Find Me A Place to Begin
on Art, Interaction Design, and Programming
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End Of An Era of the Day: The iconic Yahoo billboard — an emblem of a bygone era built over a decade ago during the heyday of the dot-com boom — was brought down today.
Aww.. I used to work at Yahoo!, and it was awesome. True Story. :(
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"It looks like a human was involved in choosing what went where,” Marissa told them. “It looks too editorialized. Google products are machine-driven. They’re created by machines. And that is what makes us powerful. That’s what makes our products great."
― Marissa Mayer addressing Google designers, as quoted in “In The Plex” by Steven Levy (via buzz)
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I don’t like to see it very often, but I do love the Tumblr maintenance page.
(Source: markcoatney)
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PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet (by Fight for the Future)
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The world is starting to imagine things we hadn’t thought of.
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Today is the end of an era folks. Lipitor, the #1 selling branded medication in the world is going off patent. This means, instead of the $115 a month Pfizer has been charging, it is now a race toward the bottom for generic manufacturers to produce and sell it for hopefully $4 a month.
Despite Lipitor’s wild popularity, as you can see below, either 96 or 98% of people (depending on whether or not you have prior heart disease) who take Lipitor see no benefit. It does do what it says— it lowers your cholesterol. But prolonging your life and increasing the quality of your life is much more complicated than just lowering your cholesterol. Here are the numbers for:
Those without heart disease (just high cholesterol):
For those with a heart disease diagnosis:
Taking chronic medications like Lipitor is quite similar to receiving vaccines. You receive vaccines to not only protect yourself, but to also protect society. At the individual level, Lipitor is a very bad investment. At the population level, a very small percentage of Lipitor takers are helped. As you can see, if you’re a gambler, it’s not a very good bet to take Lipitor. And if you look at the entire population of people, less than 4% of those taking Lipitor will actually be helped.
This is modern medicine folks, bottled up and sold via daytime television.
And by the way, see that chemical structure up there. That’s called atorvastatin. It’s also called Lipitor. If anything changes in that chemical structure, it’s fundamentally different and can no longer be called atorvastatin. So if any of you are wondering if a generic is better/different from a branded medication. It’s simply not. If a generic medication were different/better, it would be a fundamentally different chemical compound. And that applies to all medications and vitamins. Don’t let marketers fool you that there’s a benefit to spending $111 more a month on a branded drug.
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"These results are likely to have theorists going back over their models and classifying them into “those that fit the data” and “those that don’t."
― Fundamental constants are not constan – or maybe they are, we don’t really know
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wander wonder: Marina Abramovic. An artist’s life Manifesto »
1. An artist’s conduct in his life:
– An artist should not lie to himself or others
– An artist should not steal ideas from other artists
– An artist should not compromise for themselves or in regards to the art market
– An artist should not kill other human beings
– An artist should not make… -
Collapsing Time & Space »
Jack Dorsey, founder at Twitter and Square.
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The Steve Jobs Biography
This review from Amazon sums it up:
This new, highly-anticipated bio is reasonably comprehensive in scope, but written in a plodding, subjectively fawning fashion that undercuts its impact. Mr. Isaacson doesn’t hail from the technology world, and it shows; his feel for the real importance of Jobs’ accomplishments is largely constrained to social impact (of the fuzzy, gee-whiz sort) rather than crucial areas of interface, functionality and convergence. Why do Apple’s products really work? What impact will they have on how we interact with the digital world, tomorrow and after? Isaacson has no idea. All he seems to know is that ‘simplicity’ is good, and that ‘design’ is more than skin deep. And that the little things matter. Millions upon millions of people already know that; the opportunity missed here is to go deep on the subject, and unpack it. That doesn’t happen here, because the writer is out of his element.
Apart from that, we learn that Jobs was basically an ass, and that he cried a lot when he didn’t get his way. It’s implied that he carried a narcissistic disorder, but that’s never really explored — to the book’s detriment, as psychiatric context is pretty important to understand how a comprehensive tyrant could achieve so much, and improve the productivity and satisfaction of so many.
The book is also overlong — a remarkable thing given the richness of the subject. It’s written almost as a sequential fact-finding report, rather than as a truly insightful look at a man and his work. We come away with the impression that strong-willed CEOs can do what they want, as long as they make money for shareholders and impart a sense of accomplishment (however painfully won) to their underlings. Not exactly a revelation, but it takes more than 600 pages for Isaacson to drive the point home.
I’m glad we have this bio, but I suspect someone will come along and write a much better treatment of Jobs’ life. For now, don’t expect to learn any larger truths about Jobs and his world; just enjoy the anecdotes, and prepare to make your own conclusions about the book’s fascinating subject.(Source: amazon.com)
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This is great.
L’Éternel Retour…of Vodka Sauce Part II
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"We treat our office like a library. It’s quiet. Very, very quiet. It’s interesting to me that the places where people are supposed to learn stuff like a library, a school, or classroom, they’re always quiet, but if you go to an office, it’s always chaotic and loud with phones ringing and people running by calling your name. There are a lot of interruptions in the modern office. It kills creativity. So we have a culture of quiet."
― Jason Fried from 37Signals on Creative Mornings
I took the liberty of changing the shit out of this quote. -
Bodies
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A perfect world.
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I found these guys through Everett Katigbak, a Communication Designer at Facebook. Strike Anywhere Films was responsible for their new promo video on Social Apps.
