16 july 2004: color-coded

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I just finished reading William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" in which protagonist Cayce earns a crust predicting what new brands, designs and products will catch on. (Surprisingly, given the author, it's not particularly an SF book--more like a standard contemporary thriller with added e-mail.)

Meanwhile Teresa Nielsen Hayden has been pondering an American trade organisation called Color Marketing Group:

"These are the people who wished avocado green and harvest gold kitchen appliances on America, and put the 1980s into those mauve-pink shades that looked so peculiarly horrible on so many of us.

"... Twice a year they get together in Alexandria, VA, to come up with long-term and short-term color predictions. The long-term prediction is a set of sixteen colors that will be profitably marketable two years hence. That is, the 2003 palette was distributed to manufacturers in 2001. The short-term prediction is a palette of colors declared to be currently the thing.

"It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nobody’s obliged to follow CMG’s lead; but a manufacturer who ignores them is likely to find that all his competitors’ products are in fashionably compatible colors, while his own clash."

Teresa has written an excellent, link-filled article about Color Marketing Group and as a bonus she includes their 2004 color prescriptions for the Action/Recreation industry, Durable Home Products, Communications/Graphics, Fashion, Home Fashion and Transport and related industries.

16 July 2004 | top of page

Fun with captions: rock, paper, Saddam.

Journey through Max Weber's Pit and use your mouse to disturb the denizens, drift along the river of... um... something green and slightly bubbly, and launch short animated bits of amusing pointlessness. (Requires Flash/Shockwave)

thanks, Iza

Dunedin fire walk organiser defends injury rate. The mass walk across hot coals was a fund-raiser for the local St John's ambulance service. Eleven people were taken to hospital for emergency treatment, and another 17 were treated on the spot.

thanks, Paul

The tough life of an arts graduate:

"'Not once has a customer asked me about the innovations of Edouard Manet, or whether politics and aesthetics make good bedfellows,' Trumbull said. 'They're much more likely to ask me to bring them a plunger or give them a wake-up call.'

"Trumbull, who owes more than $40,000 in student loans, added that he must use a calculator to perform even simple math."

thanks, Paul

Developers of the "Halo" computer game publish regular updates on what they're doing. In this one, Jaime Griesemer describes what it's like to let other people play with your carefully-nurtured work of art:

"It's painful to watch. You want to go rip the controller from their hands and show them how to play... But you can't because if they can't figure out how to have fun on their own, then nobody else will either.

"Luckily, our tests went really well. We had some rough spots, but the 40 year old mother was gunning folks down with dual-smgs within 20 minutes. The RPG gamer was intentionally giving the enemy his Ghost so he could board them and take it back. The City Councilman decided that leaping down on someone and shotgunning them in the head was better than putting for birdie. We've got a long way to go, but Halo 2 is on track to be as user-friendly as the first one."

(thanks, Tania)

"Kids love it when their parents read to them at bedtime. But let's face it. In today's society, time is of the essence. There's only so much you can do in a day..." Book-A-Minute Bedtime offers ultra-condensed versions of all the best kids' books. Here, for example, is Dr Seuss's "Oh, the Places You'll Go!":

"You can go to some neat places, so get out of the house and make something of yourself."

...and for adults, there's a vast collection of ultra-condensed movies in Movie-A-Minute.

"ADMIT IT: You've read The Da Vinci Code. There's no denying it. I saw you with it last week on the subway, your finger stuck in the spine to keep your place... I'm not here to judge you... Still, if you're going to subject your gray matter to Dan Brown's unholy union of Tom Clancy and Indiana Jones, you should at least get some background on the source material he lifted his plot from: Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln's 1982 bestseller Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which has been recently revived in the wake of Brown's success. (I didn't say that you should actually read the book: ...that goes beyond the level of torture even Donald Rumsfeld would feel comfortable with.)"

Confronted by a lot of earnest talk and reams of documentation, we're tempted to believe there's some serious thinking going on. The reality is that "we stumble around in a fog of verbiage, ...grabbing only bits and pieces of arguments and clinging to our own for all we are worth, if only as flotsam that will keep us afloat in the swirling currents of the great river of argy bargy." The technique of 'argument mapping' can you sort things out.

Flipsock friend Chris identifies another instance of strewth in advertising: your beer may be lumpy, but you can't argue that a glass tasting of rotting-fish has less flavor than the competitor's product.

"At a time when the language has become the world’s dominant tongue and when an extraordinary range of scholarship is being produced in it, while subcultural and scientific neologisms proliferate, [Don] Watson’s gloom seems... misplaced... There is no way things ought to be and there is no prize for mere indignation. The language is as open to creative and rigorous use as it ever was. What’s required is leadership from creators, rather than sullen ‘resistance’ by those who believe they’ve been subjected to a death sentence."

