I feel like I’m just marking memorials these days. First singer Kate McGarrigle (RIP post here), now Big Star frontman Alex Chilton.
A couple of years ago I wrote a post about my surprise at learning that the Alex Chilton I knew for “Thirteen” and “The Ballad of El Goodo” had been a teen idol with The Box Tops. Check out the post and many Youtubes here.
Hark! A Vagrant. Very entertaining webcomic. Currently a bit more Canada-focused than usual, following the Olympic hockey gold.
via my bro
“Personal biospheres” by Seattle artist Vaughn Bell.
So great – I need one of these for my living room. Or better yet: a cafe filled with multi-person versions.
As a former management consultant at a firm that specialized in scenario planning, I love reading the sweeping statements and predictions people have made that have turned out to be wildly wrong.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
– Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
– Ken Olson, head of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
When you look closely, though, you find it is rare that the speaker was explicitly attempting to predict the future. The statements are instructive precisely because the speakers were not attempting to predict the future, just to describe the world as they saw it at that time.
This is why the statements are so fascinating to me — they show us our old mental maps of how we thought the world worked, and reveal to us how wrong we were. This can be jarring, because we don’t often realize the subtle calibrations we constantly make to our mental maps in response to an ever-changing present.
When the gap between where someone thought the world was going and where it actually went is big enough, we see start to see that as a failed prediction – albeit an inadvertent one. Here are a couple infamous “statements about the present” from the tech field:
“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”
“I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.”
“How do [Odeo] shareholders feel about side projects like Twttr when their primary product line is, besides the excellent design, a total snoozer?”
You can’t blame these guys for “getting it wrong.” Like Jim Cramer, their job is making near-instant judgement calls on highly speculative things. In fact, that’s basically what we’re all doing here in the present.
But once you have that future-historical view in mind, it starts coloring how you read things, like…
“Epic fail. No multitask. No flash. Wifi only (WTF!).”
“A large iPhone without a camera. I’m not all that impressed.”
Now I’m not saying they’re not right. I’m just saying take a moment to think of Thomas Watson, Ken Olson, Commander Taco, and Mike Arrington before you start typing.
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Who’s excited for Feb 2? Flight 815 crash in real time (via maxistentialism).
The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.
A gorgeous, meditative tour through imagined spaces and structures. What struck me most was not that it was full-CG — which, yes, is amazing — but that here, at the beginning of 2010, an immersive virtual world like this can be produced by ONE GUY.
Rare early footage of my favorite Aretha Franklin song, “One Step Ahead.” She must be about 20 years old here. The video is from before she signed with Atlantic Records, when she was still with Columbia, in the early ’60s.
Mos Def sampled “One Step Ahead” in 1999 for “Ms. Fat Booty” – a bit different feel, but also a great track.
mp3: Aretha Franklin – “One Step Ahead”
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mp3: Mos Def – “Ms. Fat Booty”
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When I lived in Mumbai, it took me months to figure out how to navigate the city. Rickshaws, trains, and taxis were easy enough — it was how to communicate where I wanted to go that was the problem.
People didn’t pay attention to addresses – they knew building names. They didn’t say “the intersection of X & Y streets” – they knew the name of the chowk or square at that location. Bafflingly, people didn’t even seem to know street names – as I came to learn, the official names on the map were often recent impositions and virtually unused.
I learned to navigate by landmark: VT station, Shivaji Park, BKC, Shoppers Stop, Haji Ali. Choose a ballpark destination, then zero in from there with turn-by-turn directions based on shops, statues, parks, and buildings – not street names!
So you can imagine how useless online maps were. Although Google Maps technically covered Mumbai (which I found amazing enough), actually using it was out of the question…until now! The Google Maps team in India has been busy trying to solve this problem: “Go thataway: Google Maps India learns to navigate like a local.”
Have you ever been lost? Perhaps you missed a turn because a street sign was poorly labeled, hard to see in the dark, or just not where it should have been? These are problems we’ve all faced, but they’re especially complicated in India, where street names are not commonly known and the typical wayfinding strategy is to ask someone on the street.
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To solve this problem, this week we launched an improvement to Google Maps India that describes routes in terms of easy-to-follow landmarks and businesses that are visible along the way.
I can’t tell you how useful this would have been to me when I first moved to India! Check out more details on the Google blog.
