linkfest – Scott Berkun

I’ve tried to do this on Wednesdays, but some weeks before I know it, Wednesday is long gone and Thursday is half over. So as a testament to slipping schedules everywhere, I give you, Thursday Linkfest:

YouTube – How to Dial a Rotary Telephone – This is amusing, but it’s easy to forget in 20 years all the cool stuff we’re so proud of today will seem just as silly to the young then as this does to the young now.
YouTube – Watson Describes Invention of Telephone by Bell – Nothing quite as good as a first person account of an invention.
Four ways to fix a broken legal system | Video on TED.com –
I think this is one of the first TED videos I’ve ever linked to. Self-explanatory. Problem is, like the senate, the people with the power to make change are the least motivated.
Where a Cellphone Is Still Cutting Edge – NYTimes.com – Innovation is relative and a simple idea can have profoundly different, and larger, effects in unexpected places.
How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online? | Information Is Beautiful – Nice infographics. Not sure about the quality of the data, but it’s probably a good ballpark. I’d love to see a similiar thing for writers.
Sun`s path June to December – Pure low tech coolness. 6 months of time lapse showing the suns movement over their home.
Typography Is Important – Well-Made Magazine – Techmic Studios – One of the better typography primers I’ve ever seen

Here are this week’s good links:

Ethos, Pathos, Logos: 3 Pillars of Public Speaking – I mention these core ideas in Confessions, but the six minutes blog does a nice job digging in deeper.
This American Infographic – Do you like This American Life? And you love graphics? this is for you. And if you like cocktails, you’ll love this.
How America Can Rise Again – The Atlantic (January/February 2010) – One of the best essays I’ve read in weeks. Asks all the tough questions about the future of the U.S. and doesn’t pull its punches.
YouTube – Everythings amazing nobodys happy – Innovators out there can learn from this comedian. When your idea is successful, it means it will be forgotten.
Interview With Steve Jobs from 1994 – In many ways this is more interesting than anything he has to say now, as a the time his company, NeXT, was falling apart.
NYC Subway maps through history –

Here are this week’s links:

Terrorism on airlines is overstated – In a simple argument of reality vs. perception, terrorism on airplanes, even if there was an event every month, are so small in the spectrum of fatalities as not to warrant the dramatic attention and worry people seem to have.

Here are this week’s links:

Reverse ignite – In a variation of powerpoint karaoke, where people are forced to present with someone else’s slides, Reverse ignite does it with ignite format presentations.
Bike friendlyiest city in the world – Copenhagen – Well done little video about how they redesigned Copenhagen with bikes taking priority. Amazing to watch. I was there this year and it’s amazing to walk on streets with more bikes than cars.
New Interview with David Simon, of the Wire – Won’t make much sense unless you saw the series, which, if you like yourself and your brain, you really really should go watch.
Subway architecture – Man, someday I will finish writing that book about the London Underground. Meanwhile, here are some amazing photos of underground subway stations around the world.
Diagram of old world buildings (hat tip Ario)
Donald Barthleme’s syllabus – Famed author of the classic short novel The Dead father, made a reading list for a writing class that was dug up recently. Some I’ve read, some I’ve heard of, many I’ve never seen before.

Here are this week’s links:

College student brings typewriter to lecture hall – Seems legit and not staged – the professor eventually asks him to stop.
A better rating system – 5 point scales are the standard on yelp, amazon and elsewhere. Interesting to think if there’s a better way to do this.

Here are this week’s excellent links and the only stuff I managed to read this week while on the road:

On press reporting: MSFT and black screen of death – Anyone who has an article written about them, or their work, and discovers the gap between what they are and how they are portrayed, never reads the news the same way again. Here’s an interesting tale of reporting gone wrong.
InnovationParkour – Great presentation (slides only) comparing innovation with the street sport of Parkour. Wish the actual presentation was somewhere.
Top 10 Conferences – My favorite events are ones that hit cross discipline. That’s where the big leaps and connections come from. Here’s a solid list of ten conferences that will give you want more bang for your training/event dollar. (I’ve written about GEL before)
How a web design goes to hell – Very funny for any creative who works with clients. (But does beg the question, perhaps you should pick better clients to have).
McNeil/Leher rules for news – Didn’t get all the way through this, but made me wonder what other shows would say their rules are, and how wide the gap is between their ‘rules’ and their actual practices.

