weston
Programming For Designers
I don't mean "teaching designers to program". I think everyone should know some, but a designer designs primarily. What designers have to do is already as tough and as complex as programmers -- they have to assimilate a lot of things, work on presentation and usually also functionality spec, UI, all the while trying to tell the client in as nice a way as possible that the jumping animated frog might not be the best idea. Programmers take problems, break them into solvable chunks, abstract cases, and combine reusable pieces together to create something useful (hopefully). Designers take problems, break ... read more »The Trouble With
The trouble with print media (newspapers in particular) is it has never forced itself to look into the future, even though its employees were amongst the chroniclers of the future. Newspaper executives never really focused on the reality that as the Internet became pervasive, the idea of a daily newspaper was going to become the subset of an information business -- part of an amorphous goo we call MEDIA. From Facebook to Google to Twitter to blogs, we are all part of a bigger “information” business. Because these new media are attuned to the needs of a new kind of information ...
read more »Time Machines
Dreamtime
Wim Wenders, Until The End Of The World, 1991The eventual aim of Dr Cerf's project is to develop a system that would enable psychologists to corroborate people's recollections of their dream with an electronic visualisation of their brain activity. "There's no clear answer as to why humans dream," according to Dr Cerf. "And one of the questions we would like to answer is when do we actually create this dream?" Dr Cerf makes his bold claim based on an initial study that he says suggests that the activity of individual brain cells, or neurons, are associated with specific objects or concepts. more »
"Dreaming" is also ...
read more »Linotype
Certainty, Uncertainty, Openness, Balanced Anarchy
Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, Inc.
Mind Over Body, Body Over Mind, Mind Over Matter, Matter Over Body
Insula Dulcamara by Paul Klee, 1938For the believers in the soul, let’s call them soulists, the soul assumption appears to be only the smallest of steps from the existence of a unified mind. Yet the soul is a claim for which there isn’t any evidence. Today, there isn’t even evidence for that place soulists step off from, the unified mind. Neurology and neuroscience, working unseen over the past century, have eroded these ideas, the soul and the unified mind, down to nothing. Experiences certainly do feel unified, but to accept these feelings as reality is a mistake. Often, the way things feel ...
read more »Noble Gases Do Not Bond
Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never encountered automatic weapons
Contrary to common scientific opinion, it's now clear that non-native ants are not automatically favored over native ants in disturbed environments. On the other hand, this study closely follows others in that many of the dominant ant species these scientists found are also common in other North American cities. The fact that New York ants are overwhelmingly dominated by only three ant species strongly suggests that it isn't "easy" to be an ant in a highly urban environment. Further studies should focus on why this is the case, with the goal of enhancing biodiversity in an increasingly urban ...
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