"Use only what you need"

Interesting ad campaign promoting water conservation in Denver.

Smart saw stops and retracts blade instantly upon contact with human flesh

“Every contact with a conductive material (i.e. a human body as opposed to wood) results in a drop of voltage which in turn results in an aluminum block being ‘shot’ into the teeth of the blade.” [tx NG]

Tom Suzuki, reknowned textbook designer

Interesting quote from obit: “He had that important editorial designer gift — he actually read what he was designing for. And the art department worked interactively with the editorial department and the authors and consultants in developing art and photo concepts.”

Federico Fellini on constraints

“I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.” [via CPU]

Wagashi, traditional Japanese confections evolve into art form

“The character pronounced ‘wa’ denotes things Japanese, while the characters for ‘gashi’, an alliteration of kashi, have come to mean confections. Wagashi represent the essence of Japanese culture, and continue to be vital force in Japanese life.” [tx LB]

Lectric Shave will give you a shave “up to 52% closer.” SBC Yahoo DSL features download speeds of “up to 6 megabits per second.”

Bah. “Up to” is meaningless. “Up to 6” includes 0-5. It could be everything, it could be nothing. It’s marketing code for “we want to sound impressive but we won’t actually promise anything.”

Where else does this fly? The minimum wage isn’t “up to $5.15/hour.” Good luck telling a loan officer you plan on paying back “up to 100%” of your loan. Doctors don’t say, “The operation is risky, but your chances of making a full recovery are up to 90%.”

So it’s nice to see some pushback against the term’s widespread use among internet providers.

With few exceptions, they include language that says consumers will get ‘up to’ a certain speed…In many cases, consumer advocates and industry analysts said, customers do not get the maximum promised speed, or anywhere near it, from their cable and digital subscriber line connections. Instead, the phrase “up to” refers to speeds attainable under ideal conditions, like when a D.S.L. user is near the phone company’s central switching office.”They don’t deliver what’s advertised, and it’s inherently deceptive,” said Dave Burstein, editor of DSL Prime, a newsletter that tracks the broadband industry. ” ‘Up to’ is a weasel term that should be taken out of the companies’ vocabulary.”

A similar movement is afoot in the UK where ‘Up to 8Mbps’ ads were recently ruled misleading.

ISPs advertising an ‘up to 8Mbps’ service without explaining that many people will be unable to receive these speeds are misleading consumers…35 per cent of people who live more than 3.8 km from an exchange, would be unable to get more than a 5 Mbps connection.

Ok, get back to work. After all, you really should get up to eight hours of work done today.

Recently deceased economist Milton Friedman used the quantity equation of money (MV = PY) as his license plate

“At one time at least, it appeared on the California license plate of Milton Friedman’s personal automobile. That equation is of course the quantity equation, MV = PY, or money times velocity equals the price level times output. This equation can be used to define a link between money growth and inflation that depends on the evolution of the velocity of money.” More on the equation.

People get protective over personal space in virtual worlds too

“Researchers who observed the avatars (digital representations of the humans that control them) of participants in Second Life, a virtual reality universe, found that some of the avatars’ physical behavior was in keeping with studies about how humans protect their personal space. In other words, the digital beings adhered to some unspoken behavioral rules of humans even though they were but pixels on a screen. Humans tend to avert eye gaze if they feel someone is standing too close. They retreat to corners, put distance between themselves and strangers, and sit or stand equidistant from one another like birds on a wire.”

Dupes in Borat movie speak out

“A mix of national and local articles are now telling the stories of the real people in the film. Not all of these people are pleased.” Ya don’t say?

Apple Pro profile of Brian Eno

“The multidisciplinary artist, with the help of a few technical experts, has created a computer program that continually fuses his translucent light paintings to create an ever-evolving artistic display on your computer screen. The piece is accompanied by a randomly assembled ambient track that’s never the same twice. The program is capable of creating about 77 million permutations of Eno’s visual work and is titled, appropriately, ‘77 Million Paintings.’”

[PDF] Uncle Mark 2007 (Mark Hurst’s opinionated shopping guide)

“Plenty of websites and magazines – even Consumer Reports – can give you 17 different options of digital cameras, but that doesn’t help much. You’re not asking to see all the available choices…A better question is, which ONE product should you buy, and why? The pages ahead will tell you.”

