A few things worth clumping together here. First up some beautiful Phillip Glass segments from Sesame Street (via Mike). For something a little newer, Party In My Tummy from the Nickelodeon show Yo Gabba Gabba! (via Charles). Finally, a discovery while checking out that Phillip Glass video: Muppet Wiki (exactly what you think it is).
Wow, why didn’t anyone this of this before? “The Lippi Selk’Bag is a revolutionary new sleeping bag system which allows you the maximum mobility you need whilst keeping warm. This new concept retains the functionality of the traditional sleeping bag; it’s FUN, COMFORTABLE and MOBILE!”
It’s a sleeping bag suit. Simply amazing . . .
This is crazy stuff. In 1983, at the age of 61, Cliff Young won the 543 mile Sydney to Melbourne race which some apparently call the toughest in the world. When I first read this I was slightly suspicious it wasn’t true, however, after doing some more searching I’ve turned up references to the win on Parliment of South Wales website and an obituary from the Sidney Morning Herald. Apparently Cliff won the race in part because he didn’t know all the other runners were sleeping for 6 hours a night.
The iPhone and product placement. He certainly has no shortage of opinions . . . And if you haven’t seen it, he does the weather report every day on his website.
A very interesting New York Times piece on whether the government has a right to search your laptop. Clive Thompson picked it up because one judge said that computers were extensions of our brains (similar to the argument Thompson makes in Your Outboard Brain Knows All). The judge explained: “Electronic storage devices function as an extension of our own memory … They are capable of storing our thoughts, ranging from the most whimsical to the most profound.”
Just posted this over at the Naked Communications blog and thought it would be fun to share here as well. It’s a bit of a riddle I heard over Christmas vacation: “One or more monks live in a monestary. One day God comes down and says to the monks that he is going to place dots on one or more of their heads. If they are sure they have a dot on their head, when they retire to their room that evening they must kill themselves. The catch: They may not speak to each other and they may not look in a mirror. How many days does it take for all the monks with dots to kill themselves?” Answer to come later, leave your guesses at HouseOfNaked.com.
Update (1/7/08): Greg is the winner with his lengthy and correct response.
Glassbooth, the site that helps you choose a candidate based on your political opinions, just made a deal with Dish Network to create an interactive version of the app for Dish subscribers. If you want some more info on Glassbooth, Wired wrote about it last week. Nicely done Alex.
Very interesting post from Rob Walker that looks at the last 100 years in 25 year increments and catalogs the “big changes” from each era. It’s interesting to see how the changes of earlier eras puts our current shifts in perspective.
Two gadgets I ran into lately that I want: Wacom Cintiq 12WX, a pressure-sensitive Wacom tablet with a screen for $999 that Engadget called, “probably the best peripheral I have ever tried.” The other is BUG (which just announced its pricing): A programmable/hackable gadget platform that looks like you can make do just about whatever you want (has optional camera, GPS and motion sensor modules).
First off, I found out the $100 laptop allows you to view source in any program you’re in. The whole thing is programmed in Python and you can even edit the code. Considering this is how I learned all the HTML I know, I think it’s brilliant. In related news, looks like Intel has dropped out of the program after OLPC asked them to “stop supporting other efforts in emerging markets.” The New York Times reports things are not quite as cut and dry as Intel spokespeople would lead you to believe: “A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs.”
Still not sure how this thing will play out, but I say let them all keep competing and driving the prices down. The Times article also reports that the “‘Give One, Get One’ charitable promotion had generated $35 million and sold a total of 167,000 computers, half of them to be distributed in the developing world.” That’s not too shabby (even though just over 83,000 will actually get into children’s hands).
I think this is pretty awesome. Stockholm Central Station is going to take the heat of the hundreds of thousands of people who pass through each day and use it to heat water which will then be used to heat a nearby building. According to the article, “This is old technology, but used in a new way. It’s just pipes, water and pumps, but we haven’t heard of anyone else using this technology in this way before.”
After reading the New Yorker piece on parkour from last year I hopped over to YouTube and watched a few videos of David Belle (who invented parkour) that were worth sharing: a short “best of”, his most famous fall (which is described in the article) and a BBC commercial he did.
Great definition from an article Steve Jobs wrote in 2000: “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service… This is what customers pay us for–to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it.”
When I read Stephen Jay Gould’s “Evolution as Fact and Theory” it wasn’t just his explanation that impressed me. I was also quite taken by Karl Popper’s explanation of the primary criterion of a science. As Gould explains:
Philosopher Karl Popper has argued for decades that the primary criterion of science is the falsifiability of its theories. We can never prove absolutely, but we can falsify. A set of ideas that cannot, in principle, be falsified is not science.