Susan Boyle and Benton Brown have renovated a Brooklyn building into ecologically friendly apartments. Says Boyle: "New York City, to me, is the greenest city in the world, for the energy efficiency of its compact living and ease of public transportation."

"So here we are in 'the age of delivery': promise what you like, but you'd better be sure you deliver on that promise. Companies with a good customer experience excel above traditional companies that put all their resources into the promise."

The Crazy Case Mod Contest attracted entries from computers with resident hamsters and fish, several works of wooden art and a range of other strange storage.

Ritsumeikan University researchers have built small, rolling 'soft robots' that pull themselves along by shifting their shape. The flexible plastic wheels have spokes made from shape memory alloy, a common robotics material that shortens when heated from current flowing through it.

A Gartner report claims "Portable storage products can bypass perimeter defences like firewalls and antivirus at the mailserver, and introduce malware such as Trojans or viruses onto company networks." Gartner recommends banning MP3 players, digital cameras and memory sticks from the workplace.

Bad 70s interior design.

15 July 2004 | top of page

The joy of pointless programming: how one man beat an 18-year-old record for constructing the longest palindrome. The secret of his success: a standard laptop computer that can efficiently sift through a 100,000-word dictionary.

14 July 2004 | top of page

Keira Knightley, before and after: a Photoshop boob job, or another triumph for the Wonderbra and a pair of socks?

Web Side Story says Microsoft Explorer's share of the browser market has dropped from 95.48 to 94.42 per cent since early June. Hardly a users' revolt, but it's a start.

Useful phrases for travellers, from the Zompist Phrasebook:

• Ich sprechen Deutsch wie Italienisch Fußballtrainer. (I understand your language perfectly.)

• Hay un muerto en mi cama. Por favor, cambie las sábanas. (There's a corpse on the bed. Please change the sheets.)

• Je referai volontiers connaissance quand vous serez à jeun. (I would very much like to meet you again when you are sober.)

Couple of beaut tidbits in Design Observer this month:

• the tyranny of taglines and corporate slogans: at least they're brief

• a sneak preview of Edward Tufte's new book about visualising data: "Tufte not only posted his chapter for public critique, but appears to both encourage group discussion and online commentary. Who among us would willingly subject their writing to such 'peer review'--let alone, allow our work to be moulded in the process of so doing?"

Notes, blogs and presentation slides from this year's Usability Professionals Association conference (USA), on the theme of 'connecting communities'.

San Francisco cartoonist Mark Fiore's latest animated editorial toon is an ad for the Electronic Election 2004, coming to a ballot booth near you. (Requires Shockwave)

The European Space Agency, the European Southern Observatory and NASA have released a free Photoshop plug-in that gives anyone access to archival astronomical images and spectra from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and others. (via BoingBoing.net)

"Ultimately, narrative shows how the end was contained all the time in the beginning, which is why 'you choose the ending' is lame-o." Question is, can we invent a new way of telling stories that employs the narrative uncertainty and other qualities of Internet/online communication?

Nintendo Breakz is a collection of 40 short remixes of classic Nintendo theme music. (via BoingBoing)

Japanese scientists are trying to make an electronic skin as sensitive as human skin, with sensitivity to heat, pressure, humidity and other factors. The thin plastic skin could be used for robotics, prostheses, and for sport, security, safety and other medical applications. (via boingboing)

13 July 2004 | top of page

2004 flipsocks:

17 Dec: the sock has flipped
10 Dec: anything anywhere any time
3 Dec: instant flattery
26 Nov: the steamroller of branding
19 Nov: fried v rice
5 Nov: the page with no name
29 Oct: and then there were none
22 Oct: filled with naughty laughter
15 Oct: get souls and disconcert the public
8 Oct: ooh, aah, ooh
1 Oct: pinch and a punch
24 Sep: design is the new art
17 Sep: footsteps of Aeneas
10 Sep: slow art, viral aesthetic
3 Sep: I can see your house from here
27 Aug: forever blowing bubbles
20 Aug: jargon for the digital age
13 Aug: beautiful plumage, the Norwegian blue
6 Aug: brokenated terribility
23 Jul: Alice underground
16 Jul: color-coded
2 Jul: for so long treated as nouns
25 Jun: looking for love, echidna-style
18 Jun: joy-to-stuff ratio
11 Jun: fun's fun but a girl can't dance all night
4 Jun: pink dinosaur
28 May: two people every minute
21 May: incompitnce [sic]
14 May: zygomatic smile
5 May: mailbox
30 Apr: bananaguard
23 Apr: mmmmmWAH!
15 Apr: playtime
8 Apr: googlewhack
2 Apr: we wish to inform you...
18 Mar: daffy dills
12 Mar: echo chamber
9 Jan: refund profologies

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