I just finished reading Lolita; it was my first time reading it, but it was not my first Nabokov novel (having already enjoyed Pale Fire and Ada or Ardor). It was a 1955 American hardback edition, the first year Americans got their hands on the book. I don’t understand why anyone buys new classic books … Continue reading Reading Lolita On Paper
Whenever news of an earthquake hits, we are told that the quake had a magnitude of, say, 3.2 or 5.0. Or 7.0, as was the case yesterday in Haiti and use retin-a. We all understand that 7 is worse than 5, of course, but I fear that few of us really understand or appreciate the … Continue reading Drop the Richter Scale
Someone recently pointed me to an interesting book, Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places, by Toby Israel. The book’s thesis is that a designers’ childhood environment profoundly affects their professional and adult design choices. The environments and objects children see and touch in their formative years will, according to Israel, … Continue reading UX Origins: How childhood experiences shape design choices
A few months ago I heard a fascinating woman interviewed on the radio, Noreen Grice. Ms. Grice is a blind astronomer — something that, while initially surprising to me, actually makes perfect sense when you consider that most of today’s astronomy research is based on radio signals, mathematics, physics, and chemistry — and not at … Continue reading Touch the Universe
Newsweek invited four “hot” design firms to “reboot” the brand of the Republican party to appeal to younger voters. Not an easy challenge. And while the design work itself looks good, I think each of them missed the big picture objective by failing to speak to core Republican values. First up is Pentagram. Pentagram proposes … Continue reading Grand Old Redesign
What do you do with a video camera? You video. I’ve always wanted to coin a phrase or invent a word, to have a term of my own invention be spoken by thousands or even millions of people every day. An astonishingly large number of my friends and peers have done exactly this, some spectacularly … Continue reading Video is a Verb
One thing that’s been fun about watching the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates on CNN is that you get to also watch a scrolling EKG-like graph of how viewers are actually responding to what is being shown. The methodology appears to involve a live audience, selected by CNN, to manipulate some sort of control that … Continue reading Graphing the Debates
Using some clever detective work (about which I will say little except that Google was really all I needed), I think I’ve uncovered the master plan behind the Mad Men Alternate Twitterverse that I’ve been enjoying lately. I could be wrong, but here’s my theory of how this all works: First, there are a large … Continue reading Exploring the Alternate Twitterverse
I just found out that @benjamin_spock is following me on Twitter. I’m getting the feeling that I’m being sucked in to an Alternate Twitterverse generated by Mad Men. About two dozen new Twitterers have followed me over the last couple of weeks, and the majority of them have been characters from Mad Men. At first … Continue reading Mad Men’s “Alternate Twitterverse”
Upon a friend’s recommendation, a couple of weeks ago I started following don_draper on Twitter. More precisely, I’m following whoever is Twittering and playing the role of Don Draper, the main character and fictional creative director of a 1960’s Madison Avenue advertising agency on AMC’s critically-acclaimed series Mad Men, now in its second season. What’s … Continue reading The Wisdom of Don Draper