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Election maps 2008 > Mark Newman (cousin) updates his cartogram election maps, insanely fast, to show this year's results.
Unboxed - Design Is More Than Packaging [NYTimes.com] > The only smart thing said or written about in this article: "It would be overreaching to say that design thinking solves everything. That?s putting it too high on a pedestal," Mr. Kembel says. "Business thinking plus design thinking ends up being far more powerful."
Another Frightening Show About the Economy [This American Life] > Alex Blumberg and NPR's Adam Davidson - the two guys who reported our Giant Pool of Money episode?are back, and explaining in alarmingly simple terms why shit happened, and how it might have been prevented.
313 - A Handy Map of San Francisco Bay [Strange Maps] > This 'Handy Map of San Francisco' does not say why or whether it is absolutely necessary to paint your right thumbnail black to create the effect of San Francisco.
Making money twice - [37signals] > That's roughly $765,000 over a few years off roughly the same content. Insight and ideas about how we run our business.
World War II Codebreaking Remembered [The Encyclopedia Vulcanica] > And that most importantly, were it not for the works of invention and genius performed at Bletchley Park in contribution to defeating the Nazis, your entire way of life could be markedly different.
Big black holes [Jason kottke] > Put another way, if you had 99 duodecillion dollars, you could buy as many PlayStation 3s as you wanted. Blows your mind, right?
He has got the hustle [Channel 4] > Nice to see a very good mate of ours getting some love: "I'm doing Jude Law next week," Charlie says, before grabbing the phone to negotiate a rate for Hello! syndication. Mr Gray is very well-mannered...it's something he's learnt from hanging around the truly professional and successful of the world.
Important work can be done while daydreaming [The Boston Globe] > The ability to think abstractly that flourishes during daydreams also has important social benefits. Mostly, what we daydream about is each other, as the mind retrieves memories, contemplates "what if" scenarios, and thinks about how it should behave in the future.
Interview with David Simon [The Believer] > My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader.
How to read a movie - Roger Ebert's Journal [Sun Times] > In simplistic terms: Right is more positive, left more negative. Movement to the right seems more favorable; to the left, less so. The future seems to live on the right, the past on the left. The top is dominant over the bottom.
Why America is Fucked [You Tube] > Draplin answers the question of why America is fucked, graphically. A teaser for a new project from Draplin Industries.
Axel Peemoeller - Eureka Carpark Melbourne > Peemoeller designs an interesting way-finding system for a parking lot in Melbourne. "In Melbourne I developed a way-finding-system for the Eureka Tower Carpark. The distored letters on the wall can be read perfectly when standing at the right position. This project won several international design awards."
Large Hadron Collider nearly ready - The Big Picture - [Boston.com] > n of photographs from CERN, showing various stages of completion of the LHC and several of its larger experiments (some over seven stories tall), over the past several years.
Lyons House, Robin Boyd, Sydney [cityofsound] > Great write-up of a tour of Melbourne architect Robyn Boyd, "...The kids apparently enjoyed the fact they could bolt themselves in."
It is a terrible thing to neglect one’s commitment to publishing online. At first I blamed the new job. Then I blamed something else. But now I realize that I spend all my available time reading other people’s blogs, books and papers and haven’t had any remaining time to write something useful or interesting.
I also have been working on the new Designers’ Guide to Brand Strategy - which I think should be called something else this time- but that also makes it tough to write something else about brand up here. Plenty of people have been purchasing the current one, which I greatly appreciate as it is a nice reminder to continue on with the new one.
I’ve bought two new books recently, on brand stuff, which I’ve not yet read. The first being the follow up to the poor quality The Brand Gap, which is ZAG: The #1 Strategy of high-performance brands. Not wanting to judge a book by it’s author, I will be open to the possibility that this book doesn’t need to sit on the pile of other idiotic books like The Pirate Inside, and that Zag is a useful book.
The other book, Brand Innovation Manifesto, seems interesting and I’m hopefull about it. My biggest complaint is when authors complicate the space of brand, branding and brand strategy with their own flavour of the subject, in the process getting it completely wrong - and sell books on that. An interpretation of a subject matter is one thing, but most books simply missed the original point and formed their opinion on the basis of that.
Enough ranting. More tomorrow, or the next day.
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