It’s pedantic, sure. Isn’t 1.16180 close enough? Yes, it probably would be, if there were anything to scientifically support the notion that the golden ratio had any bearing on why we find certain objects like the Parthenon or the Mona Lisa aesthetically pleasing.

But there isn’t. Devlin says the idea that the golden ratio has any relationship to aesthetics at all comes primarily from two people, one of whom was misquoted, and the other of whom was just making shit up.

—John Brownlee, Co.Design

I agree with the author. The golden rectangle is not some silver bullet for design.

I’m guilty of using the golden ratio into my work:

To my defense, though, I use it pretty damn well.

This has more to do with working within a design “system” with constraints than blindly looking to the golden rectangle for a solution.

Sports brand Adidas has accused fashion designer Marc Jacobs of producing “confusingly similar imitations” of its iconic three-stripe motif with sweatshirts bearing four stripes down each sleeve.

Adidas filed a lawsuit against Marc Jacobs International with the District of Oregon court earlier this week, claiming the American designer’s company used a four-stripe accent similar to its registered Three-Stripe Mark to intentionally “mislead and deceive consumers” into thinking the garments were Adidas designs.

— Dezeen

The world of stripes is cut throat.

John Gruber on the WWDC15 announcement:

I usually don’t play the “let’s read into the design of the Apple event announcement” game, but damned if the center of this doesn’t look like an Apple TV. And the slogan — “The Epicenter of Change” — would fit with an expanded HomeKit role for Apple TV.

June 8-12, San Francisco.

Formula E is an interesting beast.

So what does it sound like when vehicles have no exhaust:

There’s even a live DJ during each race — or “EJ,” as he’s called — who pumps music into speakers around the venue to help make up for the lack of engine noise.

And:

While the racing has been great, the most common complaint about Formula E was lodged well before the series even debuted: its sound, or the perceived lack of it. Traditional race fans love (or love to hate) the sound of combustion engines, and a series that lacks the rumbles and roars usually found in other motorsports is fighting an uphill battle.

“There’s always going to be standard combustion [engine] series out there, and we’re not trying to get rid of them,” Bird says. “There’s no reason why a fan can’t appreciate and love the so-called ‘normal’ concept of racing but at the same time appreciate and love what we’re doing here with our machines.”

But let’s be clear: these cars aren’t silent. The electric motors produce a sound that is somewhere between that of a giant RC car and something out of The Jetsons. They might be whisper-quiet from few hundred yards away, but they register about 80 decibels when they zip by. That’s plenty of noise to get your heart pounding.

I get sad thinking about combustion engines going away, but like most things, we adapt quickly to the new and forget about the old: cigarettes in bars, new operating systems, pagers.

It’s no secret I’ve been very disappointed in the iOS music player app since iOS 7.0 (see rants here and here).

Well, it looks like Apple is finally giving the buttons some decent breathing room in 8.4:

Image via YouTube

—from A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

This week Michael and Bryan discuss drag-and-drop in OS X, Apple Watch, controlling notification settings, the cost of keeping updated with tech, iOS performance on older devices, archiving old Flash websites and old video games, the new Daredevil series and Bryan’s second book, The Blasted Lands.

Listen Now (and subscribe on iTunes)

Steven Levy on the problem with his ever-increasing notifications:

But it’s hard to do this right when every single app wants to send you notifications. Even given that the system will limit itself to notices worthy of instant notice – and The Melvin Renaming is evidence to the contrary – there are just too many notifications elbowing their way into what should be a narrow passage labeled, “Stuff I absolutely need to see.”

This decreases the value of all notifications. If you want an example of another realm, consider the situation of “alarm fatigue” in hospitals, as recently exposed in a book by Dr. Robert Wachter, excerpted here on Backchannel recently. Of the 350,000 drug prescriptions a month that Wachter’s hospital issues, pharmacists get alerts on nearly half of those. In the hospital’s five Intensive Care Units, bedside cardiac units alerts go off 187 times – per patient, per day. That’s 381,560 a month. If you weren’t inured, you’d go crazy. But what about the really serious ones?

We aren’t at that level of desperation yet with online notifications. But the Age of Notifications is about to face its biggest mess yet, as alerts move from phone screens to watch faces. Notifications are just about the entire point of a smart watch – you’re not going to be reading books, watching movies or doing spreadsheets on them. And a tilt of the wrist is the perfect delivery system for those little blips.

I say these are his ever-increasing notifications because I don’t have this problem. Because I turn off most notifications on my iPhone. The only time my phone vibrates is when I receive a phone call. You know, that old-timey medium were you hear a voice and you talk into your device and they can hear you.

