Now THESE are some incredible work environments! (This is one of the less creative ones. :))
thecoolhunter.net – CREATIVE WORK ENVIRONMENTS – Do you work in one?
P.S. Has some incredible material on its site, including the most amazing bookstore I have ever seen.
What is Inhabitat? Well, it’s full of bright ideas, like this one.
But for a better definition, let me quote their about page:
a weblog devoted to the future of design, tracking the innovations in technology, practices and materials that are pushing architecture and home design towards a smarter and more sustainable future.
Inhabitat was started by NYC designer and graduate architecture student Jill Fehrenbacher as a forum in which to investigate emerging trends in product, interior and architectural design. Emily Pilloton is the Managing Editor; Sarah Rich and Evelyn Lee and Jorge Chapa are Senior Contributing Editors. Contributing writers include Jill Danyelle, Tylene Leveque, Abigail Doan, Kate Andrews and Ali Kriscenski. The site was designed by Jill Fehrenbacher and is programmed by Joey Brooks and Vestal Design, using WordPress.
Easy!
Make it very short. Too the point. Like this. 🙂
is a site for building your own web site around web 2.0 concepts. It is “alpha” if you ask me, but it has alot of potential to be great.
One feature I really like is the ability to make great slideshows. This part is good. Here’s a few I made as a test
http://berniemichalik.uber.com/SC_parade_2007
http://berniemichalik.uber.com/Dec2007
or go to Uber for more info.
What is the Rasterbator?
The Rasterbator creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. Upload an image, print the resulting multi-page pdf file and assemble the pages into extremely cool looking poster up to 20 meters in size.
It could also be useful for technical documents, too.
I think the geekdad blog at Wired is great. (Hey, lots of geeks eventually have children! 🙂 ) There’s lots of good, practical advice there. (Plus cool gadgets).
The latest article,The Science of Raising Smart Kids has some good advice on getting your kids to be smarter. It’s all about how you praise your kids. Go to the article for more details.
T Magazine, a blog over at New York Times has a scathing review of the perfume | Elle by YSL. The whole review is good, but here a whiff, so to speak:
Yves Saint Laurent On the Richter scale of disasters, some are more inexplicable than others. ….Yves Saint Laurent is rolling out Elle.Where to start. Why? Or perhaps better: How? What was the perfume “brief” (the concept the house gives the perfumers) here? “Please create for us the smell of the cheap, cellophane-wrapped sugar candy stacked on the linoleum floor of a 2nd Avenue Gristedes”? (My bold)
I would like to see more such blogs!
This Toronto Based Gallery Specializing in Art from Up and Coming Artists has a great annual festival of small works of art on sale for $50 to $250. And the people who run it are great people too.
What is this?
YouTube – IBM 1401, a User’s Manual Part I – IBM 1401 Processing Unit
(Reply) The IBM 1401 was an mainframe computer back in the 60’s. It was this huge beast of a machine that had a small flaw in which it leaked electromagnetic radiation in a frequency that AM radios could pick up. It didn’t take long for the geeks of the day to figure out how to make music out of it! That wierd instrument you hear at the start that sounds kinda like a claironet but isn’t… that the 1401!
Small side note: I have a mint condition hard cover manual on how to program the IBM 1401.
TheCompiler blog from Wired.com has the story. Key information:
The One Laptop Per Child project’s “Give One Get One” offer has been extended through the end of the year, which means there’s still time to pick up an XO laptop for yourself and someone in a developing country.The promotional offer kicked off two weeks ago and was originally scheduled to end yesterday, November 26, but due to the demand it has been extended through the end of the year.
Over at the blog Compiler from Wired.com is a good review of the latest AND greatest features in Zoho Writer. Key quote:
While it isn’t feature complete just yet, Zoho Writer is getting very close to the ideal in online editing with word processing software that works equally well in offline and online modes. With big names like Google Docs, Microsoft Live and even Adobe all vying for your online office loyalty, there’s no doubt that if offline functionality matters to you, Zoho has the lead.
The Nytimes.com has a fascinating article: New York Manhole Covers, Forged Barefoot in India
Some sample quotes:
Manhole covers manufactured in India can be anywhere from 20 to 60 percent cheaper than those made in the United States
And why is that. Could it be due partially to this:
“We can’t maintain the luxury of Europe and the United States, with all the boots and all that,” said Sunil Modi, director of Shakti Industries.
It reminds me of photographs of Europe in the 19th century.
Blade Runner: Final Cut is playing at the Regent Theatre in Toronto.
Blade Runner was released 25 years ago and while Ridley Scott made strong improvements to the film when he released The Director’s Cut of the film, the Final Cut is even better. Scott has the time and the luxury of telling the story without feeling the need to tighten it up and quicken the pace. That’s just one reason why you should see it again.
