1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worthwhile to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

[Also here: http://www.math.uh.edu/~tomforde/Russell-Decalogue-2.html AND http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/05/02/a-liberal-decalogue-bertrand-russell/ ]

"I’m not anti-technology; basically I’m concerned with thrilling and inspiring the senses. Human happiness lies in how fully we can savor our living environment. If we can fully perceive and enjoy the world in a newly emerging reality, virtual or not, that’s great. In fact, the term “haptic” is used extensively in virtual reality research. And virtual technology is in its nascent stage; we can’t judge it too harshly. One day—in two or three centuries— we might not be able to tell the difference between virtual and physical reality. But we shouldn’t stay where we are for long, because this technology doesn’t make us feel good."

"The concept of “emptiness” is one of my methods of communication design. I don’t launch a message at my viewers, but instead provide an empty vessel. In turn, I expect them to deposit something there, their own messages or images. This is an important aspect of communication, accepting what the other has to say."

"A Japanese cleaning team finds satisfaction in diligently doing its job. The better they do it the more satisfaction they get out of it.

The craftman’s spirit, I think, imbues people with a sense of beauty, as in elaboration, delicacy, care, simplicity (words I often use). Obviously, this also applies to bento-making and the pride people take in making them as beautiful as they can.

There is a similar craftman’s spirit (“shokunin kishitsu” or “shokunin katagi”) in Europe. Yet in Europe I can see it coming alive only from a certain level of sophistication. –In Japan, even ordinary jobs such as cleaning and cooking are filled with this craftman’s spirit. It is is common sense in Japan.

While Japanese are known for their particular aesthetic sense, I would say we also have an incapacity to see ugliness. How come?

We usually focus fully on what’s right in front of our eyes. We tend to ignore the horrible, especially if it is not an integral part of our personal perspective."

"When water droplets fall on lotus leaves, they bead up into balls. Dubbed the “lotus effect,” this phenomenon occurs because the infinitesimal hairs coating the surface of the leaves repel water. Super hydrophobic coating is the technology by which the lotus effect is scientifically engineered and was developed for use in special paints and coatings for self-cleaning and snow-repelling surfaces.

…Kenya Hara employs this technology in a natural humidifier with no electro-mechanical parts. Daring to use paper as his base material, Hara applied a coating of hydrophobic aerosol…Imbued with a surface microstructure similar to that of a lotus leaf, the paper causes most of the water placed on it to turn immediately into round drops. With the transformation of a fixed amount of water into many small balls, the increased surface area accelerates the evaporation of the water and makes apparent the humidifying effect. Because the water need not be heated, the humidifier requires zero energy."

"'design, is basically not self-expression. instead, it originates in society. the essence of design lies in the process of discovering
a problem shared by many people and trying to solve it. because the root of the problem is within society, everyone can understand plans for solutions and process for solving the problem, in addition to being able to see the problem from the designer's perspective. design is appealing because the process creates inspiration that is engendered
by this empathy among human beings in our common values and spirituality.'"

"focusing on the purity of form and its meaning, this book brings forth hara's theories and philosophical approach to design,
presented across eight sections: 1. re-design: daily products of the 21st century; 2. haptic: awakening the senses;
3. senseware: medium that intrigues man; 4. white; 5. muji: nothing, yet everything; 6. viewing the world from the tip of asia;
7. exformation: a new information format; and 8. what is design?"

"Most of the web team here at ESPI are what I like to call Keynote aficionados. They use the program for virtually every project, rarely dipping into Photoshop except occasionally to create some small graphic elements. An example of this is Red Bull Music Academy website that was completed last year. With the exception of some vector iconography created in Illustrator, it was all designed in Keynote.

Why use Keynote?

This is by no means a definitive list, but here are some of the key features for a designer using Keynote.

