Category: Uncategorized

Get some fun stuff from EAMES OFFICE, a comprehensive site dedicated to the work of Charles and Ray Eames. Somehow their stuff manages to look both dated and trendy, and not simply because it’s hip to be retro. The forms (furniture, architecture) don’t appeal to me nearly so much as the ideas (movies, exhibitions). Power of Ten must be one of the most influential nine minute movies of all time.

Here’s yet another Piece About Blogs… but a good one. Cory Doctorow, one of the keepers of the Boing Boing flame, has written a blog analysis that resonates with me: My Blog, My Outboard Brain (at the O’Reilly Network). Blogs are the thing that, at one time, I thought bookmark lists were going to be. That is, they are useful citations of where you’ve been and why you admired or detested what you saw. But bookmark lists are brittle and opaque. They don’t provide enough context (even if you do bother to carefully categorize them), so you never revisit the sites you bookmarked. Eventually you stop adding to them. You can instantly pop any page onto a bookmark list, but to add to a blog (a blog worth keeping, that is), you have to focus your net-addled brain for more than half a second and describe why a given page interested you in the first place. That extra effort makes your record worth returning to. I stopped bookmarking pages about the time I started blogging.

NPR has a good page about Ron Popeil’s Ronco empire. The Pocket Fisherman, the In-the-Egg Egg Scrambler, the Smokeless Ashtray, Mr. Microphone, I watched all of these many, many times, always wondering who bought the stuff. But people did buy it — Popeil’s pitches changed our relationship with the TV. The Veg-o-Matic actually has a home in the Smithsonian now. In fact, on the NPR page you can watch the original Veg-o-Matic commercial. Go look at it. You may be tempted, like boy who saw Hamlet, to dismiss it as one cliché after another. But it’s not. The man’s establishing a genre. That’s worth a little respect.

By the way, these links to NPR constitute an act of civil disobedience. NPR now requires that you fill out this special form before you link to them. But I didn’t fill it out. Do you suppose they’ll actually enforce this? As Voltaire might have said: I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to link to my extensive and extremely clever web site. Voltaire would’ve had a blog. Oh yeah.

Random interface design note: I have a Bose Acoustic Wave radio/CD player. It’s a solid machine that has served me well, and it has a digital volume control that goes up to 100. Why 100? I guess their industrial designers considered 100 a nice round number (although, like with the car speedometers that go up to 160 mph, I only ever crank mine up to 30 even on a loud day). But the funny thing is, when you increase the volume, it only goes up by two at a time. So you can only land on the even numbers between 0 and 100. Why avoid the odd numbers? Why not just go from 0 to 50 in steps of one at a time? Now perfect happiness eludes me. I can never be truly happy until my volume is set to 17.

Hard drives just keep getting smaller and denser: IBM’s ‘Millipede’ Project Demonstrates Trillion-Bit Data Storage Density. Now you have a place to keep all the files you’ve ever created, all the intermediate drafts of those files, all the movies you’ve ever seen, every song you’ve ever heard, every picture or home movie you’ve ever shot. Okay, there it all is in a great big pile. How will you find anything?

Here’s a good column by Michael Wolff (appearing in New York Magazine) about one potential future for the post-Napster music industry. It’s seems safe to say that the music business won’t disappear, but it sure might turn into something like the book business. Not a terrible business to be in, but also not one with millions of dollars to throw away on frothy extravagance. I recently spent a while talking to a friend of mine who works in the music industry. He said everybody sees the business model imploding, but nobody knows what to do about it. It’s like drifting in a canoe towards the waterfall… Later I sent him a link to this article, and he had not only read it, but everyone at his office was talking about it. It seems to come pretty near the mark: Facing the Music.

The Genome News Network sez: “The first head-to-head comparison of draft human and mouse genome sequences can be summarized in one word — fourteen. Fourteen genes on mouse chromosome 16 are not found in humans.” How do you like that? Out of more than 700 genes on chromosome 16, mice got everything we got, PLUS fourteen extra genes. Pretty sad, if you ask me. What genes do you think they are? The stay-really-small gene (TNY), the beady-eyes gene (BDII), and the be-furry-and-have-a-skinny-pink-tail (FZY) gene. I’m betting that’s three of them right there. How do I submit papers to Science? It also brings to mind a fun experiment: make a knockout mouse that’s missing all fourteen of those genes. Then stand back!

Koylon foam beds. Forced ventilation. Living the life of Riley. James Lileks is an unstoppable creator and collector of oddball miscellany. This postcard from his Motels collection made me laugh so hard that tears were squirting from my eyes. Okay, maybe you won’t think it’s that funny. But still.

Go look. It’s a Welsh blog. You won’t understand it, but it looks so cool: MorfaBlog. Or as the host, Nic Dafis says, “Yn ôl y geiriadur, rhywbeth A chanddo weflau mawr, cyriog, gwefldew. Neu, cyfieithiad diog o’r gair Saesneg ‘weblog’.” (pause for laughter) But seriously, folks…

I went to my college reunion last week and there discovered that a classmate of mine was actually in World Trade One on the 83rd floor when the first plane hit. I knew that no one in our class died in the attack, but I hadn’t considered the people I might know who had close escapes. People have different reactions when asked to recount a story they’ve told many times, but he was willing to tell his one more time. A few tidbits from his story that I hadn’t heard anywhere else: the flexure of the building due to the impact did all kinds of damage throughout the structure, breaking water lines, knocking marble tiling off the walls, and bending door frames. This last apparently trapped some people in their offices by jamming the door shut. Burning fuel pouring down the stairs diverted them from the first stairwell they came to and sent them running to the second, by which time the smoke in the hallways was already very thick. He also said the stairway wasn’t even crowded until he got down into the 40s. Which he knew at the time was a bad sign.

On the way back from the reunion, I stopped in New York to look at the site. It’s just a big construction zone now, the last remnants of debris having been cleared from the site itself. The scene surrounding the big void is more telling. There’s still plenty of damage visible to the nearby buildings, and a few spray-painted signs (“TRIAGE”) remain on the walls. Lots of tourists. Lots of security. The city hasn’t removed any of the tourist signs that tell you fun facts about the towers. I wonder if they ever will.