Not only that, but as they say at blogto.com, you should go to the Regent and take advantage of
the opportunity to see one of the great visual masterpieces of the cinema on an actual cinema screen, digitally projected no less, is too tantalizing to ignore. Scott’s restoration project has included digital fixes and cleanups
Plus, it is just fun to go the Regent Theatre! It’s a great old theatre on Mt. Pleasant just south of Eglinton. Go before the end of November!
Here’s a few reasons why you want to go to the Aroma Espresso bar located in the Annex of downtown Toronto (on Bloor around Bathurst):
– it’s in a great location. The Annex is great, and if you are going to a film at the Bloor, Aroma is a great spot to drop in before or after
– it has great ambience (see the link below for more photos)
– it has friendly service
– it has great coffee, plus they give you a chocolate with your coffee! (See photo above)
– when you order one of their delicious muffins that have a very light crust on the outside and fluffy on the inside, they warm it for you.
Those are just a few things I discovered on my visit. Try it yourself…
Stephen Fry has a blog. Anything else I write will slow you down in getting to his blog. Go read that: you’ll be better off for it. Click here!
What is it? Well
Snitter is “Snook’s Twitter”: an Adobe AIR-powered application for twittering
It is really COOL….lots of nice features. You can find it here: Snitter: Snook’s Twitter – Snook.ca
chumby is just one of latest low cost computing platforms coming on the market, like OLPC. Plus, they are darn cute! Check it out.
I was sending someone an email tonight, and I was discussing one of my favourite books, The Brothers Karamazov. I noticed that Microsoft Word underlined “Karamozov”. Oh oh, I thought, better fix that.
Now if you type in “Karamozov” instead of “Karamazov” in ScribeFire, and then right click on it, it will tell you to replace it with “Karamazov”. But if you do this in Microsoft Word, you get “Kalamazoo”.
Now the first thought I had was: what, Word has been around since at least the early Dostoevsky novels, and it certainly ain’t small, so you think it would be smart enough to at least know leaders of major world literature? My Cyrillic is non-existent, but I am willing to bet money that the Cyrillic spelling of Karamazov NEVER translates into Kalamazoo.
My second thought was: maybe it’s me. So I right clicked on “Karamozov” and “Karamazov” and changed the language to “Russian” and the spell check error went away! Hmmm, I thought, Word IS smart! You just have to tell it the word is Russian! And it is smart enough to know that there are two ways to spell Karamazov!
But then I thought: I wonder if that is true. So I quickly typed in the another “Russian” word:
“Wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww” and did the same test, and lo and behold, “Wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww” is also the name of someone is Russia! (Perhaps this was a minor character the Dostoevsky later dropped to get the book under a 1000 pages.)
So, if you are a developer, and you are providing multilanguage support for your product, and you are asked to specify what standard you will be supporting, I recommend you say: the same one used by Microsoft Word! 🙂
When I first saw the name of this blog, Chocolate Porn du Jour — Chocolate Chipped I thought, yeah, yeah, another person using the “p” word to get attention. Then I looked at the site. Wow. It is one decadent site! Not sure if I cheapen the site by using the “p” word…this is beauty in the form of chocolate! See:
and lots more!
A great flash presentation on The Life and Work of Gustav Klimt can be found at this site. Lots of his work here, from the famous like “Judith with the Head of Holofernes” to early portraits. A visually stunning site, which is most appropriate for this great painter.
At the NICHOLAS METIVIER GALLERY is Edward Burtyhsky’s Quarries. As he says:
“The concept of the landscape as architecture has become, for me, an act of imagination. I remember looking at buildings made of stone, and thinking, there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there because these stones had to have been taken out of the quarry one block at a time. I had never seen a dimensional quarry, but I envisioned an inverted cubed architecture on the side of a hill. I went in search of it, and when I had it on my ground glass I knew that I had arrived.”
It is on for a few more days: check it out if you can.
There is a fascinating article Silent Minds: The New Yorker on how brain scans on vegetative patients are showing more activities than was expected. Here’s the lede into the article, but I recommend you read the whole thing:
Ten years ago, Adrian Owen, a young British neuroscientist, was working at a brain-imaging center at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, at the University of Cambridge. He had recently returned from the Montreal Neurological Institute, where he used advanced scanning technology to map areas of the brain, including those involved in recognizing human faces, and he was eager to continue his research. The imaging center was next to the hospital’s neurological intensive-care unit, and Owen heard about a patient there named Kate Bainbridge, a twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher who had become comatose after a flulike illness, and was eventually diagnosed as being in what neurologists call a vegetative state. Owen decided to scan Bainbridge’s brain. “We were looking for interesting patients to study,” he told me. “She was the first vegetative patient I came across.”For four months, Bainbridge had not spoken or responded to her family or her doctors, although her eyes were often open and roving. (A person in a coma appears to be asleep and is unaware of even painful stimulation; a person in a vegetative state has periods of wakefulness but shows no awareness of her environment and does not make purposeful movements.) Owen placed Bainbridge in a PET scanner, a machine that records changes in metabolism and blood flow in the brain, and, on a screen in front of her, projected photographs of faces belonging to members of her family, as well as digitally distorted images, in which the faces were unrecognizable. Whenever pictures of Bainbridge’s family flashed on the screen, an area of her brain called the fusiform gyrus, which neuroscientists had identified as playing a central role in face recognition, lit up on the scan. “We were stunned,” Owen told me. “The fusiform-gyrus activation in her brain was not simply similar to normal; it was exactly the same as normal volunteers’.”