Death metal band logos

Scary logos from Zyklon (Norway), Extreme Noise Terror (England), Vomitory (Sweden), Dead Infection (Poland), Regurgitate (Sweden), etc.

Netflix and fast iterations

“We make a lot of this stuff up as we go along. I’m serious. We don’t assume anything works and we don’t like to make predictions without real-world tests. Predictions color our thinking. So, we continually make this up as we go along, keeping what works and throwing away what doesn’t. We’ve found that about 90% of it doesn’t work.”

Kathy Sierra on how she makes her graphics

“People pay attention to graphics. They respond to graphics. They learn from graphics. If you want your readers/learners/audience to ‘get’ something as quickly and clearly as possible, use visuals. And you don’t have to be a graphic artist, designer, or information architect to put pictures in your presentation, post, or book. This post is my first attempt to categorize the kinds of graphics I do here, and offer tips for creating visuals that tell the story better and faster than words.” Related: The power of rough edges.

SmugMug saving big using S3

“Total amount NOT spent over the last 7 months: $423,686. Total amount spent on S3: $84,255.25. Total savings: $339,430.75. That works out to $48,490 / month, which is $581,881 per year…These are real, hard numbers after using S3 for 7 months, not our projections.”

LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy creates jogging-friendly track for Nike

“The DFA cofounder has just teamed up with Nike to release 45:33: Nike+ Original Run, a 45-plus-minute track designed to accompany joggers on their workouts. Displaying Murphy’s inimitable production style, the track has the dynamics and temporal ebb and flow of an eclectic DJ set, beginning with a long, warm-up segment, moving into a rousing Afrobeat crescendo, peaking with double-time disco, and finally coming back to earth on a parachute of cool, ambient synthesizers.”

Sacha Baron Cohen, civil rights scholar

“Baron Cohen made a pilgrimage to the birthplace of Martin Luther King while doing research for his dissertation in Cambridge. Entitled ‘A Case of Mistaking Identities – the Jewish Black Alliance,’ the thesis examines the nature of cooperation between the African-American and Jewish communities and suggests ways of how to improve relations in the current day. His professor describes it as a major work of importance on the civil rights movement and is suggested reading for history students in Cambridge.”

DropSend for sale, opens kimono

“How much profit does DropSend bring in each month? Revenue: $9,041.81 per month (and growing by 8.6% per month) Costs: $2,100 per month (Servers at 365main.com + maintenance) Profit: $6,941.81 per month.”

BusinessWeek: Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet

“Bezos wants Amazon to run your business, at least the messy technical and logistical parts of it, using those same technologies and operations that power his $10 billion online store. In the process, Bezos aims to transform Amazon into a kind of 21st century digital utility. It’s as if Wal-Mart had decided to turn itself inside out, offering its industry-leading supply chain and logistics systems to any and all outsiders, even rival retailers. Except Amazon is starting to rent out just about everything it uses to run its own business, from rack space in its 10 million square feet of warehouses worldwide to spare computing capacity on its thousands of servers, data storage on its disk drives, and even some of the millions of lines of software code it has written to coordinate all that.”

Internet Addiction Test

“How do you know if you’re already addicted or rapidly tumbling toward trouble? The Internet Addiction Test is the first validated and reliable measure of addictive use of the Internet.” [tx wax]

The birth of the iPod

“[Jon] Rubinstein made a visit to Toshiba, Apple’s supplier of hard drives, where executives showed him a tiny drive the company had just developed. The drive was 1.8 inches in diameter — considerably smaller than the 2.5-inch Fujitsu drive used in competing players — but Toshiba didn’t have any idea what it might be used for. ‘They said they didn’t know what to do with it. Maybe put it in a small notebook,’ Rubinstein recalled. ‘I went back to Steve and I said, “I know how to do this. I’ve got all the parts.”’ He said, ‘Go for it.’”

Also features this quote from Steve Jobs on design: “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Viral video vs. Super Bowl ad

”’Dove Evolution,’ a 75-second viral film…has reaped more than 1.7 million views on YouTube and has gotten significant play on TV talk shows ‘Ellen’ and ‘The View’ as well as on ‘Entertainment Tonight.’ It’s also brought the biggest-ever traffic spike to CampaignForRealBeauty.com, three times more than Dove’s Super Bowl ad and resulting publicity last year.”

