First I find crazy backyard offices and now it’s crazy office chairs:
Human Hamster Wheel?
The idea of curling up in there with a laptop makes me nervous about the entire idea of working from home.
(This came up in a search for “co-working” facilities, which I’m bound to discuss at length at some point. These chairs live at a place called Cohere.)
I happened to notice this standard FedEx shipping envelope sitting atop our supply cupboard at work:
FedEx Envelope
The line at the top reads, “Do not ship liquids, blood, or diagnostics in this packaging.”
Uh oh. I was about to print some diagnostic log files from my latest application and ship them to New York. It’s a good thing I noticed that important warning!
Design Milk published a pictorial a few days ago on offices built in people’s backyards titled The Rise of the Backyard Office. Evidently building a separate office in one’s backyard is a trend now. Many of those pictured are elegant and intriguing (and make me jealous), but I can’t can’t quite get past this one:
dmvA’s Blob VB3
If I worked in that office, I’d feel compelled to come home every evening (across the yard, of course) with a joyful greeting of, “Nanu, Nanu!”
(Mork & Mindy? Anybody? Is “Nanu, Nanu” still a usable catchphrase? How about “Shazbot?”)
We’re contemplating a cross-country drive this summer, starting in the Boston area and heading west. I asked Google Maps to start plotting out the trip with some stops along the way, and it was doing well until I asked for a detour through Niagra Falls and Canada.
I find step 59 (“Make a U-turn”) a little alarming, since it occurs on the provincial highway system — Canada’s equivalent of the Interstate highways in the United States.
Step 60: Now You're Lost!
I zoomed out to see what might have brought Google to this unfortunate recommendation. I think this explains the problem rather well:
420 is Everywhere
So basically, Google is just acknowledging what’s bound to happen anyway. “This way is 420! No, it says this way is! No, this way! Ahh, screw it; just turn around over here.”
Well played, Google. Well played.
(In Maps’ defense, there actually is a cut in the median just beyond what Street View shows there where a U-turn looks legal, at least, but let’s at least pretend I’ll be able to take the right “420” exit in the first place.)
The Harvard Pops gave a delightful baseball-themed concert tonight, including Boston’s own baseball favorites like Shipping Up to Boston and Sweet Caroline. “Sporchestra” commentators narrated the event, providing (for example) play-by-play analysis of Beethoven’s 5th symphony:
The brass section has the theme… and now the basses have it… and now nobody has the theme! The audience can’t find the theme! Wait… what’s this… he’s introduced a new theme!
Mengruo Yang performed a mesmerizing and technically impressive solo on flute in Fantasie Brillante from Carmen (performed here, perhaps even more impressively, by 7 year-old “Emma“).
Megan Savage narrated the poem Casey at the Bat as Adam Lathram brought it to life. The Boston Pops had included this poem in their own baseball-themed concert last year, but I honestly liked conductor Allen Feinstein’s original music from tonight’s performance better.
My favorite line of the evening came when Adam Lathram was about to start a rigorous training routine for his upcoming bullfight in a montage set to the music of Rocky:
You’d better get a move on. You only have 163 measures.
All this begs the question: where were you while all this was going on?
These graphics depict the international standard signaling techniques used to communicate with helicopter pilots on or near a helipad. These particular signals tell the pilot to lift off or move downward, respectively.
They’re also fantastic dance moves as exhibited by one of the lesser known Village People: the Aircraft Marshaller.
Patrick Jean made a video depicting what would happen to New York if it were attacked by 1980s video games:
I like the bit with Tetris best, but the entire thing is wonderful.
I was unimpressed with this the first time I watched it, but after trying it again I’m finding it entirely remarkable. Todd Lappin handed his new iPad to his 2.5 year-old daughter and filmed her first few minutes using the device.
This is cheating to some extent in that she’s already used an iPhone and therefore understood not only the basic interface but also many of the applications (including her games in particular).
That aside, however, the basic idea that children born today are faced with clear, intuitive interfaces for interacting with computers — and that they can learn to use a device like an iPad before even being able to read — is truly astounding.
YouTube has quite a few videos of children using an iPad (a surprising percentage of whom are 2.5 years old) which only emphasizes the basic point that we’ve invented a device young children can perhaps universally understand.
This is my favorite unintentionally funny database table name ever:
skin_condition
This application, like many applications we create, supports different templates so that the application can look like a natural part of a variety of different websites. That’s a skin.
Each such site might want to limit which records are shown, so the School of Management can show only their own faculty’s records, for example. That’s a condition.
A condition for a particular skin? A skin_condition, of course!
Clara Moskowitz at MSNBC reports on a study about traffic planning.
Researchers arranged oat flakes to mimic the layout of cities around Tokyo, and then set some slime mold loose. This mold grows as a large, interconnected network that tries to get the most efficient access to food — in this case, Japan-mimicking oat flakes.
The resulting network of mold ended up looking suspiciously similar to the train network that connects the real Tokyo to its real suburbs.
Apart from the quip Freakonomics makes about whether transportation engineers are as smart as mold, there’s also something to be said for the similarities between what we humans do to our environment and what mold does in its own.
(via Freakonomics)