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Thursday
04Mar2010

Go Faster

When people speak of the good old days of racing, you really shouldn't take it as an exaggeration.  The racing was fast, dangerous, and not clogged with sponsors just looking to get air time on TV.  Yes, big name brands are what funded these teams, but there was a sense of pride in what the car looked like in the end.  And while some of todays cars do a good job of livery design, "it just aint what it used to be..."

This video discusses a new book showcasing race car graphic design in the glory days of Le Mans, IMSA, and Formula one.  Enjoy. 

Friday
19Feb2010

2010 Olympic Medals.

If you have been following the winter games, you have most certainly seen one of these guys being hung on the necks of the athletes.  As part of Vancouver's drive for a "Sustainable Olympics", this years medals were designed and manufactured by local designers and use recycled computer components as a material supplier.

Tuesday
16Feb2010

The future.

It takes great film makers close to two hours to say what this commercial says in one minute.

Monday
08Feb2010

Super Bowl

Some how the best commercial of the super bowl, for me, goes to an unlikely candidate... Google.

Saturday
06Feb2010

Technology and Imbeciles

In science, the weight of the references that one can cite helps to enforce the strength of one's point. In particular, the idea is to find the oldest valid accounts that resonate with the theme. THerefore it's quite funny to read an account of how Mark Twain thought that the appearance of the telephone would produce a nation of idiots. His inimitable recounting of the first conversation he heard as an aural observer meshes well with the feeling we have today when confronted with someone on an ear-bud phone, apparently talking to himself.

Going back further, Socrates was convinced that the advent of writing would doom the world to a state of inarticulate analytical paralysis. Debate, in his view, was key to honing an argument and therefore writing about one's own thoughts was no more than self-indulgent nonsense.

So, the current chest-beating pronouncements about Twittering Twits and Google-eyed morons is nothing new. The "resolution" is not new either. If a technology serves a productive purpose, it will survive and if it doesn't, it won't. Personally, I think Twitter has the makings of a fad and certainly would not have emerged except by piggybacking on the spread of hand-held, multifunction phones. Texting, in general, is a more useful utility and is probably here to stay.

It's all about knowing when to unplug. Recent fMRI studies show that students who think that they are master multi-taskers have not, indeed, undergone some sudden evolutionary spurt that separates them from previous generations. Conscious focus can really only land on one input stream at a time and there is no way around it. If you add too much noise into the input, nothing coherent will stick (like actually learning anything in a class lecture). And Socrates was certainly right in the sense that we humans need to talk to other humans (preferably face-to-face) in order to really grow in the way we view the world.