The entire creationist program includes little more than a rhetorical attempt to falsify evolution by presenting supposed contradictions among its supporters. Their brand of creationism, they claim, is “scientific” because it follows the Popperian model in trying to demolish evolution. Yet Popper’s argument must apply in both directions. One does not become a scientist by the simple act of trying to falsify a rival and truly scientific system; one has to present an alternative system that also meets Popper’s criterion  it too must be falsifiable in principle.
After reading that over a few times I decided to read Popper’s “Science as Falsification” from 1963 in which he explains his theory in more detail. The story behind it is that he was trying to figure out why Marx’s theory of history and Freud’s psycho-analysis didn’t sit right with him when Einstein’s theory of relativity did. In digging into his own mind, he finally came to the conclusion that he believed in Einstein’s theory because it was the only one that was proven by an experiment that could have easily shown it to be wrong. In other words, when Einstein’s theory was proven in 1919 (by an eclipse photographed by someone named Eddington apparently) it could have just as easily been proven wrong. This stands in opposition to pseudo-science which can bend results to prove their point no matter how they turn out.
In the end this led popper to these seven conculsions for differentiating science and pseudo-science (or whatever else you want to call it):
1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory  if we look for confirmations.
2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory  an event which would have refuted the theory.
3. Every “good” scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
6. Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of “corroborating evidence.”)
7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers  for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a “conventionalist twist” or a “conventionalist stratagem.”)
Popper sums things up like this: “the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.” All of this got me thinking what a sham so much of marketing (and almost any business research) can be. Unfortunately I’ve found that very little of the research marketing (and business generally) does is for anything other than supporting their current stance. There’s no science behind it and that which disproves hypotheses is simply thrown away for “better” results. Don’t want to go off on a whole rant here, but just think that it’s important to draw the distinction between market research and science.
As a side note, this makes me think some more about the need to release science’s dark data.
Just read a great piece on evolution vs. intelligent design by Stephen Jay Gould from either 1981 or 1994 (has two citations at the bottom). Gould is one of the evolutionary biologists behind the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium, which basically states that evolution happens in quick bursts rather than gradually.
Anyway, “Evolution as Fact and Theory” has a great explanation for why calling evolution unproven is bull: “Evolutionists have been clear about this distinction between fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theoryâ€â€natural selectionâ€â€to explain the mechanism of evolution.”
It reminded me immediately of a Clive Thompson piece from Wired about the need to change the way people think about the word theory.
This script by Damon Cortesi makes me wish I used Twitter more. Here are my charts.
I was planning on holding off posting this, however, Google has locked me out from sending emails after I sent out a massive New Years note last night (if you want to go back to the other posts, here is my best links of 2007 volume 1 and volume 2). So for those of you that have written me back, I will respond as soon as I’m allowed to send mail again. For those that I didn’t get to send to before the lockout or whose emails I don’t have, here’s the “card” I included . . .
I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank those of you who commented on the site. I got about 800 this year and I wanted to personally thank every one of you. It means an incredible amount to me when someone finds something interesting enough to add their own two cents. It still blows me away that I can put some half-baked thoughts out there and get such amazing responses. So without further ado . . . (in chronological order from the first time they commented in 2007)
Vaspers, Michael, Max, CK, Alex, Adrian, Liz, Justin, Jeff, El Gaffney, Candice, Joe, Michael, Josh, Johanna, Nate, Mike, David, Barbara, Andrew, Abe, Adam, David, Bonnie, Chris, Shana, Aaron, Charles, Arienna, Gregory, Kevin, Marc, David, Charles, Jason, Paul, Russell, Amber, Josh, Range, (The Other) Noah, KG, Chris, Harris, Chet, Erik, Karl, Jarrett, Christian, Devin, Shobita, Paul, Mark, Peter, Akhila, Debbie, Ed, Jack, Tad, Steve, kt, Drew, Ori, Eric, Phil, Ronnie, Clay, Bb, Martin, Herb, Kim, Kathy, Scott, Christina, Tyson, Minic, Brian, Dino, Joey, Kyle, Ryan, Onika, Scott B., Brian, David, Sarah, R, Michelle, Matt, Brad, Stephen, Sokratis, Dave, Oakie, Jeck, Ian, Lebbonee, Leah, Andy, Tiffany, Jamie, Adam, Philip, Lon, Mark, George, Bryce, Amanda, Ben, Chartreuse, Sonali, Stephanie, Ari, Sarah S., Satish, Eric, Michelle, Heron, Scott, Headphonenaught, Athur, Jeff, Christina, Pam, Damiano, Erin, Evan, Silvia, Rebecca, Katie, Rob, Michael G., Tim, Christian, James, Miguel, Dan, Mike A., Johnny, MJM, Antonio, Jamie, Brian, Paull, Ross, Dave A., Matthew, Courtney, Michael, Ryan A., Dan, Orli, Fraser, Esther, Ray, Nichelle, Jamie, Mark S., Monica, Joe, Michael, Florian, Pieter, Carmen, Amit, Meba, Benton, Tangerine Toad, Rashmi, MC, Diana, Lindy, Wes, Nandhu, Angus, Seni, Joshua, Dave, Ryan G., Jay.