1. Ease and spread of use
2. Flexibility and non-destructive editing
3. The cleverest grid lines I have ever met
4. Animation tools for prototyping
5. Third party add-ons/libraries"

"There's this attempt to frame this argument in some kind of grand narrative about the Purpose of Art in this grim, materialistic way that dictates you have to elevate drawings and games and music to the same level of perceived importance as, like, sciences that help you learn how to build weather-resistant structures or stop wounds from bleeding, so art has to be measured by some arbitrary metrics to denote the movements of resources (TIME being considered a resource.) You're no longer hanging out and talking about your feelings about art and other potentially subjective shit, you're a warrior on the front lines of a new frontier, dude fighting for humanity's future. If you get locked into this mindset, you're inevitably building a canon. You have to have the big list of The Ones That Mattered because you need them to be the Platonic ideals everything else has been derived from. You don't think it's ego masturbation because you're convinced it's "going somewhere."

Jump a decade into the future, then another one, then another one, then keep going until the inevitable advance of tech has mutated "games" into something you no longer even recognize. Sergei Eisenstein was a bleeding-edge dude in his day, imagine drop-kicking his nerd ass into our age of Transformers 3 and iPhone videos. He would throw up. So might you, if you live long enough to see the format/medium/whatever you fought over outgrow your conception of it on a fundamental level. Whatever you think defines game graphics, whatever you think defines a game interface, whatever you think defines the goal of a game, its physical boundaries, anything, forget it because it's going to be wiped away. It'll join the rest of "art history," emulated on a drive somewhere and ripped completely free of what it gained from its original context.

Find what you're into and figure out why you're into it and talk about that. You're otherwise wasting your life. I'm serious, you can listen or not but it doesn't matter. You are being pulled into an endless game of whack-a-mole. You will try to devise a principled stance to use as an attack platform and you will use those arbitrary criteria to complain about random things that appear before you forever. Jump ahead a decade or another decade or another decade or another decade and all you thought would matter about what you were doing has been erased, and the kids will be waving their dicks around on the holodeck and they will not learn your name, and if they do they won't care, and if they care they won't understand."

"There's both a good and bad side to virality. Products with viral hooks that are so strong they coerce people to sign up--in order to achieve a huge initial viral rush--are obviously bad. Not only do they alienate users, they don't lead to a sustainable business. On the good side, you have organic growth, which comes as a natural byproduct of something that spreads simply because people like it--eBay, Hot or Not, and Flickr. I can't think of an antonym for it."

"The decision to make all the photos public versus private was motivated by the fact that conversations are where metadata happens."

"Here’s what I’m sick of. When I talk to people about applied philosophy of technology, they get apologetic. Hardware techs feel guilty for liking to go on hikes without electronics. Crunchy folk feel guilty for using e-mail instead of postcards. It throws me, as if they’re confessing to victimless sins of omission in cults they’ve only heard of. Where is it written that we should take cameras on hikes or that postcards are necessarily better? For goodness’ sake, it’s our culture. If it chafes, let it out. If it drags, take it in. If it has loose threads, cut them off or tie them up or learn to like them – but quit apologizing and take some responsibility for your needs and tastes. Make, own, and remake your approach to technology."

"Software is written by people, for people. Sometimes it really sucks. But it’s our suck. We make it, we own it, and we can remake it. This means me, and this means you."

"Of course, even under the previously mentioned worst-case scenario, the Japanese language itself is currently in Category (3), "safe" languages. However, the answers to the questions of whether Japanese will continue to be safe forever, and whether the Japanese people will maintain an adherence to established forms (kodawari) of their language, are by no means certain. The term kodawari has come to have a positive meaning in recent years (as seen in advertising by companies who use it to stress their pursuit of excellence in their products), but in the past, it used to have an exclusively negative connotation as a sort of stubborn reluctance to alteration. Might that not be why the Japanese, lacking much of a kodawari toward their traditional culture, have been so receptive to the foreign and the heterogeneous, in response to the times, their situation, and the countries they are dealing with? The uncritical acceptance of foreign loanwords may be one example of this phenomenon…"

"Scye is an exceptional clothing line, but Hidaka and Miyahara’s strategy of pursuing quality and craft over trend and flash is not unique amongst young Japanese brands. Miyahara explains, “I believe the Japanese people have a basic artisanal disposition. There is a word in Japanese — kodawari — meaning being obsessed with the details, and it guides almost everything here.”