Jon Stewart on YouTube

Jon Stewart: “We get an opportunity to produce this stuff because they make enough money selling beer that it’s worth their while to do it. I mean, we know that’s the game. I’m not suggesting we’re going to beam it out to the heavens, man, and whoever gets it, great. If they’re not making their money, we ain’t doing our show.”

Microsoft spins negative assessment into positive blurb

Microsoft took just the first sentence of this quote and used it out of context as a positive blurb: “If you’ve never used anything but Internet Explorer, you won’t be able to wipe the grin off your face. But next to rivals like Firefox, Opera and Safari, IE 7 is a catch-up and patch-up job. Some of its ‘new’ features have been available in rival browsers for years.”

Watch this movie (1MB) to see how Lineform, an Illustrator competitor, uses a line of text under the toolbar to explain what’s happening and which key modifiers are available.

No Ideas But In Things

“No Ideas But In Things is a library of controls, animations, layouts, and displays that might be a source of inspiration for interaction designers. Dan Saffer is the curator.”

Monome creator says limitations promote intuitive design

The Monome designer says, “I’m an ultra-minimalist, and there’s an incredible draw for me towards simplified systems. When you introduce limitations it promotes more intuitive design.”

The lost world of Joseph Pulitzer

“A century ago, newspapers were bigger, bolder, and more beautiful. What happened?” [tx Peter]

Blossom plant at My Dream App

“The Blossom plant responds to your productivity! Choose a virtual plant to illustrate achievement of your goals. Create criteria that feed it and criteria that neglect it. For example, to feed it: Actively use Excel or Photoshop. To Neglect it: Actively use World of Warcraft or browse blogs on Safari. IF your plant is healthy and flowering, you know you’re meeting your goals. Consistently failing to meet one’s goals will slowly wilt the plant. Clicking on the plant can display stats of current health, graphs of app usage, and suggestions of what to work on next to meet your goals.”

10 Steps You Can Take To Guarantee Failure

“5. Don’t Do – Talk. Try to fill up as much of your day with socializing as possible. Talk about all the things you will do someday or that you were gonna do. Just make sure you don’t mess it up by doing anything productive.”

Here’s a thumbnail shot of a beautiful support email from a customer: documented, screenshots, + highlights! Bravo.

Does computer-related activity really cause carpal tunnel syndrome?

“Most likely the disorder is due to a congenital predisposition – the carpal tunnel is simply smaller in some people than in others…There is little clinical data to prove whether repetitive and forceful movements of the hand and wrist during work or leisure activities can cause carpal tunnel syndrome.”

Marc Hedlund on baking cookies and caring about details

“But what I really do is pay a lot of attention to all the little parts of making cookies. How melty is the butter when I add it? Did the eggs get beaten to that particular fluffiness? When I put the cookies in, did the oven just stop heating to temperature, or did it just turn on again? How does the kitchen smell when the cookies are ready? That’s all there is to it. I like cookies enough that I give all of my attention to making them come out right. I pay attention to every step and how it affects the results.”

Beating the market by buying art

“In 1997, the Christie’s sale of 20th century art works from the estate of Victor and Sally Ganz netted more than $207 million, a record sum for a single-owner sale of art at auction…Over the period 1948 to 1997 the Ganzes earned real rates of return ranging from 12 to over 21 percent for works sold at the three auctions. Overall, the Ganzes beat – often by a wide margin — the returns from diversified portfolios of common stocks…Their financial success did not result from a few lucky purchases. They earned consistently high returns, regularly beating the stock market on works by different artists acquired at different time periods.”

NY Times implements subtle layout difference to indicate whether a story is news or opinion

“The Times has instituted a sweeping but subtle redesign, to emphasize the difference between objective and subjective journalism. Straight news will remain, well, straight: laid out in justified columns, with even margins on the left and right. Stories that have been colored by analysis, commentary or authorial whimsy will all receive the layout previously reserved for columns: a straight left margin and a ragged right one.” [via Newsdesigner]

Stellarium Astronomy Software

“Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.”

A giant FAQ database about Google by Googlers

“Google encourages all its employees to send things they learnt or want to share with coworkers as a snippet of five lines – no less, no more. The employees have to be very precise and focused. It can be anything from executing a simple task or if they figured out a better way of doing something that is part of their daily work. Or just an aha moment. All they have to do is email it in. Google then indexes all these emails and makes them searchable.”