It’s been a few weeks since I was able to kick back on a sunday - today, I basically forced myself to. And now at the end of the day, it is easy to quickly glance back and realize how much pleasure I took out of going through all the things I wanted to read, watch and hear in the last few weeks and couldn’t. It’s like my brain finally caught air, after weeks trapped in work and routine. Here’s a few of the things that caught my eye today - I leave them here, hoping that you the reader, may go through them one of your free sundays too.
”Destroying Mercury to Build a Dyson Sphere is a Bad Idea”, an article penned by Alex Knapp for Forbes, is a great read if you appreciate people who think about the future, unconcerned about the limitations of the present. If you don’t know what a Dyson Sphere is, there’s a ton of great resources I’ll gather one day (drop me an email if you’d like an unfiltered list).
The always inspiring James Bridle gave a great talk titled ” We fell in love in a coded space” about digital storytelling, sentience and robots at Lift 2012, and the video is now up. If you have around 20 minutes, go check it out. On the talk, he mentions Argot and Polari, two languages within other languages. What us programmers might call DSLs.
Spent quite a bit going through some of the things already being planned for @notch’s next game, 0x10c, a game with a CPU ( specs) inside a computer inside a spaceship, inside a game, inside your computer. I guess we’ll see where this one will end up, but judging by the community around minecraft, I suspect we’ll see much here too.
This SXSW, Jason Hreha (also at 500 Startups) gave a talk titled “Applying psychology to web design”, but the things he said can be very much applied to other things. Make sure you do listen to it ( slides here) if you do user experience design for products and/or services.
I don’t know how Craig Mod does it, but his most recent essay on the translation between the digital and the physical (and specifically about designing Flipboard for the iPhone) is beautifully written - perhaps as beautiful as the idea behind it, and the book created to collect the development process of the app. 8 pounds, is how much the process weighs.
Have a great week.