Just wanted to point to a neat little video over on blip.tv where Matt Biddulph gives a short presentation on getting real world data into Second Life. Always of interest to me. There’s also a related post discussing this effort on Joshua Kaufman’s blog called “Building Bacteria in Second Life” (Link) that also get’s into Spimes (something else of interest to me).
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There’s a curious entry over on O’Reilly, “The Blonde Correction” (Link), that struck me as being relevant to the design community. From that post:
What I found interesting about this is how much it tells us about faint signals and how the mind sees patterns. What we call intuition is often something we recognize but don’t quite have a conscious story for. Rattigan seems to me to have picked up on the “blonde” connection mostly as a good headline for his show segment, but he had a real point to make. In fact, we all look for hooks on which to hang things that we know, but can’t prove.
Kids today have it so good. Case in point: the above radio-controlled water toy. I was surfing through C|Net’s “Crave” blog the other day when I saw that thing; a radio-controlled water cannon. If I’d seen that as a kid I’d have dreamt of them. I know because I’m already dreaming about how to use them!
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For what it’s worth, I’ve been trading comments on the Design Sojourn blog on… well… it started off as a discussion on developing devices that worked with Web 2.0 (recall my earlier post on that – reLink). The discussion has since expanded into something quite a bit larger: the convergence of bits and atoms. Here are some pieces from my comments that might be of interest: Continue reading
While surfing through YouTube and discovering both legitimate and pirated concert footage, I realized that never before has a generation grown up seeing celebrity lifespans in such a vividly compressed manner. In an age where generation gaps are no longer punctuated by differences in musical tastes – as they had been in the past – any teenage kid, who today discovers Roxy Music circa 1972 on YouTube and enjoys their music, can immediately pull up a video of the band and see them not as people in the prime of life but as they are 30 years later. The result of this time compression is that kids today are given an amazingly powerful lesson in mortality; a lesson the likes of which no other generation has ever experienced. Is it any wonder kids are driven to upload videos of themselves in the prime of life? I suspect this is an indication that we’re slipping into what might be called the Age of the “New Flesh“.
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