Showing posts with label link. Show all posts
Showing posts with label link. Show all posts
7/31/2011
A Brief History ofApple Not Buying Things
Heeee, yep. (The Lala one is still sad to me.) [via Daring Fireball]
7/29/2011
7/17/2011
Guys, guys, guys!
I'm famous. Well, more like I bought myself some fame from a cool webcomic that my friends recently introduced me to, Poly in Pictures (hi PiP visitors! sorry my site's so neglected and cobwebby). (And now the recursive linking circle is complete.)
Because it's not a proper webcomic post without an example:
Because it's not a proper webcomic post without an example:
3/30/2011
3/14/2011
"Some Perspective On The Japan Earthquake"
A lot of people have written about how the Japanese earthquake is a perfect example of high engineering standards and rigorous training and preparations paying off, but I especially liked this account.
[via Chockenberry]
A train pulling out of the station had hit the emergency breaks and was stopped within 20 feet — again, just someone doing what he was trained for. A few seconds after the train stopped, after reporting his status, he would have gotten on the loudspeakers and apologized for inconvenience caused by the earthquake. (Seriously, it’s in the manual.)
[via Chockenberry]
3/12/2011
"Durable" instead of "Sustainable"?
A little thought by Human Transit. I'm not sold, though the throwaway comment about "Resilient" caught me eye. [several weeks old, but then I have things I've been meaning to read for far longer and I'll probably post some of those, so, tough]
3/03/2011
The Department of Defense's Corrosion Department
Random stuff like this interests me way more than it should.
The Pentagon itself spends something in the neighborhood of $23 billion per annum to combat the problem. "Weapon systems are routinely out of commission due to corrosion deficiencies," the DoD observes. "For example, corrosion has been identified as the reason for more than 50 percent of the maintenance needed on KC-135 aircraft."
So—get this—the Defense Department has an entire agency that does nothing but try to figure out ways to fight corrosive gunk.
UI tweaks in OS X Lion
I always love these look at the steps in the evolution of a UI.
When Apple changed the system folders to monochrome I found that it did hurt usability, but I'm actually curious if it might be worth the trade off this time. We'll see. Regardless, the care the designers invest is undeniable.
iTunes was first to go monochrome, and now Lion is following in its footsteps. Things like the color icons in the sidebar in Finder are now monochrome[.]
...
Another move to make the interface take a step back and bring user content forward. Giving up color cues almost certainly makes it less usable, so what’s gained? A nicer looking interface that feels simpler because it fades away into the background, presenting you with less information to process.
When Apple changed the system folders to monochrome I found that it did hurt usability, but I'm actually curious if it might be worth the trade off this time. We'll see. Regardless, the care the designers invest is undeniable.
"Gene and the Machine - The shocking truth about the electric Volt"
Perhaps the best auto review of all time.
[old, and been sitting in my too-read 'pile' long-enough that I can't figure out who first linked me to it, but still worth a read]
So this won’t be a conventional automotive review. First, I’m not qualified to write a conventional automotive review, inasmuch as I know next to nothing about automobiles. Second, I am nakedly biased. I very much wanted to hate this car. It challenges my worldview.
Life is bewildering — essentially, it’s a fatal disease of uncertain course and unknown duration. If we are to make any sense of it, if we are to tame our existential terrors, we must gratefully cling to those few established truths on which we know we can rely: Day follows night. Sex causes babies. To lose weight, eat less. American cars suck.
[old, and been sitting in my too-read 'pile' long-enough that I can't figure out who first linked me to it, but still worth a read]
12/03/2010
12/02/2010
our security theater obsession is directly tied to why we're losing the war(s) and putting ourselves in far greater danger
exactly. [via @Fraying and Gruber]
[edit:] and, to steal a great quote from the article that Gruber picked out:
[edit:] and, to steal a great quote from the article that Gruber picked out:
Of course, the U.S. national security state has quite a different formula for engendering safety in America: fight the Afghan war until hell freezes over; keep the odd base or two in Iraq; dig into the Persian Gulf region; send U.S. Special Operations troops into any country where a terrorist might possibly lurk; and make sure the drones aren’t far behind. In other words, reinforce our war state by ensuring that we’re eternally in a state of war, and then scare the hell out of Americans by repeatedly insisting that we’re in imminent danger, that shoe, underwear, and someday butt bombers will destroy our country, our lives, and our civilization. Insist that a single percent of risk is 1 percent too much when it comes to terror and American lives, and then demand that those who feel otherwise be dealt with punitively, if they won’t shut up.
