kiosk

at kiosk, the neon is almost as good as the stuff.

does not compute

the cynic says this email from patagonia is a cunning form of marketing misdirection. i have resisted all of cyber monday's blandishments so far.

it doesn't hurt to ask

i made two of these on my last day at the ranch, using some apparently nearly pure copper sheet retrieved from the garbage can in the metal shop. the other one says: "eat your vegetables."

my new binding system is unstoppable

shock cord makes jack purcell much easier. this is MSR's silicone-core product intended for replacing tent-pole cords. you will also require scissors (make sure the blades are sharp) and an open flame (a lighter or gas burner will work).

do not pre-cut your cord. choose a hole to start with (A; above, the toe-ward outside hole) and thread from the outside in. the loose end of the shock cord will end up protruding from the last hole (B; above, the heel-ward inside hole) while the spool end will protrude from A. pull through to leave about 2-3 inches extra on the B-end. coarse adjust for tightness (err on the side of being a little loose), then cut the A-end of the shock cord and tie a stopper knot in it. adjust for tightness again and tie a loose stopper knot in the B-end. repeat on the other shoe. walk around for a bit to be sure of things. try the shoes with socks and without. when you're happy with the fit, secure the knot and trim both loose ends to just shy of the stopper knots. wet fingers and seal the cut cord ends quickly with an open flame, pinching immediately with wet fingers to fuse the melted sheathing.

walk around smugly.

bigger isn't always better

and certainly not for mobile devices. the size of a device determines its mobility: those intended to be mobile, such as laptops and smartphones, should be small, small, small.

laptop manufacturers might consider that some people still use their laptops for things other than movie-watching, and that some people enjoy carrying around a laptop that is fast and fully functional but not the size of a butcher block cutting board. for those who don't watch movies on their laptops, a 16:9 screen proves mildly useful for using the kind of application that has toolbars on the side, but is worse than useless for popular laptop use-cases such as document-reading, code-writing, and scrolling-page navigation. a 4:3, retina-display, 11" macbook air would be a dream with a small footprint. it is all but certain that 2 out of the 3 will be in the next air refresh; will the 4:3 aspect ratio be an option? we, or at least i, can only hope.

smartphones are inherently mobile devices, and the good ones (fast, high-resolution, with good platform compatibility) are now almost all too big. the few small phones these days are mostly underpowered budget models with crummy displays. the iphone is the only exception to this trend: a premium phone with a small footprint. samsung's galaxy line would be more competitive with the iphone if they released a galaxy nexus with a better designed rear camera housing and a smaller footprint than the iphone.

though i am not an apple fanboy, i will say this: apple gets a lot of credit for detail-oriented hardware but they should get more credit for resisting—as few major hardware manufacturers appear to be doing—the urge to differentiate their products by simply making them bigger. that, as kierkegaard says, is the bad infinite.

a rectangle of radiant simplicity

The finished product was a rectangle of radiant simplicity, an unfancy, richly hued blank presence that was the predictable result, Barrett insisted, of selecting proper materials, preparing them in patient, time-honored ways and approaching their manufacture with a spirit of total dedication. “This is pretty much how it was done for 1,800 years,” he remarked. “By hand. One sheet at a time.”

mark levine, on timothy barrett, in the new york times.
[thx ben]

barrett worked at twinrocker paper for a while. the mark of the maker is a short documentary about them, and is worthwhile.

a partial history of new ideas in food

(thx corky, for the invitation. slides are here.)

next acquisition target

in case you are unaware, this is a photo of a real live copy of modernist cuisine. from a 25 minute rapid flipthrough, the book is as promised, maybe more. the typography is oddly 90s in feel: i don't think i've seen optima used as body text since 1998 when it was de rigueur for certificates and other official documents, and the title type is reminiscent of eurostile (but is actually not). the photographic reproduction is killer, though (stochastic screening is part of the reason).

let us not forget that the set weighs 40 pounds and requires special protective packaging inside a dedicated box the size of a cube fridge.

