Lauren and Mary go to DC
After being upside down in the flight simulator at the Air and Space Museum
With an original XEROX Alto
With an original Macintosh
In front of the Supreme Court
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After being upside down in the flight simulator at the Air and Space Museum
With an original XEROX Alto
With an original Macintosh
In front of the Supreme Court
#notebook #medianotes
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Media for Thinking the Unthinkable on Vimeo
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We got to walk around the deck, balconies and inside of the carrier and round the inside of a submarine.
F14 Tomcat
Lauren tries to take off
Lauren with her war face
Lauren with her more relaxed face
A chair that was lightweight, durable, portable and comfortable.
A rescue helicopter. It could land on water. It was my favourite of the day.
Lauren and the A-12, the precursor to the SR-71
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The best teachers are practitioners of the things they teach. Because they apply the material they teach in their own work, it is more likely to be useful and they can better judge how well they are conveying their ideas.
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An Ill-Advised Personal Note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable"
Victor talks about choosing a life’s work that will be important in a hundred years. He cites Carver Mead’s talk at the centennial of the Caltech Electrical Engineering department.
Mead says the following things.
The department was founded by Royal Sorensen. Sorensen’s field was power electronics, which had already gone through the exponential improvement part of its S-curve and had started leveling out. This meant that there wasn’t much left to contribute.
Caltech alums invented quite a few of the foundational technologies of the information age. This was because Sorensen made it a core value to understand something right down to the bottom. This meant people could ignore fields of expertise and work with whatever techniques and knowledge were relevant to achieving their goal.
And you can’t see the field that will be important in a hundred years, just like Sorensen couldn’t see the field of information theory that underpinned the information age. Victor’s lesson from this seems to be that, though you can’t see what field will be important, he can contribute by inventing tools for thinking that are technology independent.
It’s worth watching Mead’s whole talk:
http://ee.caltech.edu/centennial/video/19_mead/flash/19_mead.html
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Scaling Laws and the Speed of Animals
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https://embedwith.tumblr.com/post/101441175857/embed-with-ojiro-fumoto
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We used this recipe.
Prepping the ingredients in regulation headband.
Prepped.
Sautéing the garlic.
Bringing to the boil.
After one hour in the oven.
After six hours in the oven.
Ready to trough.
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Sequelitis - Mega Man Classic vs. Mega Man X - YouTube
Partly about how Mega Man teaches its mechanics. Sometimes, it exposes the player to a new thing in a safe environment and then lets them practice in a dangerous environment. Sometimes, it exposes the player to something where their normal tactics don’t work, but builds in time for them to recover and learn the right tactic. Sometimes, as with the wall jumping, it lets the player “accidentally” trigger a new action and immediately gives them a reason to try and do it again.
Partly about how Mega Man makes the player’s motivations the same as the player character’s: get more powerful weapons and defeat the boss that hurt them. It does this by a) making the powerups of the fictional game world meaningfully fun to the player and b) making the player suffer the same shameful defeat as the character. This means that the player doesn’t have to empathise with the character to care about the game. Or, maybe, it brings out the empathy.
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Alan Kay, 2015: Power of Simplicity - YouTube
Concepts that are too simple are sometimes not powerful enough solve harder problems. For example, Copernicus tried to explain the motion of the planets with circles. What was needed was a slightly more sophisticated building block: ellipses.
Humans are copers, which means we’re not built to throw away a solution that isn’t working, but, instead, we’re built to patch it to keep it working.
He draws an analogy between hierarchical structures and systems of gears. The latter seize up after about 1000 cogs. In contrast, the internet is like a biological organism with a huge number of decentralised cells. The internet has never broken, despite the fact that every node in it has been replaced at least twice.
He says that it’s much better for the invention arms of companies to work on ten year time scales. This avoids people trying to incrementally get to big inventions, which would mean those things never get invented. At XEROX PARC, they spent the first three years inventing, then the next five years polishing the inventions into things that were sellable.
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5 Steps To Re-create Xerox PARC’s Design Magic (From The Guy Who Helpe
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Building the Future, Block By Block - YouTube
About Pico Pico Cafe, a place in Tokyo made to attract a community of game programmers. One of the owners made Pico8 , the wonderful virtual console designed to be a toy box for making game creation accessible.
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Designing And Building Stockfighter, Our Programming Game | Kalzumeus Software
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The Evolution of Cristiano Ronaldo «
Over the past 10 years, two players in the world have been better than the current version of Cristiano Ronaldo: Lionel Messi and the previous version of Cristiano Ronaldo.
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A documentary about two fishermen and their friendship. There are some interesting parts about the craft of fishing. There are some interesting parts about the way the two men’s approaches to fishing mirror the way they live their lives.
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A super interesting documentary about the attempts of three men to climb Meru.
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Video: Justin Bieber, Diplo and Skrillex Make a Hit - The New York Times
Unusually, the animations in the video are not just window dressing, but clever explanations of how the music works.
“This is wrong, PooBear. And he’s like, ‘No, it’s wrong right.’ I just had to get used to it.”
“The voice and mouth and your whole skill structure is like an organic synthesiser.”
“Anyone can copy any synth now. But if you manipulate vocals, it’s something original.”
“We added natual harmonies because we didn’t have anything from [Bieber] so we created our own harmonies. Like this one goes down a seventh.”
“When I do MIDI I usually just draw it in.”
“The drop has an A and B part. The first part’s simple: kind of a hip-hop bass. The second part goes double-time.”
“[On sound and drum sound making.] If you compare it to a painter, so much of the process until the eleventh hour is just getting colours right.”
Skrillex: “It was finding that one little thing. Which was the dolphin sound.”
Diplo: “Everyone wants to know what the violin/flute sound is.
Bieber: "Der-de-ee-oh. That’s actually my vocal that they took and messed with.”
Skrillex: “It’s pitched way up, distorted, bounced and re-bounced, so it sounds worse, almost.”
“You took a little pattern and created it into a whole different sound, but it still has the elements of some human thing. A warmth in the track.”
“It’s so cool that we’re still in an era where people think that people have no talent if they make computer music. It shows how young it still is.”
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!!Con 2015 - Kevin Lynagh: I made a cell phone! (DON'T TELL THE FCC KTHX!) - YouTube
I saw this at !!Con. Kevin is so funny and has such a great sense of craft.
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Really digging this on the PS4. It feels more tactical than other shooters. As well as fast reflexes, you win battles by planning: you attack from the side, you let the factions wear each other down, you box the enemies in, you do hit and run attacks.
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“Sometimes I lie awake at night, feverishly searching for new ways to load myself down with more poorly-paying responsibilities. And then it comes to me: I should start another open-source project!”
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Saw this today at the Whitney. It’s essential to see mobiles in person. All the magic comes from their changing configuration.
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Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems « the jsomers.net blog
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Cezanne's Large Bathers: Painting Raw Experience - YouTube
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We listened to this, and a lot of other cowboy music, as we drove fifteen hours from Boulder, CO to Austin TX. “With one eye swollen up from the back of your hand. And the other eye fixed on the lights of Cheyenne.”
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An incredible game. Lauren and I played it for three hours last night. You use keywords to search a database to find videos of police interviews. You use what is said to choose new keywords to find more videos. Slowly, you piece together what happened.
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