Photographs of our planet are so commonplace to many of us that we don’t even really think about it. Imagery of our planet has always existed in my lifetime. It was only recently that I even thought to realize that in my father’s own lifetime, photographs of our planet from space did not exist. The first photograph of Earth from space was taken by the Explorer 6 satellite in 1959. My dad was 8 years old at the time.
The image above is not the photo taken by Explorer 6
All too often, exiting a subway station and getting your bearings can be a bit disorienting, especially in New York City’s grid. Gothamist.com reports on a new wayfinding system, developed by New York City’s Department of Transportation and the Grand Central Partnership, to assist people on finding the right way upon exiting a subway station. It is about to be tested around the MTA’s Grand Central Station subway exits. The sidewalk decals feature a compass image displaying which street is in what direction.
It’s interesting to see that the decals will not be placed in actual N,S,W,E orientation (Manhattan actually points Northeast), but placed according to what New Yorkers correlate to North and South (i.e., Uptown and Downtown).
It’s a great start, but now we just need the subway map, local street map, and “Next Train” notifications posted at street level. Not too mention the one shortcoming of the MTA’s subway map, depicting which trains are express and which are local. Even I still have a bit of trouble remembering which of the N,R,W,Q trains are express.
Every music artist samples in some way, that’s no surprise. Typically it’s better to sample from songs that aren’t just a few years old. No one remembers the old stuff, thus it can be called current. When Kanye West sampled Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” for his song, “Stronger”, it was a stretch as the Daft Punk version only came out 6 years prior and Daft Punk has been on the road with their Alive 2007 tour, greatly featuring their version of the song.
The Alive 2007 tour, an amazing spectacle of a concert, featured some of the most advanced visuals I’ve seen. One of the most enchanting visuals was the red light up suits worn by the Daft Punk duo (seen below left).
If you’re wondering, that’s Kanye West on the right in his blue light up jacket from his “Stronger” performance on Saturday Night Live. It is one thing to sample a riff, but to also sample a concert which is still currently going on is a whole other matter.
As a Mac-using freshman in 2000 at Northeastern University’s College of Computer & Information Science, I was pretty much a joke to everyone–mostly due to my computer, but okay, that could be debated. The all too often question was, “how are you gonna do computer science on a Mac?” Surprisingly, I did just fine, and before I knew it, a lot of people were picking up on the Mac trend. By the time I graduated a lot had changed in the Mac world and surprisingly, I actually knew a handful of other people who owned Macs.
But when I saw the below photo taken by Mollie Sterling of a classroom at her alma mater, The Missouri School of Journalism, I was more than shocked. I knew there was an up-tick in Mac usage but I certainly never imagined something like this. Even if it was staged or if having a Mac is a prerequisite, it is still an amazing sight.
Mac filled Missouri School of Journalism classroom [Large Version]
Earlier I had spoken about what I had thought about the state of current user experience books and that if I am seeking to find new knowledge I would have to look elsewhere. Oddly enough that elsewhere may be in the past. Which as I write this, seems utterly obvious but I think Alex Wright sums it up nicely in his book Glut:
“For all the barrels of ink and billions of pixels spent chronicling the rise of the Internet in recent years, however, surprisingly few writers seem disposed to look in any direction but forward.”
We owe a lot to those who came before us and I’ll be perfectly honest, I cannot say I know a great deal about those who laid down the path, which is the basis for my career today. The work of these visionaries or futurists when looked at today, the hits are amazingly accurate and the misses well, while amazingly interesting have yet to come to fruition.
But this makes me wonder, are we more caught up in the day after today? As opposed to, who is laying the ground work for that true tomorrow? Yes, working day to day is an iterative process and you’ll get anywhere one step at a time. Some of the works of earlier futurists describe ideas which are far beyond anything they ever had, and I’m not talking about looking at a bird and envisioning all humans in flying cars. So where are today’s futurists? I assume it is only negligence on my behalf to find them, hopefully.