[with thx to corby, for letting me see modernist cuisine in the flesh. so to speak.]

le whif

labo group gave out a few hundred of these le whifs today at TEDxBoston. 200mg of chocolate, aerosolized (i assume). powerfully weird, but they do taste like chocolate. for those who care, close to zero calories.

the inventors explain that the history of food consumption has followed a trajectory of decreasing volume (which is only arguably true), and that inhaled food--le whif is the first example--is the logical telos of that trajectory. they didn't say why, but they're not the first to think that something like this might be on the way. back in the 80s, writing about japanese food, mfk fisher noted that

We have never been taught to make little look like much, make much out of little, in a mystical combination of ascetic and aesthetic as well as animal satisfaction ... [but this new acceptance], no matter how unwitting, of the intrinsic asceticism of Oriental cooking, is suspected by some observers to be a kind of intuitive preparation for the much leaner days to come to all of us who live on a polluted planet. What is now a stylish fad, or an "awakening," depending on both pocketbook and chronology, may become in the future an exotic recollection of the Good Old Days, when carrot curls and cashew nuts were eaten by caprice and not necessity. A latter-day MacLuhan might argue that out current preoccupation with culinary simplicity is really an instinctive recognition of our diminishing supplies of food ... of our need to accept austerity as the rule, after a long time of heedless Western glut.

from the introduction to japanese cooking: a simple art

aerogel

would someone buy me a block of aerogel? (what is aerogel? find out here and here.) you can do all sorts of neat things with it. it is also optically weird and looks awesome.

photo taken at JPL by robert m. brown and found at hubert van hecke's aerogel page

yanobe kenji

not everyone is cool enough to build large metal objects that do neat things. for example, how about this foot soldier, a "Weapon for conquest series, A "teleexistence" type, pants model trabelling weapon"? or this survival system train, "Kenji Yanobe's private train possessing various containers with the necessary functions for survival such as the oxygen generation container, water distillation container,and houseuhold tools"? the best one is the 7.2 meter tall giant torayan, "the ultimate child's weapon, as it sings, dances, breathes fire, and follows only those orders given by children."

yanobe kenji's giant torayan breathing fire, as advertised, at the rocking mammoth. image copyright by the man himself and linked from his own fine website.

change

the last time we had a snowstorm, the internet went funny too. just another excuse to hate on comcast. in any case, the year in review:

i was back in the motherland for over a month last november. for the first time in several years, enough of my family (ie, one) lived in the same country that it made sense having a permanent place to live. we were close to a rainforest and, in the mornings, a cool mist would sometimes drift in through my window. that was nice. i was working mountain view hours while in singapore, so i woke up late, walked out for breakfast at the town center, and harassed people into meeting me for beverages in the afternoons. i got books out of the library that i didn't have time to read in san francisco and read them all.

in my second week home, i started reading the steep approach to garbadale and doing my annual re-read of i heard the owl call my name. one day that week, i woke up just as the sky got light, and had an epiphany. it felt exactly like what w.s. merwin said, that this life does not go all the way. the goog was a sweet gig, but it didn't go all the way, not in the least. it didn't even go another full year. the prospect of still being there at the end of 2008, to be honest, was terrifying in a completely benign-seeming way. it was a variety of low-level existential dread, the kind frogs purportedly don't feel when they boil slowly to death. not to put too fine a point on it. occasionally, everything snaps into focus; maybe it was intuition, or the steep approach to garbadale, or i heard the owl call my name. in any case, before coming back, i'd begun to think about more school but did nothing about it. within an hour of waking up, i'd emailed the usual suspects to ask them to write letters for my applications.

after that, time passed rapidly. even before i heard back from schools, i'd begun making alternative plans, just in case. having spent a year making things on the weekends, i thought perhaps it would be a good thing to do that more of the time. through john grew sheridan, i contacted susan working at anderson ranch and put in an application to work the summer session in their wood/furniture/sculpture program and, bizarrely, got in. andy and susie magdanz, friends of glenn and ilene's, offered me a place to stay in cambridge for the first couple of months. it turned out to be an enormous victorian house down brattle street with two cats and two dogs.

at the goog, i ramped up the nonprofit earth and maps work, and got the climate project connected to avenue A | razorfish, and google connected to cleanuptheworld.org (the little thing steve and i dreamed up last year has now turned into this). i went to iceland with a fancy new gigapan robot and, with fulbright ben, drove around the island making ephemeral sculpture out of snow, ice, and rock (more on iceland here, here, here, here, and here).

in march, i decided i couldn't wait any longer and gave notice. then, through a truly perverse turn of events, dan janzen and winnie hallwachs (from the ACG) showed up at google to give a lecture about genetic barcoding and emergent biological data. through them, and through brad, i got the chance to work on a genomics and structured data project at google--something i'd been trying to do from the time i started (efforts that resulted in the ill-fated visit by ed wilson, jeffrey sachs, and harold varmus, and in miscellaneous attempts with my favourite partner in crime, joel finkelstein, to get google involved with the encyclopedia of life project). with the international barcode of life folks, we went to costa rica to try and save the world (yes, really), with a large list of assorted googlers in train. i extended my time at google as long as i possibly could, then everything came to an abrupt end in may. last day at work on friday, then i packed everything up, sold a stack of books and my burning man tickets, dropped off two large boxes at the salvation army, drove the desk to halsey's house, sold the car, got a valedictory latte at ritual roasters, and had people over for a 36-pack of tecate. i left for colorado before sunrise the following monday. it was epic.