Here’s a slightly late Wednesday linkfest, now extra fresh for Thursday:

Youtube UI research – It’s always interesting to see how any major brand makes product decisions, or even how they do the research to help making them.
101 things I learned in Interaction design school – Love the style of this, and the book the style is inspired by (101 things I learned at architecture school).
Glass is half empty – While preparing for last night’s Ignite talk on Everything you need to know about philosophy in 5 minutes, stumbled on this. As well as this. Some creative thinking around a mostly annoying question.
Speakers frame of reference (PDF) – Haven’t read this one yet, but it’s about how framing a sentence or idea changes the meaning for the listener.
Jargon of politics – Reading this reminded me of the must read, Orwell on the politics of the English language.
Science in shackles – Commerce and creativity have always been both symbiotic and competitive, but things do seem scarier now.
World’s coolest bookstores – Interesting how many of them are in cathedrals 🙂
Computers don’t save money – Interesting, but these reports have flawed logic. The execution of the idea may be poor, but in better hands, might have better results. Give an idiot any tool and the results will not be good.

As a side note, sorry there’s been so much stuff on the blog about public speaking this and that. Need to pay the bills (e.g. book sales) and just trying to help the new book into the world. Diversity will return.

Here are this week’s links:

Behind the scenes at Pixar – it’s not all fun and games. Intensity works both ways.
What to do when they mix up your talk – Great story of things going wrong at a tech conference – they posted the wrong title and description, so to the audience, he was giving the wrong talk. Talk about tough.
Slow news movement? – From the article it seems Gilmour hasn’t read Amusing ourselves to death, which argued for a kind of slow news, or at least news as divorced from entertainment centric advertising fodder pretending to be news. Sadly it’s good thoughtful blog posts like this one that won’t be on the top or digg or twitter trends any time soon.
Innovation on the highways – The French Intersection – It’s hard to sort out the original announcements, but this blog post explains how The Diverging diamond design improves safety and reduces traffic. If it works, it’s pretty darn clever.

Here are this week’s links:

The rise and fall of Rome, in numbers – Interesting to see a graph of the population of the roman empire over time.
How to shoot an anvil – Pure stupid guy fun – what happens if you pack two anvils together with gunpowder? Answer – watch. Promise it will make you smile.
Top songs about writing – It’s a great idea for a list, but half these choices were totally lame. Perhaps they limited themselves to stuff they could find on YouTube. What would yours be?
Better presentations thru sex – This is irresistible public speaking fodder. Changes the idea of what should happen in green rooms. (Sadly, they don’t link to the study they mention).
Miquel Barcelo – At first I thought this artist’s work reminded me of poor general contracting, but the more you look at it, the more it seems like an acid trip take on a cave.
The benefits of cursing – In the ‘brain science gone to far’ pile, some researchers are studying why we instinctively curse. Isn’t the fact that it feels good and the words are fun to say explanation enough? Interesting, but silly methinks.
U2 re-releases Unforgetable fire – Listening to this album is always a treat, as the bands sound isn’t changed yet by mega-stardom. The link has an interview with the producers of the re-release.

Here are this week’s links:

Surround yourself with whiteboards – For years this has been my fantasy – to write things anywhere at any time.
Is creativity worth $964 an hour? – Fast Company describes a recent survey of ad agencies where the high end creatives are billed at $964. The article says little, and worse the report costs $750 to buy to read.

Here are this week’s links:

How the spaceship got its shape – All innovations someone fought for over years are taken for-granted when they succeed. If ever you’ve thought space travel was cool, you owe it to yourself to read this article.

Here are this week’s links:

The mathematics of movies – a nice, breezy essay on the various ways theories of math show up in pop action and horror films.
I will not read your fucking script – I can’t decide if this guy is a jackass or not. I think he is, as anyone with a profession gets asked for free advice. But he does have some points.
UK apologizes to Alan Turning – This is one of the saddest stories in the history of technology, as Turing was a genius (a word

Was traveling all week so Wednesday linkfest is now Friday linkfest. I’m sure you all could figure this out but I feel obligated to say something in the sentence that precedes the link:

100 years of special effects (youtube) – The thing I wonder about is if 100 years from now people with think of our best special effects the same way we think of the ones 100 years before us, or if there has been a decreasing curve of possible size of improvement over time.
Kurt Vonnegut explains drama – this is good for writers and readers. And in classic Voneygut form at the end, it’s quite funny and cynical about human existence.
In praise of the sci-fi corridor – I’m a sci-fi corridor junkie. The book I worked on about the london underground was in part a way to spend countless hours in the modern stations running around prenteding i was a kid on a spaceship.
Why we’re screwed – Evidence our brains are wired for hunting, and how the internet lets us never stop.
The many failures that led to rock band – A good honest, useful portrayal of what it took to develop the ideas for rock band and to succesfully bring it to market.