While some of this so-called quality obsession may be a response to discerning consumers, Miyahara sees craftsmanship in Japan prospering from the creators’ own self-demands:

Some part of kodawari is the designers’ own self-satisfaction of creating really nice things, even if consumers don’t notice the details. When we started the brand, we thought about how to do things from the perspective of those who actually make the clothing, and we wanted to produce clothes that people would still wear after a long time — both in terms of quality and style."

"There is nothing finer than reality, so far as I'm concerned, and yet there seems to be no life unless reality is coupled with imagination, and attention to reality is coupled to imagination. You give people some simple, abstract marks, which represent some speakable sounds, which represent in turn some thinkable meanings, and they supply the pictures for themselves. Still, reality underlies imagination, an attention to reality trues and tunes imagination. That's how listening works, and listening is the foundation on which reading and writing is based."

"Across the globe, like-minded individuals are getting caught in these games' gravitational pull, forming organizations and hosting events like Come Out and Play in New York and Hide & Seek's Weekender festivals in the UK. In London, a new series of events by the name of The Wild Rumpus are beginning to pick up steam.

"I don't feel I can speak for everyone, but for me its that I don't see why the style of games we played back in the playground had to be left there," Rumpus co-director Marie Foulston explained. "I don't just want to play against a machine, I want to play with other people.

"For video games especially, the concept of being physical and shifting away from the screen still feels like a contradiction in line with traditional expectations, but it's a fantastic one.""

"Here’s what it looks like:

* High-quality screenshots with human-readable filenames
* Option to download all screenshots in a ZIP
* Embeddable gameplay videos on YouTube/Vimeo
* Full gameplay description
* List of features
* Release date
* Price point in USD and EUR
* Available platforms
* Direct download link on iTunes/Steam
* Developer name and link
* Publisher name and link
* App icon and game logo in high resolution and with alpha channel
* Packshot if applicable
* Awards and nominations
* E-Mail address of team member responsible for press
* No buzzwords"

Notes here by @tealtan:

"unusual contexts in writing / reading text

“In a hyperliterate society, the vast majority of reading is not consciously recognized as reading.”

“What readers expect is more important than what readers want.”

Bill Buxton: “every tool is the best at something and the worst at something else”

skills, path-dependency, learning effects

“…we actually like constraints once we're in them.”"

And notes from @litherland:

"11:40: “I do things like … just obsess about weird little details. So, for instance … like, how do you do text entry in a Netflix app on the Wii? You know? I think about this a lot.” Your many other talents notwithstanding, Tim, you may have missed your calling as a designer. /

18:30: “I think it’s a tragedy that we have not been able to figure out a good interface for pen and ink on reading devices.” Holy grail. My dream for years. I would give anything. I would give anything to be smart enough to figure this out."

"A world is more than a space, more than a place; it is something to inhabit & be inhabited by. What you infuse a space w/ to make it habitable, to make it memorable (since memory is profoundly spatial), gives the place its character, its soul…

Zelda would be better if it had no story…no plot to structure the adventure…first Zs barely had any plot…were better for it. With plot, sequence matters too much…early Zs had situations, worlds & scenarios that framed action, gaps to be filled in by player, sequences to be broken. Optimal paths & shortcuts weren’t a given; they had to be earned. Items were the most prominent plot devices, & even they were not unduly strict about order. You could be slow & steady or blast straight through with a little know-how…basic rules of the gameworld were what bound you, not some artificial necessity imposed for the sake of plot."