anderson ranch was, mildly put, a complete change. nestled in the mountains south of aspen, with bright sun, thin air, no cellphone reception (for me anyway), and internet access whenever we got to the shop computer. when i arrived, the aspens carpeting the mountainsides had just begun to put out the first tiny leaves. we got up at 7am when the sun came in through the apartment windows (not even hiding under the blanket would prevent it from doing so), biked up the mountain to the ranch for breakfast, and usually rode down through the sprinklers in pitch darkness after midnight; our apartment got into the habit of early morning pasta meals.

the maloof wood barn at the ranch. here, we spent all our time.

having 24-hour access to the biggest, best-equipped shop i'd ever been in made me want to try all sorts of hare-brained things. i got into the groove of making things and watching them fail, then trying again. i made pointless things, like clouds. i painted things weird colours and also no colour. i stood around in classes learning things i never really even thought about. some of the lectures were really great (like this, and this). the people i worked with were bizarre and marvellous, and made magnificent things--staff, students, faculty (there was a marvellous run of weeks with paul bowen, wendy maruyama, merryll saylan, and tom huang that will stay with me for a long time), and especially my fellow peons whose work i'd link to if only they had online portfolios. local art patrons had us over to marvel at their collections. when we could get away on the weekends, we took the free bus into aspen to observe the lives of the wealthy and tasteless, avail ourselves of a magnificent library built with their tax dollars, and get mildly discomposed at the local (only) dive bar. i left only twice, once for for catherine and zach's wedding in sundance, then again for sci foo camp (hitting up quince along the way). four months later, we were all wiped out and ready for the summer to end. it was getting cold again and the aspens were beginning to turn.

after the last class of the season, it was like the ranch took a deep breath and exhaled everyone to much needed time away. my last weekend there was strangely quiet after many weeks of the opposite. the holiday messed everything up, and my stuff followed bland to jackson hole before getting shipped out east. i showed up in cambridge with just a backpack on one of the hottest, most humid nights of the summer. the house on appleton street had high ceilings and tall windows opening out onto trees. those first two weeks before the start of school were full of leaf-filtered light in the mornings, and waking up with a cat on the bed. i developed a fondness for almond butter and honey on a freshly-toasted english muffin. ami came out to visit and we ate at craigie street just before it left craigie street.

school started in mid-september and i saw the sociology department for the first time ever. in october, i moved into a house down the street from william james hall. 3 storeys with 9 other people in it, and minimal insulation. the house runs as much like a well-oiled machine as a house containing 10 people can be expected to do. there is a lot of cooking, mostly of lentils, and we wear sweaters often. there was a backyard party to celebrate the end of the fall; matt made 50 pounds of slow-roasted beef brisket. classical social theory, economic sociology, stratification, the social psychology of organizations, and a class in letterpress printing by michael russem of the kat ran press (more here and here) somehow ate up the last 14 weeks--i don't know where the time went. they keep telling us that we'll be with our colleagues for the rest of our professional lives. for a surprisingly large number of classmates, i'm glad this is the case.

sabeel says graduate students are the only professionals whose labour isn't alienated. i'm not sure that's completely true, and ritual roasters is 3096 miles away but, even so, the best ice cream, pad thai, and sandwiches in the world (well, maybe not the sandwiches, but they're still pretty damn good) are within walking distance, i've seen ferran adria speak in person and tara donovan's retrospective at the ICA, and they pay me to think about stuff i care about. it hasn't always been a great year, but i'd say things are pretty good.

happy new year.

bricolage

every so often, i come across something that feels great; some organization has gone and used the resources available to it and done something interesting, unexpected, funny, gentle -- bricolage is the fancy word. it's particularly nice when that something involves a product i used to work on, and when it involves neighbourhoods and communities that coalesce around a transient event or phenomenon -- the way good art should. this is old news by now but robin hewlett and ben kinsley (both from CMU) went and orchestrated a piece of transient community art and captured it in google maps. (presumably, they did this with the help of the google streetview team. it probably doesn't hurt that part of the google geo product and engineering team work out of the google pittsburgh office, and that there are some pretty strong ties between the geo team and CMU. some of these googlers were instrumental in the launch of the sky feature in google earth and maps).

you can see Street with a View both on their website and in google maps:

View Larger Map

make your own muppet

fao schwartz has a new service that allows you to make your own muppet online. presumably, the patterns get sent to some lasercutter somewhere, sewn up by an itinerant stuffed-toy artisan, then make their way to you.