Vonnegut

Here are this week’s links:

Sentiment Analysis (Can computers interpret feelings?) – This is dumb. There, I said it. First it will never work for similiar reasons to why AI mostly doesn’t work, but more importantly, why not just let someone who’s not a moron interpret why consumers are outraged instead of inventing a technology that will do a suckier job and cost more? If the average person isn’t great at figuring out what other people mean or are feeling, what hope do computers have?
Multitasking muddles brains (see also the mediocre multitasker)- Evidence from an admit-idly small study that yes, multitasking is bad. But it gets better, as the researchers were hoping to figure out what “gifts” multitaskers had that others do not. Turned out no only couldn’t they find it, their research suggests multitaskers perform worse at many tasks.
Coach seats make us hate each other – The design of everyday things applied to one reason people are so grumpy on airplanes.
Learning UX from games – This really should be titled ‘learning UX from good games’. It’s amazing how many $60 XBOX games have horrible out of box and first 20 minutes of gameplay experiences.
Wide screen vs. Full screen – Wonderfully concise example rich explanation of how much gets lost when they “modify a movie to fit TV”. Lots of famous directors give commentary.

Here are this week’s (health care free) links:

The parts of news you don’t usually get – This is so unbelievably awesome. Explains my gripes with television news, and in some respects, twitter, digg and social media.
The Inner workings of Antikythera – The first lecture i did at Google about the Myths of Innovation talked about an ancient Greek computer that had computer tech lost to us for hundreds of years, called the Antikythera. This is an explanation of how we think it worked.
Book signing gets bloody – Things go very strange and wrong at this book signing. Lots of pictures of blood. Not for everyone. I was too curious not to read it the whole thing.
Innovation and resistance in religion – In the universal theme of how innovation and tradition will clash by definition, here’s an interesting article about Lutherans and gay-marriage (also see my earlier post on innovation vs. tradition)
Guide to fails in Star Wars design – Bad things happen when you apply basic design questions to a set of movies you fell in love with as a kid. Very funny.

Here are this week’s links:

The project management cartoon generator – you’ve seen this cartoon a zillion times. Now you can make your own version.
Kill your darlings – Nice article by book cover designers on ideas they had that were rejected.
Men meet more then women? – It’s sketchy data (can’t we have a rule that if you quote a survey you must provide a URL to a detailed description of how it was conducted?), but this NYTimes article reports on a study showing men average more meetings per day than women.
Lessons from Microsoft Bob – Really wish there were more of these lessons learned things written by folks who were there. The gossipy thing near the end is Melinda French, who was the General Manager for Bob, was dating Bill Gates at the time and would eventually become Ms. Gates.

Here are this week’s links:

50 great examples of infographics – Curiously enough, these excellent, cool, examples are surrounded by annoying animated internet ads.
Secrets of Amazon.com sales ranking – Some details I hadn’t heard before about how the rankings are computed (weighted over time).
How Twitter’s staff uses twitter – In the irony department, here’s all kinds of data about how tame the use of twitter is among the people who work at the company.
How to think constructively about healthcare – Great charts and data about how U.S. health care compares to other nations. (Hat tip: Cesar)

Here are this week’s links:

The problems of Virtual teams – Some research showing how problems are more frequent on virtual teams than local. It’s a small sample size, but first research I’ve ever seen asking this question.
Letterman top ten – Dear God this is funny. It’s silly and stupid, but perhaps so am I.
Orwell vs. Huxley – Fantastic cartoon that captures so many of my opinions on technology, the world, and the future. (The winner, between Orwell vs. Huxley is Neil Postman). (Thx to Ario for the link).
Photo blog of abandoned things – It is what it says. Amazing photos of large, abandoned man made things from around the world.

Here are this week’s good links:

100 years of design manifestos – I’ve always wanted to write a manifesto. How could it not be fun? And given how hamfisted many of these are, it seems there’s plenty of room for someone to write some good ones.
How the average American spends their paycheck – Well down visualization/graphic about how we spend our cash.
Google generation a myth? – A study in the UK shows there’s not a huge difference in how today’s kids use the web for research vs. adults. The actual study isn’t posted, but their claim, if I read it right, is we all suck at doing research regardless of age.
Mcluhan vs. Mailer – McLuhan and Mailer, two brilliant men with supersized egos, duke it out in a live debate that is fascinating even if you don’t care what they’re talking about. No conversation this complex and interesting would ever be on broadcast TV today.
Zoning out is good for you – Chapter 1 in The Myths of Innovation explores this notion, that our brains do lots of work, especially creative work, when our conscious minds are zoning out and relaxing.
Tornado vs. Train – This is exactly what you think it is and it’s awesome.