Rambles Blog at Star Chamber

On the power of sketching: Interactive Systems for Supporting the Emergence of Concepts and Ideas (SIGCHI Bulletin Vol.30 No.1, January 1998)

Article by Carolyn Snyder who used to work at Jared Spool’s User Interface Engineering. developerWorks: Usability | Web architecture : Paper prototyping

Are you interested in information architecture? It sounds so appealing, doesn’t it? Information architecture. Peter Merholz of peterme fame always has something interesting to say about it. That’s how I came across this entertaining list: jjg.net: information architecture resources.

New Yorker article on why and how the towers fell when they did.

Mixed Messages on the Newsweek site is an entertaining piece by an Iranian-American visiting Tehran. He gives an account of the anti-American museum housed in the former US embassy, including games such as a “carnival strength meter where you pound Uncle Sam on the head to score points and hear feedback like, ‘Wow, you pack quite a wallop.'”

Philip Greenspun’s home page

MazeWorks – Java Games and Puzzles

Britney Spears guide to Semiconductor Physics: semiconductor physics, Edge Emitting Lasers and VCSELs

Salman Rushdie writes Yes, This Is About Islam in the NY Times. He says, “The restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticization, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become modern.” This brief essay and a piece by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek (“The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?” which you have to pay to see online) have sharpened my own views on the topic. I also found “What Terrorists Want” by Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker to be good reading. The essential question is this: are they crazy or rational? If they are rational, what do they want?