And what did I do? I pushed back at him about the talk he gave. While he was making his points on stage, I was taking an inventory of the things I didn’t agree with. And when presented with an opportunity to speak with him, I quickly pushed back at some of his ideas. I must have seemed like such an asshole.
[Been there. Trying to teach “give it five minutes” to my son. Might be one of the better things I can do for him.]
collin’s gist: But what about the cheaters?:
I would design a system that lets players play. And then I would design an identity system that reduces complete anonymity and records all the action of the game. Nobody wants to play with a cheater and a cheater will be on record.
[I like this idea a lot. It plays into my sense of simplicity and the natural world. I’ve repeatedly used this pattern in my life, writing music for the players rather than the other way around. In the end, rules must be embraced as a willful limitation and ultimately cannot be enforced.]
Dan Black is one-half of the Chicago-based design duo Landland. Besides his love of design, he has a real fondness for brown shirts and referring to himself in the third-person. With muted tones, his atmospheric landscapes often evoke a sense of nostalgia. This is evident in his work for The Hold Steady, which also happens to be this week’s poster pick.
[Nice.]
Source: Yummy Fresh grain feed!
We’re hoping to succeed; we’re okay with failure. We just don’t want to land in between. The app idea, which came first, was a way we were hoping to make TV without going through all the TV hoops. The magazine came later. Of course you want your peers and the public to engage with something like this, but I don’t have any idea of who the people are or what they really think of it. I’m always prepared for people to be like, “This is just f—ing too ridiculous,” and then it will all be over.
[snip -Ed.]
The first audience I think about is us: Can we make something we don’t hate? Then it’s my friends: Can I create something they will think is cool even though they have to listen to me bitch all the time? Then it’s people out in the world. And my secret hope is that a certain aspect of the magazine leads them down an unexpected alley—reading more Junichiro Tanizaki, or chasing down a Bill Orcutt record, or seeking out Kay & Ray’s potato chips.
I think Dave is incapable of stopping himself from following ideas that interest him. He doesn’t have a brand he’s worried about; he’s not worried about a message; he’s not interested in trying to create something that’s going to be a blockbuster. Failure is an option, but only when you’ve done something that says, “This is the most honest thing we can put out there.” So that allows us to make it as weird as we want because we believe in what we’re doing.
I can’t speak to how he runs his businesses, but he has just scores and scores of talented people, and he is creating scenarios where they run this restaurant and this restaurant—Dave Chang is not the chef of it. I’m probably in a much more stoney-baloney sort of way into that idea, but, also just creatively, that’s exciting to me. You find people and let them really go out on their own with it and then shape it as much as it needs to land on its feet.
[The bold bits (added by myself) are a model I’ve followed for years.]
Cars Kill Cities « Progressive Transit:
Contrary to how it may sound, I do not want to rid the earth of cars. I just want to use them smarter. Do you really need a 2-ton vehicle to pickup your dry-cleaning? Probably not. Although I do see the appeal in loading a family of 6 into an SUV and traveling to Florida for vacation. That is a totally reasonable use of an automobile. What I really want is clean, walkable, safe, affordable, and family-friendly cities and towns.
[I was just talking to my wife about the impact of living far from work and school. We have no easy solutions at the moment, but we’re thinking about what we can do…]
Source: Dave WIner
Can we buy your search engine?:
Can we operate our own search engine? Can the developers who lead us there get unreasonably rich even if they don’t control our future? These are all questions that I believe we can address. I think we can all win. And I think that until we do this, and do it right, we’ll be stuck in the same infinite loop we’ve circling as long as I’ve been in tech.
[More to consider.]
Source: Scripting News
Farhad Manjoo:
Apple’s profits ($13 billion) exceeded Google’s entire revenue ($10.6 billion).
[The numbers were crazy good.]
Source: Daring Fireball
Daniel’s Great Annual Birthday Ride:
We set out on an intentionally short, but vertically-challenging ride. Daniel learned from last year that if he didn’t set my expectations properly about the verticality of the ride, I would curse his name peppering my expletives with promises of great bodily hard. I’m ok to ride hills, I just like to KNOW that I’m going to be multidimensionally (sure, it’s a word) suffering.
[That’s not the only thing I learned. I also learned that that I should not have Jenni ambush me with video. Had I known that was going to happen, I would have reengaged my brain. You see we were standing in a spot with a great view of the valley from the Hudson River from the top of the first eastern wave of Ramapo hills. Having just climbed it, I wasn’t thinking about anything but “It’s cold (now that I’ve stopped)”, and “it’s only get colder on the trip down.” I hadn’t engaged any higher order thinking a that point. Naturally, that is when she points a camera at me, and suggests that I should have something to say. Oy. Next time. This new bit of climbing (who knew it was there?) will add a nice bit to my climbing ride, and is quiet enough for hill repeats when necessary. As a bonus, it is closer to me than any other climb with some length to it. I also haven’t tried it in the other direction which could be less steep, but longer. Fun.
I also learned that there is entirely too much bike gear in the entrance to our play room, even if ignore Jenni sprawled on the floor.]
Source: JenniBlog™ 2.0
The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA:
In other words: Apple is trying to establish a rule that whatever I create with this application, if I sell it, I have to give them a cut. And iBooks Author is free, so this arrangement sounds pretty reasonable.
[This is being bandied back and forth. Where else but through iBooks would an iBooks file be used so who cares, or maybe it was an overzealous lawyer at Apple, or as the above. What is the place of books in the future of education.
I was rarely interested in sitting and reading a textbook. Even history, with its arc and story was often reduced to a memorization of a bunch of facts about which I no longer had the slightest interest. But science lab, or a field trip to a historical place, or anything where you did something, worked with something, *touched* something worked for me.
So where do textbooks fit? Where does it make sense to have a primary learning experience consist of this? Most of us can look up facts whenever we need them. We can find well written accounts of virtually any topic, and it’ll include almost up to the minute news and recent changes in all but the most esoteric fields.
What I’d like to see for my kid is some sort of 1:1 iPad to student program. That should easily cover the 5 Rs. Art class, music class, etc. can all be bought this way as well, although I wouldn’t try and remove the chance for kids to play real instruments, apply paint to canvas, water color, go to museums, and mix stuff together in a science lab. Quite the opposite, I would encourage that more time and money be spent on those things. The social experience of going to school, the chance to bring Noah first hand (literally) experience with things that I cannot are why I want from his school. I admit, to my sorrow, that part of this is also “day care”. Both my wife and I work, so we need to make sure some one we trust is caring for Noah, but I want that time filled with great stuff now, while his mind is like a sponge. For the moment, Noah’s working on the basics (reading , writing, etc.) Soon those things will be just gateway skills to the real stuff. And I want him to have a modern education, not one that was designed 100 years ago.]
Source: venomous porridge
turnings :: daniel berlinger 