Quote of the day: Susan Maushart
From the opening pages of Susan Maushart's The Winter of Our Disconnect, a book I picked up this winter in Cambridge (thank you, Waterstone's 3 for 2 mix and
Colbert on the cloud
I'm deep in writing right now, so until I surface, here's Stephen Colbert's genius piece on the cloud and memory. The Colbert ReportGet More: Colbert Report Full
Do Facebook users spend more time online than computer scientists in the 1960s?
There's a claim-- I found it first in one of Geoff "Nunberg Error" Nunberg's articles-- that before they were all put on CDs, the documentation for a 747
“Slowly, the tools of the hand disappear”
My architectural history mentor, David Brownlee, shared a link to this essay by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien on slowness and hand-work in architectural practice. This is a
Fred Stutzman on Freedom, productivity, and bigger/better/faster vs. smaller/better/slower
Fred Stutzman, the creator of Freedom and Anti-Social, and now a postdoc at CMU (and like me, a Microsoft Research Lab alum) has a very nice reflection about
Are there distraction-free graphics programs? Can there be Zenware for music?
I've been wondering about this for a little while. Zenware (the term was coined in this article, btw) seems to consist of 1) programs that keep you from
“Think of how unproductive Dickens would have been if he had to fight against Facebook”
John Biggs reviews a couple distraction-free text editors in the New York Times: With the release of Mac OS X Lion, the idea of a full-screen app —
What was the first machine users considered an extension of themselves?
This is a question I spent a little time digging into today. Leaving aside weapons and artist's tools (though I'm not sure that the now-common "the sword is
The Slow Science Manifesto
This. Is. Awesome. We are scientists. We don’t blog. We don’t twitter. We take our time.... Science needs time to think. Science needs time to read, and
More on architecture, drawing, and thinking
I've been reading up on the effects of CAD-- and more specifically, the abandonment of drawing in architectural education-- on architectural thinking and practice. It's a great example