Flavors of the One Love
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Johnny Smith Learns the Cornet
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1 min read
Having learned to fly from pilots he befriended, Smith enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces in the hopes of becoming a military pilot. He was invalidated from the flight programme because of imperfect vision in his left eye. Given a choice between joining the military band and being sent to mechanic’s school, Smith…
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Exploratory Ideas for Newsware User Interfaces
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1 min read
Way back when, I was a journalism major in college. So I was pleased to meet the folks from Daylife last year and bat around some ideas about how they’re aggregating, understanding, and syndicating news applications. I just found part of the conversation lying around my hard drive and thought you might be interested in…
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The Failure of Failure
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2 min read
Much has been written about the importance of failure in design. To improve things we need to try new approaches which sometimes work and sometimes don’t. Straight forward enough, at least to designers. But business managers won’t go near that. “Yes, I need to fail!” Bull-shit, you ain’t gonna hear that in many management offices.…
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What Music Videos Want to Be When They Grow Up: Once
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1 min read
Once is the best movie I’ve seen in a long time, and accomplishes this very simply, without trying very hard. A tale short enough to be a short story. A musical setting so natural you almost don’t realize you’re watching a musical. Characters that are beautiful people you’d want to be friends with. Website Soundtrack
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Worthwhile is Now Motto
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1 min read
I just noticed that Worthwhile magazine dodged a trademark suit bullet and re-emerged as Motto magazine. They had good spirit before, I’m looking forward to checking out this new incarnation.
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Photographer Recommendation in New York
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1 min read
I splurged on a new headshot recently and was lucky to find Carla Coria, a photographer here in Brooklyn, New York who does amazing work with a simple studio and a digital camera. She made prep easy and effective, the shoot as fast and painless as possible, and a week later had a final shot…
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No-Knead Product Design
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1 min read
Lou dropped off a loaf of this amazing no-knead bread that’s all the rage among home cooks these days (recipe). It was and continues to be delicious, and as I munched through the crunchy exterior into the large crumb I pondered Lou’s search for a no-knead information architecture. My brain loves reducing complex processes to…
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Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
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2 min read
…that’s the spoiler from Michael Pollen’s Unhappy Meals, in which he expertly dissects the food industry at the personal, commercial, industrial, and societal levels in just a few thousand words, helping us see the problems with Western nutrition are worse than we thought. I’ve been working in this industry lately, and fascinated by the meta-designs…
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An Inconvenient Truth is Al Gore’s film about global warming. A friend of a friend who saw a preview said it blew her mind. Who Killed the Electric Car? investigates, murder mystery style, the birth, limited commercialization and subsequent death of the electric vehicle in the United states.
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Innovation in poached eggs
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1 min read
Surrounded by the twin mystiques of brunch and Hollandaise, Elaine Corn offers a better, simpler cooking method (boil water in a shallow skillet, add vinegar and salt, slide the eggs in and turn the heat off, let cook in covered skillet for three minutes). I can tear that page out of my Betty Crocker cookbook…
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Reframing control in social media
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2 min read
We’ve been working for several companies facing how they and their markets change with the further spread of social media. It’s creating enormous potential for more democratic media production and sophisticated tools, but a lot of it will rely on companies understanding it and being receptive to it. We’re developing a framework to help companies…
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Don’t Think of an Elephant!
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6 min read
I finally got a around to reading Don’t Think of an Elephant! in which George Lakoff applies his linguistic and cognitive ideas on framing to American progressive politics. It’s a compelling, important book, and the theory can be used anywhere, particularly the hierarchy of vision -> values -> principles -> policies -> ten-word philosophy. It’s…
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The ‘objective’ press
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1 min read
Strong Lattes, Sour Notes at Starbucks: Starbucks’ adventures in media bars aren’t playing out as planned BusinessWeek, June 20, 2005 At Starbucks, a Blend of Coffee And Music Creates a Potent Mix: Chain Boosts Sales and Careers As It Co-Produces, Offers Selected CDs in Its Stores Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2005
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Energy vocab watch
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1 min read
Terry just taught me clean washing greenwashing, which is when a company smears on the energy-efficient PR while continuing their old inefficient ways. And now there’s hygrid, a hybrid of electricity from the grid and rolling your own.
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Mad Hot Ballroom
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1 min read
NYC school kids learn ballroom dancing, wonderful.