A huge thanks to each and every one of you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all the feedback and support. You’re all great. For anyone I missed, I’m sorry. For anyone that didn’t comment last year and felt like it, why not give it a try now? Or just email me and say hi.
In case you don’t have anything to do on your first day back at work, Kottke has been kind enough to post his best links of 2007. (This is where I got the idea for my own two part series.)
A few favorites after looking at it for a few minutes: Line Rider masterpiece, Feltron’s personal annual report (which should have made my list), desktop tower defense (a game I know I should try but am incredibly scared I will become addicted to) and the website for Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You. Two I’m especially looking forward to reading: New Yorker piece on David Belle inventor of parkour and the greatest long tracking shots in history.
Uni Watch, a blog devoted to sports uniforms, has an excellent (and very long) breakdown of logo creep in sports. It’s specifically addressing the the kind of branding that Reebok has on NFL jerseys (a logo on the upper chest) rather than the more ostentatious branding in something like Nascar. I’m not entirely sure where I fall on this debate, as I see the merit to both sides (teams/leagues have an opportunity to capitalize on their audience while fans pay quite a bit in money and attention to watch their favorite team.
I found this analogy especially troubling: “Let’s say American Express offered to give the state of Illinois a huge sum of money targeted for the state’s school system  but in return, the AmEx logo would have to be printed on the statehouse dome, AmEx ads would have to be posted throughout state facilities, and the state itself would have to be renamed “American Express Presents Illinois.â€? Would that be a good idea?”
To be honest, I’m not sure I’d be against any of it . . . At least I could easily argue both sides.
Hi, I'm Noah. I am the co-founder of Percolate. I like writing on, thinking about and making stuff for the internet. I'm responsible for a few internet experiments like Brand Tags, likemind and My First Tweet. On this site I write about media, marketing, culture, technology and randomness. I like it when people email me.
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The drip denotes a curated post from Percolate. The comment is mine, the content on the other end of the link is not.
Q: What is this site all about?
A: I think Michael Bierut explained it nicely a few years ago in response to people asking him why he didn't write more about design on Design Observer: "But the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can't get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you're interested in, the better your work will be." Replace "graphic design" with "media/marketing/technology" (or whatever you'd like to call my field) and you've got my deal.
Q: Where else do you live?
A: Good question. All over the place as a matter of fact. On Tumblr for more randomness, Twitter for short bursts, Dopplr for places I'm going, Delicious for things I'm reading, last.fm for music I'm listening to, Flickr for photos I'm taking and Facebook because I don't really have a choice. (Oh, and Amazon for stuff I want people to buy me.)
Q: I meant that literally. Where do you live?
A: Oh, sorry, Brooklyn, New York is where I call home at the moment.
Q: Any other side projects you'd like to tell us about?
A: As a matter of fact, yes. There's How Much Does it Buy?, a calculator for the rest of us. Holy Crap! Facts (and accompanying Twitter feed) which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. Da' Bears Blog is, in my opinion, the best Chicago Bears blog on the web (I don't write it, I just helped it get off the ground) and Tweemail is a little PHP script I wrote for getting Twitter updates by email. I'm also always working on a few other things and will let you know when they're ready for public consumption.
Q: Um okay.
A: Yeah, that's a fake question mostly so I can throw in this one other quote I like that I think sums up some of what I try to do here. This one comes from Albert Einstein (or at least the internet says so) and goes something like, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Words to live by.
Q: What sites do you like?
A: Well that changes all the time. At the moment I've been digging clusterflock, Beyond the Beyond, Bobulate, Barking up the wrong tree and The Awl.