11/14/2010
Andy Ihnatko's Sheldon Moment
human nature in a nutshell (and why designing things that are new or different is always so challenging to get acceptance of):
I was having a true Sheldon Moment. I couldn’t come up with any credible reason why the sudden change to this familiar layout bothered me. Yet I found myself wanting to tell the person at the register “But that’s not where those tables go. Why would you do that?” in a calm but very firm voice.
11/13/2010
11/01/2010
10/24/2010
attack of the toddler brainz
yep: Immediate gratification in design (a completely written-about-to-death topic, but still, this one serves to give a slight spin on it that I like and can serve as a good litmus-test) [via @NiamahNyx]
10/22/2010
The 2011 Mediocrity
Experience Mediocrity
Best marketing campaign ever (well... maybe after Old Spice dude...) [via Design Sojourn]
10/07/2010
From 'Wayfinding' to 'Thingfinding'
Rez talks about how users are often looking for many things in a location typically over-looked by traditional wayfinding approaches and how to approach that broader goal [via Wayshowing]
9/24/2010
the conflict between high speed passenger service and freight rail in america
(a minimally-edited off-the-cuff draft):
As the Wall Street Journal summarizes in an article I find a bit skewed and thin on context, the freight railroads see national high speed passenger service as a serious threat [via The Infrastructurist]. And, while we desperately need passenger service of anything even pretending-to-resemble a functional national network, the freight railroads are right. Passenger service is a huge liability for them. After decades of starvation, the US (well, US and Canada - the two are functionally one and the same in the railroad world) railroads have finally had significant growth for the past couple decades, and in the past decade have actually reached the point of spending billions on infrastructure capacity upgrades to handle the traffic. They now carry way more traffic than ever on a fraction the route-miles through much more efficient networks. North America (US and Canada primarily, but Mexico is catching up fast) has the most successful and efficient freight rail systems in the world, and one of the few that is fully-privitized. They simply do not have the capacity for passenger service on any of their core lines without heavy capacity expansions. When there is plenty of open capacity on a line, the incremental costs of an added train are not too major - when the line is at capacity, incremental costs can escalate exponentially in extreme cases (need another track and you're in a mountain range? have fun blasting lots of rock...). A single passenger train actually has the capacity needs of several freight trains - the greater the speed-disparity, the more a passenger train delays the surrounding freights, and their tighter scheduling requirements (federally-regulated and hard-fought in the courts over the decades of Amtrak's life) mean that a delayed passenger train destroys the schedules of every other train around it. Excellent freight and passenger networks can coexist, but that takes massive capital, and exists almost nowhere in the world. Not in Europe, thats for sure - all those countries in western Europe with their excellent passenger service? Yea, they have freight networks varying from small-and-plucky to abysmal. If you have to choose one or the other, then America needs freight way more given our geography, economy, and the far greater efficiencies of freight transport than passenger by rail due to the inherent nature of their traffic patterns (with occasional exceptions like urban mass-transit).
In all of this it's also important to remember that our freight railroads have grown incredibly-protective and wary of any government involvement - one of the biggest things that saved the entire industry from death was the Staggers Act which largely deregulated them and eliminated decades (close to a century even?) of heavy pricing regulations - a holdover from the Robber Baron era. They are still massive corporate interests with great power, but despite being many times larger geographically than ever before (to oversimplify: UP and BNSF are Mississippi to Pacific, CSX and NS are Mississippi to Atlantic, CN and CP are Canada), they have a tiny fraction the actual power and have to compete with the massively-Federally-subsidized highway network. Amtrak was a government bailout that took the passenger service out of the hand of the freight railroads and relieved them of a government-mandated service were collectively hemorrhaging some $700 million annually as early as the '50's and literally bankrupted several mid-sized railroads. But it was inherently a compromise that satisfied no one. It retained a fraction of the routes and was structured in a way that it would be perpetually fucked financially and politically, but they survived at all. And it still forced the freight railroads to give these trains priority dispatching that earned them no money, but at least they were not directly costing them millions.
