic” existing spacings.

Pocket Art Director
via Designer News

I don’t care what you call it. I call it awesome.

Over at the New Yorker, Jill Lepore calls out Clayton Christensen on his innovation and disruption theories:

In his original research, Christensen established the cutoff for measuring a company’s success or failure as 1989 and explained that ” ‘successful firms’ were arbitrarily defined as those which achieved more than fifty million dollars in revenues in constant 1987 dollars in any single year between 1977 and 1989–even if they subsequently withdrew from the market.” Much of the theory of disruptive innovation rests on this arbitrary definition of success.
I love Christensen’s work, but it’s always interesting to read opposing views.

—John Oliver

This week Michael and Bryan discuss tea, coffee, the Digital Cliff, sports better and worse than soccer, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and why Microsoft Kinect sucks.
Oh, and Al Pacino helps us express our loathing of Skype and shitty Internet service in the United States.
Weekly Exhaust, Episode 4
If you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, contact Michael.

“Smartwatches are stupid,” says Hartmut Esslinger, Apple’s first head of design and creator of the company’s Snow White design language. “Why would I put cheap electronics on my wrist as a symbol of (my) emotion?” Esslinger also calls Fitbit, the popular fitness tracker, a gimmick. “I know when I am tired,” he says, referring to the device’s value proposition of counting calories through the day. Esslinger’s remarks about wearable tech may seem provocative but they represent a fundamental design problem in the industry.
—Forbes
Hartmut is right. The current crop of smartphones does suck. This is what makes this fall even more exciting—when Apple is likely to announce whatever it is they’re going to announce. Historically, Apple is never first to market, but it’s always best to market.

Found in Batman #230, which has a great cover, too.

Australia’s landmark cigarette legislation banning logos and putting dire health warnings and graphic images of sick or dying smokers on packs seems to be working, data shows, even as tobacco companies argue business is better than ever.
Michelle Innis, NYTimes.com

Anyone else seen these kids “graduating” from kindergarden this month?
Can anyone tell me what the big achievement is?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Min Ming Lo breaks down all the different share icons in existence today.
Personally? I’m digging his “milkshake” proposition. I even like the unintentional reference to There Will Be Blood (or was it?).
At the end of the day, icons—like English, Chinese or Spanish—are a language. In case of the Share icon, there’s different ways of representing it. Some representations are more obscure than than others, but they’re dialects and dialects are neither right nor wrong, they just are (well, technically, it’s it’s called soda, not pop).

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.
—Elon Musk, Telsa Blog