Dean Kamen's commencement speech at Bates College
“You are moving for the first time into a world where ideas matter more than all the stuff there is. But those ideas have to come from educated people and they have to be used as a tool and not as a weapon. That’s the biggest change that’s happening…So I would beg every educated person in this world to remember, every day when you get up, that you are an incredibly small minority of all humanity. And with all the privileges I understand it gives us, I think it gives us an enormous responsibility to be leaders that do the right things for the right reasons. And remember that you can be doing good while you are doing well.”
Craig Newmark podcast interview
“Everything on the site is based on user feedback. Frankly, I have no vision whatsoever.” Other interesting Craigslist facts: Seven billion pageviews a month, the company has never had a tech quit in 12 years, they never hold meetings.
Edward Tufte takes his next book to Real-land
“No more staring at pixels on the screen. More staring at…what’s going into Real-land. Movies, books, DVDs—I don’t know. It’s called ‘walking, seeing, and constructing,’ and it’s now in Spaceland. No more representations. Instead of designing with Adobe Illustrator, I’m designing with a Komatsu excavator.”
YouTube Presidential debate
“We’re moving to a society that is video-based from one that is text-based, whether we like it or not. Candidates are starting to recognize that the only way to fight the potential of the tsunami of voter-generated video is to produce lots of video themselves. The Internet culture recognizes that Internet video is more authentic, more granular, less scripted than television, and it is an antidote to sound-bite politics.”
Having a mindset of constant criticism
“You have to reshape your mind until you’re finding fault with everything…And as you fix more and more of these little details, as you polish and shape and shine and craft the little corners of your product, something magical happens. The inches add up to feet, the feet add up to yards, and the yards add up to miles. And you ship a truly great product. The kind of product that feels great, that works intuitively, that blows people away.”
iLike on Facebook: the most rapidly-adopted technology launch in history?
“Launching just over two weeks ago, iLike on Facebook signed up a million users in its first week; then a million more in the 5 days, and another million in the next 4 days. We’re currently signing up about 300,000 new users per day.”
Xerox 1974 memo: Ethernet will fail
“Here’s a memo from a Xerox PARC (engineer, I presume) suggesting that the Ethernet approach to networking can’t possible meet the necessary requirements (notably bandwidth performance) because it’s based on an uncontrolled random transmission timing, as opposed to a controlled, synchronous sharing of the transmission medium.”
The iPhone’s big gamble: no keyboard
Don Norman on the iPhone: “The tactile feedback of a mechanical keyboard is a pretty important aspect of human interaction. If you take that away you tend to be very insecure. Apple says, ‘We’re not selling to the person who lives on his BlackBerry, we’re selling to the person who listens to music and surfs the Web.’”
Proof of concept web app for the iPhone
“OneTrip is an iPhone-optimized web application (a simple shopping list). Since third-party apps won’t be available on iPhone for a while, I thought I’d create a website you could load in Safari on iPhone to approximate having a custom widget.”
Trash projection art
“Real Life is Rubbish, 2002” | Two separate piles of general household rubbish onto which a light is projected, creating a shadow self-portrait of the artists.

rubbish

Keywashing video
“Michele read a couple webblog entries and heard an NPR story about how you might be able to clean your computer keyboard in the dishwasher. So she organized a bit of an experiment. Just like with socks in the laundry, somehow a couple of our matching keys disappeared in the process. Luckily they were F10 and F11. We never use those anyhow.”
How Jean-Luc Godard created jump-cuts in 1960's "Breathless"
“The finished film was 30 minutes too long, and rather than cut out whole scenes or sequences, Godard elected to trim within the scene, creating the jagged cutting style still so beloved of action filmmakers. Godard just went at the film with the scissors, cutting out anything he thought boring.”