Oh my Lord in Heaven what’s wrong with this town?
Friday marked the fortieth anniversary of the Beattle’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. John Timpane of the Philly Inquirer does a very thorough job of explaining the albums importance. It reads quite scholarly. Shockingly at a daily newspaper.
Link via Social Media List and Conversation Agent, who connects the album back to the changes happening in the web sphere.
This is one that I bought years ago in a bookstore in the Rockridge District of Oakland. It sat on my bookshelf for 6 years or so.
First published in 1998 in French (the English version is from 2000, I’m not so cool that I read the French edition), Conversations About the End of Time is four interviews done Q&A style with Stephen Jay Gould, Umberto Eco, Jean-Claude Carriere and Jean Delumeau. Carriere (a screenwriter) and Delumeau (a Catholic historian) were new to me and contibuted considerably to the book.
The book is fascinating, not only because each interviewee is such a big and original thinker, but because it is amazing how much the world has changed in less than 10 years. This is both an easy read (because of the conversational style) but is as completely full of ideas and information as a collection of philosophy texts. I was especially impressed with Carriere and Delumeau. Their names don’t sell books to English-speaking audiences, but each had amazing insight.
David Armano begins a conversation about the definition of experience design. Check out the presentation and his post about same.
MS released Surface (presented above as on what looks like 80s table-top-style video game). Apple has already previewed the iPhone with similar touch surface interaction. I recently presented a concept brief for an museum exhibition that made use of dialogue tables. (That I proposed would interact with RFID tags.)
People seemed to doubt this would work. But here it is all grown up with Surface.
I think we’ll see this a lot more in museum and exhibition presentation settings. More so than even hotels and restaurants as Core77 suggests.
As I continue to miss on the ever evolving new media world, I’ve only just found out about lolcats and all the variations. As an amateur anthropologist (hey, I did major in it!), I found Anil Dash’s round up the best (in part because it gets into the structure of the lolcat pidgin). A new form of internet grammar? You decide.
Putting People First reports that a undergraduate program in experience design that was to start in the Netherlands has been cancelled. Apparently there was a lack of interest.
To which I would say, of course there is, no undergraduate has any idea what that major would even be. It’s such a new field (pulling together many existing fields) that it seems silly to start this as bachelors program. Build up a strong masters program and let that be the magnet that seeds the interest for an undergraduate program.
Let’s hope someone else sees this and creates the same program elsewhere or retools and relaunches at Utretcht.
What Chattanooga got right 23 years ago, Knoxville has only just figured out: Redevelopment happens when there is community buy-in from the start. Every get rich quick, redevelopment scheme (A World’s Fair!? A domed downtown!?) failed in Knoxville because of top down decision making.
Knoxville has less far to pull itself up (it was not a dirty, dyeing steel town like Chattanooga), but they are still behind and have made some irreparable planning decisions in the meantime. MetroPulse does the round up.
(Also, Chattanooga’s success pre-dates Web 2.0 by two decades. For you kids that think collaboration and distributed decision-making is some new idea.)
Kottke writes today about what he cynically (or snarkily?) calls “self-deception.” I think it’s more accurately called visualization. And how that leads to better living. I think there’s some rule self-help book out right now about something similar. I could Google it, but so could you. The science seems to support the theory though, according to Kottke.
A crime wave has hit the once bucolic Lakeshore Avenue District fueled by the (formerly) peace-love-unity-respect, rave drug Ecstacy? Apparently so.
Police have also identified a troubling new trend: Some of the young suspects are users of the drug ecstasy.
Perhaps it’s the thirty dollar a tab designer price.
I was always amazed by this to. I used to see all the fabulous people walking around in the middle of the day. When I first moved there and couldn’t find work. I wanted to go up to them and ask “what do you do?”
Best answer:
“If you ask 100 girls for $10, that&rduo;s $1,000, that’s rent,” he explained logically.
Ahh, the California lifestyle.