…a world is not for you. A world needs a substance, independence, sense that it doesn’t just disappear when you turn around."

"The following parable will take you on a journey through the creation of a Git-like system from the ground up. Understanding the concepts presented here will be the most valuable thing you can do to prepare yourself to harness the full power of Git. The concepts themselves are quite simple, but allow for an amazing wealth of functionality to spring into existence. Read this parable all the way through and you should have very little trouble mastering the various Git commands and wielding the awesome power that Git makes available to you."

"This is the Git reference site. This is meant to be a quick reference for learning and remembering the most important and commonly used Git commands. The commands are organized into sections of the type of operation you may be trying to do, and will present the common options and commands needed to accomplish these common tasks.

Each section will link to the next section, so it can be used as a tutorial. Every page will also link to more in-depth Git documentation such as the offical manual pages and relevant sections in the Pro Git book, so you can learn more about any of the commands. First, we'll start with thinking about source code management like Git does."

"Are you a print designer, photographer, fine-artist, or general creative person? Do you have a shitty website that you slapped together yourself in Dreamweaver in that ONE web design class that you took in college? Do you not have a site at all because you’ve been waiting two years for your cousin to put it together for you? Well, we’re here to help. We know that you have little to no desire to do web design professionally, but that doesn’t mean that you want an ugly cookie-cutter site or to settle for one that hasn't been updated since Hackers was in theaters. Through short tutorial videos, you’ll learn how to take a basic wordpress blog and manipulate the css, html (and even some php!) to match your aesthetic. You’ll feel empowered rather than crippled by the internet and worst case scenario you’ll at least end up having a better idea of how professional web designers turn your design dreams into a reality on screen."

"The "L Train Notwork," a digital experiment/stunt/art project from the creative agency WeMakeCoolSh.it, launched on NYC subways Monday, allowing commuters to chat and flirt via their devices. Have they invented a whole new marketing channel?"

"The “Notwork” had two main components: a selection of visual and literary content curated by WeMakeCoolSh.it and their friends--poems and drawings by local writers and artists, for example, as well as a few newsfeeds refreshed daily--plus a decidedly old-school chatroom that was called “Missed Connections.” The whole experience is closed-circuit and site-specific, something more like a local area network than the Internet proper. If the World Wide Web is a Borgesian, universal library, then the L Train Notwork is an intimate art gallery. “We’ve been calling it social art,” McGregor-Mento said."

[See also: http://wemakecoolsh.it/ ]

"Dysfunctional measurement has the following characteristics:

1. It's outsourced. You're paying someone else to do it for you because, for whatever reason, you believe you can't do it for yourself. As a result...

2. It's irregular. When you rely upon someone to do something else for you, it typically doesn't get done the way it should. And when you're paying for it, it probably isn't getting done as often as it should. But when it does get done...

3. It's too quantitative. Think about it. A third party cannot know enough about your business to ask the right questions—the questions you probably already are asking. They can give you stats, but stats aren't always answers."

"Functional measurement isn't occasionally paying someone else to gather numbers for you. It's regularly gathering data that provides enlightening, qualitative insights."

"Thing #1: There are no independently meaningful metrics. It's about combining them to answer questions.
Thing #2: Anything can be a source of data."

"I wonder, then, if the promise of an ebook isn’t the book but the library. And if, in all our attention to a new device for reading, we’re neglecting methods for shelving. A search engine cannot compete with Warburg’s delicate, personal library. The metadata of a book extends beyond the keywords held between its covers to the many hands the text has passed through; it’s not enough just to scan every page. We need to also scan the conversations, the notes left in the margins, the stains from coffee, tea, and drink. We need to eavesdrop on the readers, without whom every book is mute. That is the promise I seek."

"At the end of the project someone should've been commissioned to write a book, "What This Goddamn Plant Is: And, How It Works". That book is effectively being written now, only by archaeologists."