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Recently saw Sondre Lerche in concert. Great show. This is a more intimate interview from Kaleidoscope Pictures.
Dahle Disko by 120 Days. The song came out last year, I think, but I only discovered it about a week ago.
Bon weekend, mes amis.
Aerial views of Facebook’s, Twitter’s, and Tumblr’s headquarters, respectively. All images are the same scale.
One of the quirks of the digital age is that very small populations construct the social environments of astoundingly large populations. I’ve commented on the impressiveness of this before, “[Facebook has] built a design and interaction system used across the world by a massive amount of cultures. Mandarin, with its 1.1 billion speakers, is the only language or medium with more native participants than Facebook.”
But as digital participants become more numerous and sophisticated, I often wonder when a cultural bottleneck will emerge. At what level of sophistication will users chafe at the systems designed by a handful of people half a world away and turn to more local offerings?
This problem is surely exacerbated by campuses, though it’s unclear to what degree. Building bubbles to keep employees at work as often as possible – shuttling them to work, feeding them, entertaining them, providing them with exercise – reduces the amount of serendipitous encounters they can have. Their connection to the world they build for risks becoming more and more tenuous. And as each company grows around its campus, the Founder’s Effect kicks in and any problems becomes exacerbated.
Location isn’t everything, but it certainly is a variable. Looking at the new Facebook HQ, bordered by residential areas, corporate parks, and salt ponds, it’s hard not to appreciate the asset Tumblr has that barely anyone talks about.
It will be interesting to see how campuses affect future products. And how we might measure or observe how this manifests in the first place.
Update: To be fair, isolate campuses can have good quirks. Sure, you risk the Founder’s Effect but you also get Genetic Drift: crazy ideas that arise because you don’t have an overarching culture to keep them from occurring. Google is a great example of someone who suffers from the Founder’s Effect (Wave, Buzz, …) but benefits from Genetic Drift (Glass, driverless cars, …)
There’s no point to letting indignation, or even just personal preference, override the rational effort to forecast the Academy’s likely misjudgments. The Oscars are the way that Hollywood’s insiders want to be perceived by the world. The following predictions are less their view of the industry’s best achievements than of the choice of work that they’d elect to represent them; the awards are the industry’s advertisement for itself.
Richard Brody casts his Oscar ballot: http://nyr.kr/11XQz7S
(Source: newyorker.com)
Pair wine and food by chart.
Temperature + what type of Nordic ski wax to use for the snow conditions. Photo taken today in Girdwood, Alaska.
-Sarah Gonzales
tumblr.js JavaScript client
Today I’m excited to announce the release of tumblr.js, the first of several official API clients we’ll be rolling out over the next few months.
You can install it now with
npm, and start making something awesome:var tumblr = require('tumblr.js'); var client = tumblr.createClient({ consumer_key: 'consumer_key', consumer_secret: 'consumer_secret', token: 'oauth_token', token_secret: 'oauth_token_secret' }); // Name all of the authenticating user's blogs client.userInfo(function (err, data) { data.user.blogs.forEach(function (blog) { console.log(blog.name); }); });It comes with full support for all of the API V2 endpoints including tag search, following, liking, and post creation. For more detail, see the GitHub page.
More to come soon!
(via engineering)
According to the board, wrestling is no longer a “core sport” in the Olympics and it will have to petition for inclusion in 2020 along with, and I am not making this up, sport climbing and wakeboarding. This is terrific. Why don’t we just hold the Olympics in an REI outlet store somewhere? (via Wrestling out of the Olympics - Grantland)
The Noun Project has teamed up with ProPublica and Hacks/Hackers NYC in organizing an Iconathon to create a new visual language around Investigative Journalism. This Iconathon will be held at The New York Times building on Saturday, February 23rd, and is sponsored by Knight-Mozilla OpenNews and The New York Times.
We’ll be creating symbols for concepts in watchdog journalism such as public records, on-the-record sources, corporate malfeasance, and illustrating the ways power may be abused in both the public and private sectors. The icons created will be released into the public domain to be used in news applications and interactives, as well as to illustrate reporting series, Web site topic pages, and mobile applications.
The Iconathon will kick off with presentations on tech & investigative journalism by Scott Klein - editor of News Applications at ProPublica, and Matthew Ericson - deputy graphics director at The New York Times. “A new set of icons for news will help graphics editors and news application developers use graphical shorthand in place of lengthy explanation — the proverbial thousand words — and to tell meaningful and impactful stories more gracefully and graphically” - said Scott Klein.Event Details:
When: Saturday, February 23rd from 10:30am to 4:00pm
Where: The New York Times building at 620 8th Avenue, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10019
RSVP: Seating is limited, RSVP for free tickets.
The Noun Project organizes Iconathons to engage the general public in the design process, so no design or art skills are necessary - all are welcome to participate!
According to Chrys Wu of Hacks/Hackers NYC “Investigative journalism is about explaining complicated concepts and revealing systemic problems. If we can do that visually, it can help readers better understand the reported stories.” We’re honored to help out in such an important endeavor.
*Detective icon is by Simon Child.