If we want any remotely-decent national passenger network, we need to mimic the approach of the regional commuter agencies negotiations with the freight railroads. If guaranteed their train capacity needs, some liability protections (liability costs are OBSCENE these days), and some say, they will happily cooperate, hand over some control, and even pitch in some on infrastructure upgrades as long as they see some benefits. The key is not expecting them to give up capacity, control and liability just because.
(Interestingly I am biased in both directions on this matter - as a US railfan, the freight networks are something I know well and care about a lot, but similarly as a train nerd and someone interested in transportation planning, I have always thought our passenger network needed tens of billions in investment annually for a couple decades at least to fix the crimes of the past half-century.)
[edit: an example of a more detailed description of the costs from Union Pacific]
As the Wall Street Journal summarizes in an article I find a bit skewed and thin on context, the freight railroads see national high speed passenger service as a serious threat [via The Infrastructurist]. And, while we desperately need passenger service of anything even pretending-to-resemble a functional national network, the freight railroads are right. Passenger service is a huge liability for them. After decades of starvation, the US (well, US and Canada - the two are functionally one and the same in the railroad world) railroads have finally had significant growth for the past couple decades, and in the past decade have actually reached the point of spending billions on infrastructure capacity upgrades to handle the traffic. They now carry way more traffic than ever on a fraction the route-miles through much more efficient networks. North America (US and Canada primarily, but Mexico is catching up fast) has the most successful and efficient freight rail systems in the world, and one of the few that is fully-privitized. They simply do not have the capacity for passenger service on any of their core lines without heavy capacity expansions. When there is plenty of open capacity on a line, the incremental costs of an added train are not too major - when the line is at capacity, incremental costs can escalate exponentially in extreme cases (need another track and you're in a mountain range? have fun blasting lots of rock...). A single passenger train actually has the capacity needs of several freight trains - the greater the speed-disparity, the more a passenger train delays the surrounding freights, and their tighter scheduling requirements (federally-regulated and hard-fought in the courts over the decades of Amtrak's life) mean that a delayed passenger train destroys the schedules of every other train around it. Excellent freight and passenger networks can coexist, but that takes massive capital, and exists almost nowhere in the world. Not in Europe, thats for sure - all those countries in western Europe with their excellent passenger service? Yea, they have freight networks varying from small-and-plucky to abysmal. If you have to choose one or the other, then America needs freight way more given our geography, economy, and the far greater efficiencies of freight transport than passenger by rail due to the inherent nature of their traffic patterns (with occasional exceptions like urban mass-transit).
In all of this it's also important to remember that our freight railroads have grown incredibly-protective and wary of any government involvement - one of the biggest things that saved the entire industry from death was the Staggers Act which largely deregulated them and eliminated decades (close to a century even?) of heavy pricing regulations - a holdover from the Robber Baron era. They are still massive corporate interests with great power, but despite being many times larger geographically than ever before (to oversimplify: UP and BNSF are Mississippi to Pacific, CSX and NS are Mississippi to Atlantic, CN and CP are Canada), they have a tiny fraction the actual power and have to compete with the massively-Federally-subsidized highway network. Amtrak was a government bailout that took the passenger service out of the hand of the freight railroads and relieved them of a government-mandated service were collectively hemorrhaging some $700 million annually as early as the '50's and literally bankrupted several mid-sized railroads. But it was inherently a compromise that satisfied no one. It retained a fraction of the routes and was structured in a way that it would be perpetually fucked financially and politically, but they survived at all. And it still forced the freight railroads to give these trains priority dispatching that earned them no money, but at least they were not directly costing them millions.
If we want any remotely-decent national passenger network, we need to mimic the approach of the regional commuter agencies negotiations with the freight railroads. If guaranteed their train capacity needs, some liability protections (liability costs are OBSCENE these days), and some say, they will happily cooperate, hand over some control, and even pitch in some on infrastructure upgrades as long as they see some benefits. The key is not expecting them to give up capacity, control and liability just because.
(Interestingly I am biased in both directions on this matter - as a US railfan, the freight networks are something I know well and care about a lot, but similarly as a train nerd and someone interested in transportation planning, I have always thought our passenger network needed tens of billions in investment annually for a couple decades at least to fix the crimes of the past half-century.)
[edit: an example of a more detailed description of the costs from Union Pacific]
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