Among other things, Paul Smith shows how to pull off the difficult task of mixing horizontal and vertical stripes by in his upcoming spring/summer collection shown in this video. (Look for the Harry Potteresque model):
Thanks for coming to this blog. If you like my blog, please come and see my new blog at:
http://smartpeopleIknow.blogspot.com
Different domain name, same good contents.
Over at the excellent food blog, Jaden’s Steamy Kitchen, is a review of the No Knead Bread recipe that was featured in the nytimes.com a while ago. Better still, Jaden provides instructions so simple to follow, even a 4 year old can do it (and she has photos to prove it). If nothing else, have a good read of the recipe:
P.S. This article: How to Turn Cheap “Choice” Steaks into Gucci “Prime” Steaks is also highly recommended. Heck, just sample the entire blog. 🙂
Amazon has quite a good collection of Richter books, including this one, which I quite like:
and this one, which is a fine little collection:
and this one, which covered the MoMA’s retrospective of Richter.
For this entire list, go here:
lifehack.org had a pointer to this great collection of people who failed or were considered failures: They Did Not Give Up
Anyone suffering from one of life’s many setbacks can take comfort from this.
WiReD’s compiler blog has the story here
The music is poppy, the lyrics are anything but. Transbuddha has Kate Nash singing Foundations here
Jim Jaramusch’s “Coffee an Cigarettes” has alot of great scenes, but this one of Iggy Pop and Tom Waits is my favourite. It helps to know something of the two singers, but it is still funny.
I really enjoy Pavorotti and James Brown’s singing. While not everyone will like the idea of singing together, I do, and if you do too, check this out:
The Addiction Research Unit from the University of Buffalo has a fascinating page on how
The prohibition of psychoactive substances has evolved gradually in the United States and in Europe. The opium-containing preparation laudanum had been widely available since the 18th century. Morphine, cocaine, and even heroin were seen as miracle cures when they were first discovered. During the mid to late 19th century, many manufacturers proudly proclaimed that their products contained cocaine or opium. A few, like Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup for infants which contained morphine, were more guarded in divulging their principal ingredients. By the beginning of the 20th century, problems with habitual use of cocaine and opiates was becoming increasingly apparent. This led to the removal of these substances from some products (e.g., Coca Cola) and to the introduction of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) in the United States which required the listing of ingredients on product labels. Nonetheless, standard narcotic remedies like paregoric remained readily available into the early 20th century, and Benzedrine inhalers were marketed without prescription until the early 1950s. Codeine wasn’t removed from most over-the-counter cough suppressants until the early 1980s.
Before Prohibition: Images from the preprohibition era
Thanks to Jean-Francois for this one!
Stephen Hawking – who appeared on the Simpsons – talks about being on the Simpsons.
First Star Trek, then the Simpsons: Hawking gets on all the best shows. 🙂
Over at lifehack.org is a good article on how to fail and why it is important. Some of the points are:
Go see How to Fail at Practically Anything and start failing today!
CNN has cribbed some material from Real Simple and the FlyLady to help you get your home cleaned in a flash. I don’t know if you can do it in 19 minutes, but it can be close. 🙂
How to clean your home in 19 minutes – CNN.com
Also, if you have kids (or a sloppy spouse/roommate who won’t clean up), get some baskets and keep them nearby. Then go around the house, scoop up some stuff and put it in their room. Time = 1-2 minutes.
Hey, smart people don’t spend all day cleaning…they have better things to do! 🙂
Image: James Worrell at realsimple.com
If you are looking for the very best (or at least the most expensive), then you must visit Delud Luxury Blog. For example, the truffle you see in the photo is the Knipschildt’s “La Madeline au Truffe” with a price of $250 for a dark chocolate.
Me, I’ll be happy to eat the wonderful truffles at Simone Marie Belgian Chocolate here in Toronto. 🙂
Over at The Morning News – Still Life
is a feature on an amazing artist, Martin Klimas, who as the artlcle says,
destroys a lot of clay to make his art. Combining the silence of Eadweard Muybridge’s horse pictures with the association-rich composition of a still life, Klimas breaks recognizable objects so they become something else, and stops us just at the moment of transformation.
(Thanks to andrewsullivan.com for this one)
Smart People I Know 