Overcompensate

Three Specialists

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:43:27 +0700

Magical Nihilism:

It’s from the beautiful, beautiful book Bluebeard, and I think I first heard it first (as with many such things) from Matt Webb:

“The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.

The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius – a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in in general circulation.

“A genius working alone,” he says, “is invariably ignored as a lunatic.”

The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find; a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad.

“A person like this working alone,” says Slazinger, “can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shaped should be.”

The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. “He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting,” says Slazinger.

“Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.”

Pursuit of Greatness

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:49:21 +0700

Pursuit of Greatness:

Bono on Jonathan Ive:

What the competitors don’t seem to understand is you cannot get people this smart to work this hard just for money. Jony is Obi-Wan. His team are Jedi whose nobility depends on the pursuit of greatness over profit, believing the latter will always follow the former, stubbornly passing up near-term good opportunities to pursue great ones in the distance.

(Via Daring Fireball)

Ann Druyan, about her husband Carl Sagan

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:11:53 +0700

When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me – it still sometimes happens – and ask me if Carl changed at the end & converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again.

Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous – not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance…, That pure chance could be so generous and so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful…

The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

(Via Lil Chlo)

Field Study: Stop Stealing My Style, Bro.

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 14:09:23 +0700

Field Study: Stop Stealing My Style, Bro.:

Keenan Cummings:

You can’t own style. Style is commodity. Own an intelligent process for making decisions and you’ll have a defensible and competitive advantage.

Consistency

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:17:09 +0700

Consistency:

Lukas Mathis:

It’s easy to take «consistency» to mean that everything should be the same. That’s wrong, however. Consistency also means that different things should be different, to prevent people from forming wrong expectations.

The Little Things

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 22:42:04 +0700

The Little Things:

A small point; but then as Otto Jespersen (the greatest of all 20th-century grammarians) remarked in his retirement address in 1925: “To anyone who finds that linguistic study is a worthless finicking with trifles, I would reply that life consists of little things; the important matter is to see them largely.”

Gestalt.

(via Daring Fireball)

Effects of Typography on Reader Mood and Productivity

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 18:15:53 +0700

Effects of Typography on Reader Mood and Productivity:

In their paper titled The Aesthetics of Reading, Kevin Larson and Rosalind Picard present their findings on the effects of typography on reader mood and cognitive performance. They conducted two studies, each involving 20 people. The participants were divided into two groups of 10 and were given 20 minutes to read a specially typeset issue of The New Yorker on a tablet device. One of the groups got a badly typeset version (using Courier, with spaced out words), the other a properly typeset one.

Interesting findings. Bottom line: typography matters.

shellen: This pretty much Thanksgiving at our house. Happy...

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 11:13:30 +0700

shellen:

This pretty much Thanksgiving at our house. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours no matter what your Thanksgiving looks like.

Photo

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 10:58:14 +0700

Oh, Computers

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 11:01:00 +0700

Oh, Computers:

Lukas Mathis have an interesting analysis:

This is a sentiment you often hear from people: casual users only need “entry-level” performance. Even casual users themselves perpetuate it: “Oh, I’m not doing much on my computer, so I always just go with the cheapest option.” And then they buy a horrid, underpowered netbook, find out that it has a tiny screen, is incredibly slow, the keyboard sucks, and they either never actually use it, or eventually come to the conclusion that they just hate computers.

In reality, it’s exactly backwards: proficient users can deal with a crappy computer, but casual users need as good a computer as possible.

Computer housekeeping is still a complicated matter for any regular people to deal with, heck, even for a proficient user. Even with iOS which is a blank slate of an OS, Apple clearly pushing hard to get rid of the file system, and yet still not achieve the level of simplicity and ease of use they desire.

There’s still a lot of complexity we have to deal with using a computer, any computers, why? Because it’s multipurpose device. Consider a smartphone, it’s a phone, a camera, a calendaring device, an internet browser, an email device, a gaming device, and anything that an app can offer, on top of that it got plenty of sensors, gyro, proximity, light, GPS, and you name it, in short it’s a darn complex computer.

The challenge is how to make it more simple? You can’t just mindlessly reduce or hide the complexity and call it a day, because simplicity is not the absence of clutter, simplicity is not so simple to achieve.

"Most artists and designers I know would rather work all night than turn in a sub-standard job. It is..."

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 10:13:44 +0700

“Most artists and designers I know would rather work all night than turn in a sub-standard job. It is a universal truth that all artists think they a [sic] frauds and charlatans, and live in constant fear of being exposed. We believe by working harder than anyone else we can evaded [sic] detection. The bean-counters rumbled this centuries ago and have been profitably exploiting this weakness ever since. You don’t have to drive creative folk like most workers. They drive themselves. Just wind ‘em up and let ‘em go.”

- – Linds Redding, A Short Lesson in Perspective.

(via Signal vs. Noise)

Sulk.

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 13:13:48 +0700

Sulk.

Photo

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 11:41:59 +0700

Jason Santa Maria

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 20:42:49 +0700

Jason Santa Maria:

Jason Santa Maria interviewed by The Great Discontent, great as always:

I’m sure that I’m romanticizing it as I’m getting older, but when you’re a kid, everything seems possible. When you think about doing something, the time between thinking about doing it and actually doing it is usually very brief. You say, “Hey, what if I do that?” and then you’re doing it. As an adult, you think, “I want to do this thing,” or, “I want to make something.” Then you start gathering resources and devising a plan, but then you get tired because you’re old and want to lay down. There’s something about that childhood idiocy that I often think back on and love.

nevver: Weekend plans

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 23:30:35 +0700

nevver:

Weekend plans

Photo

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 23:27:46 +0700

parislemon: Just a guy, a beer, and a gang symbol? Some great...

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 14:10:55 +0700

parislemon:

Just a guy, a beer, and a gang symbol? Some great shots on Retronaut.

(via 9to5Mac)

Hello Weekend, Inc

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 21:01:12 +0700

Hello Weekend, Inc:

I recently joined the newly formed but stellar team at Weekend, Inc in Jakarta, Indonesia as a UI/UX designer (or whatever the cool kids calls it nowadays). We are cooking up ~~several secret projects~~ and some not-so-secret projects and by the way, we are still hiring.

Questions Are Places for Answers

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 15:06:20 +0700

Questions Are Places for Answers:

Jason Fried:

Clay explained it in a way that I’ve never heard before and I’ll never forget again. Paraphrased slightly, he said: “Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.”

What an insight. He continued to talk about the power of questions. Questions are your mind’s receptors for answers. If you aren’t curious enough to want to know why, to want to ask questions, then you’re not making the room in your mind for answers. If you stop asking questions, your mind can’t grow.

Pure beauty. “Asobi” was created by art student Yasutoki...

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 08:14:39 +0700

Pure beauty.

“Asobi” was created by art student Yasutoki Kariya for his senior thesis exhibition. Meaning “play,” the installation is comprised of 11 computer-programmed incandescent light bulbs hung from strings. They playfully re-enact Newton’s Cradle, visualizing the transfer of kinetic energy in the form of light. (via Spoon & Tamago)