“A bizarre legal case pits the family of recently-deceased Mary Robbins against Arizona cryonics company Alcor. Robbins signed a contract with Alcor to have her head cryogenically frozen after her death. But now her daughter won’t hand the head over.”
— Cryonics Company And Family Battle Over Ownership Of Woman’s Head
Dimensions of design/Against ahistoricity
From Responsive Environments: A Manual for Designers (Bentley, Alcock et al., 1985):
How does design affect choice?
The design of a place affects the choices people can make, at many levels:
- it affects where people can go and where they cannot: the quality we shall callpermeability.
- it affects the range of uses available to people: the quality we shall call variety.
- it affects how easily people can understand what opportunities it offers: the quality we shall call legibility.
- it affects the degree to which people can use a given place for different purposes: the quality we shall call robustness.
- it affects whether the detailed appearance of the place makes people aware of the choices available: the quality we shall call visual appropriateness.
- it affects people’s choice of sensory experiences: the quality we shall call richness.
- it affects the extent to which people can put their own stamp on a place: we shall call thispersonalization.
“The city is a subject that is apparently about everything. It is about climate change and racial tolernace, social justice and economic development, culture and personal memory, national identity and civil liberty. Without some sort of focus, however, or a framework applied to the ways in which we think about it, the city is a subjet so all-embracing that any discussion about it becomes a discussion about everything - and so, in the end, about nothing.”
— Deyan Sudjic, The Endless City (via karahayward)
“This is the crux of it: I’ve come to feel that, by virtue of my public participation, a whole lot of people I don’t know expect and (what’s more and worse) feel like they have the right to demand a certain level of performance from me. They – and for some people reading this, I really mean “you” – insist on a certain frequency of posting, a certain quality of cleverness or perspicacity, a certain threshold of seriousness. I believe this because I hear about it in spades if I fail on any count to deliver on your expectations.”
— Apologies and explanations [longish, too emo for most] « Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird
“One of the harder things about public speaking for me has always been this notion I have that, for any given audience, you’re always carrying around some insight that would blow their minds — but you don’t know which of the ten thousand notions floating around your skull it actually is. And your task, if you want to leave the people who have entrusted you with their time and attention with something of worth, is to somehow divine that one thing, and sort it from the banalities, shallow takes and things they’ve heard before, better stated by someone else.”
— Apologies and explanations [longish, too emo for most] by Adam Greenfield
Yay: giant observation tower & the clip of a geodesic dome bouncy castle at the Hayward.
Boo: combining the two trends I loathe most in architecture currently. Digital displays! Amorphous blobs!
Although I still struggle to explain why I dislike these. Russell Davies and Adam Greenfield have touched on them in talks recently and explained the problem far better than I can yet explain it.
via karahayward
russell davies: cheapfuturefashionfomatics:
This feels like another prototype of a measuring pebble; something small and simple that will enhance my devices, something I can afford to break or lose but that connects to my expensive, unreliable, easily damaged phone/pad/whatever. And using the code to connect is genius - no need for capacitive sausage skin or hacking into the headphone jack. Easy, cheap, good.
“The plagiarism claims stem from both Willy and Harry being required to solve a task as part of a contest”
— Harry Potter plagiarism lawsuit could be billion-dollar case, says claimant
“Especially in magazines, it’s packaging that defines the editor and his or her value. But the real lesson of iTunes is that we don’t want albums any more; we want singles. I’ll read a magazine article when someone links me to it, no longer because I am attracted to the brand or the editor.”
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