I understand I’m an outlier in how I handle my notifications, but I still don’t have any sympathy for these self-made “victims” of notifications. I am in charge of my device, my device is not in charge of me. As George Carlin said, I have this real moron thing I do, it’s called thinking. When I install a new app, and that app asks permission to send me notifications, I think for a minute if really makes sense for Flappy Bird or Instagram to send me notifications. The answer is usually no.

I have some advice for anyone who feels their device is running and ruining his or her life:

• Delete Facebook from your device

Now those hours you’d normally be wasting following the lives of other people? Use a small fraction of that time in the settings area of your iPhone or Android phone. Familiarize yourself with how notifications are handled and turn off the unimportant ones.

I’m normally a big fan of Steven Levy, but shame on him for writing that piece.

Great insight by Basecamp founder Jason Fried on how Instagram and Twitter feel different:

Every scroll through Instagram puts someone’s good day in front of me. A vacation picture, something new they got that they love, pictures of nature, pictures of people they love, places they’ve been, and stuff they want to cheer about. It’s just flat out harder to be negative when sharing a picture. This isn’t a small thing – it’s a very big deal. I feel good when I browse Instagram. That’s the feel that matters.

So now I have a choice… When I have a few minutes to kill, and my phone is in front of me, I almost always reach for Instagram. I never regret it. I come away feeling the same or better. When I occasionally reach for Twitter, I discover someone’s pissed about something. I often come away feeling worse, feeling anxious, or just generally not feeling great about the world. Twitter actually gives me a negative impression of my friends. I know it’s not Twitter doing it, but it’s happening on Twitter. that’s how Twitter feels to me.

I’m on Twitter every day and it’s definitely a place to show off how witty, topical or pissed off you are.

Instagram is just where i like to post pictures of cars I find.

Jim Dalrymple on what metric is going to determine if the Apple Watch is a success:

Even though the iPad sold almost 25 million units in the last fiscal quarter, it’s not up to the 75 million that the iPhone sold. For a lot of people that’s the measure of success, without taking into account that they are completely different products, serving different markets.

So, how will we measure the success of Apple Watch? Will it be pre-order sales? Perhaps, first weekend sales? Number of overall units? How about total quarterly profit? The number of magazine covers it’s on?

The measurement of success will be different for almost everyone. But I don’t believe that any of those are as important as one measure of success that will be a bit more difficult to track: are people still using Apple Watch after three months.

Another factor to consider in the measure of success of a product launch is not just the amount of sales, but the speed at which the product sold. The iPhone took a fraction of the time to get to the same 8-digit sales numbers it took the original iPod. My guess is the Watch sales will not be flying off the shelves as quickly, initially, as the iPhone and therefor will be deemed a dud. I also could be completely wrong.

But Apple is a marathon runner, not a sprinter. They iterate and improve month after month, year after year. If the sales numbers or the product experience don’t impress you this summer, let’s check back in a year.

And to circle back to Jim’s point, if the Apple Watch does experience slow growth over the next 2 years, this could likely mean many were initially skeptics who held off buying, but they saw that the Watch proved itself worthwhile to the early adopters and they decided to buy.

Jenna Kutcher

via this isn’t happiness

Steven Johnson responds to the Apocalyptic Schadenfreude of east coast news stories:

The question is whether that engineering is sustainable. What the Times piece explicitly suggests is that California has been living beyond its means environmentally. That’s the point of those extraordinary overhead photographs of lush estates, teeming with greenery, bordering arid desert. You see those images and it’s impossible not to feel that something shameful is happening here. And yet, picture a comparable view of Manhattan sometime in the depths of January, with a thermal imaging filter applied. The boundary between Man and Mother Nature would be just as stark: frigid air surrounding artificial islands of heat. It’s true that New York City distributes that artificial heat much more efficiently than the rest of the country, thanks largely to its density, but it’s still artificially engineering your environment, whether you want to make a dry place wet, or a cold place warm. And while the Northeast has an advantage over California in terms of rainwater, California has a decided advantage in terms of temperature and sunlight, particularly the coastal regions where almost all the people live. Coastal California enjoys one of the most temperate climates anywhere in the world, which allows its residents to consume far less energy heating or cooling their homes. California is dead last in the country in terms of per capita electricity use. Thanks to the state’s abundant sunshine (and pioneering environmentalism) there are more home solar panels installed in California than in all the other states combined. If you’re trying to find a sustainable place for 40 million people to live, there are plenty of environmental reasons to put them in California.

You’re either living on west coast with water shortages or living on the east coast with endless blizzards and flooding. Yay!

via Twitter