I was thinking today that if you put an LCD screen over a urinal you could map some kind of XY input in the bowl to a mouse cursor so you could interact with the display, but then I decided that would be too much trouble in terms of accuracy and how would you input a click and stuff like that so maybe the better solution would be an proximity-based sensor that would read your personal prefs off a keychain RFID tag or something and just automatically display some pre-selected content (i.e. your inbox, facebook, twitter or etc.) Special bonus because it’s at a urinal, the system could also theoretically give you (or the police) an update on your blood-alcohol content, STDs and any drugs you might be on. Plus, wouldn’t it be cool to serve custom ads based on a person’s biochemistry? Blood-sugar, pregnancy, the presence of anti-depressant medicines. This stuff is gold and you people are all just pissing it away!
From Objections Within NATO Hinder Antidrug Effort in Afghanistan - NYTimes.com:
In an interview, General Craddock said profit from the narcotics trade “buys the bomb makers and the bombs, the bullets and the trigger-pullers that are killing our soldiers and marines and airmen, and we have to stop them.”
Something about that quote reads as a Primal Scream lyric to me. I think it’s the part about “the bullets & the trigger-pullers.”
[Elvis] suddenly spotted a mystical face in the clouds. Unfortunately, it was Joseph Stalin. “That’s Joseph Stalin’s face up there…” Elvis whispered to his spiritual advisor Larry Geller. “What’s he doing up there?” Geller himself remembers that the clouds did look like Joseph Stalin — and then that the miracle had happened.
Elvis violently screeched the bus to a halt, crying “It’s God! It’s God…! The face of Stalin turned right into the face of Jesus, and he smiled at me, and every fiber of my being felt it.”
Elvis later decided that he wanted to become a monk, and according to Careless Love, “the guys all fumed at this latest evidence of the boss’s weirdness and almost perverse dedication to the bizarre.”
And that night in the Mojave desert, their motor home caught on fire.
I got a Holiday e-card from Atari. It’s so intense! Still got nothing on the Infogrames Corporate Anthem though!
From News You Can Lose: Financial Page: The New Yorker.
In a famous 1960 article called “Marketing Myopia,” Theodore Levitt held up the railroads as a quintessential example of companies’ inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Levitt argued that a focus on products rather than on customers led the companies to misunderstand their core business. Had the bosses realized that they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate. By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net.
But there’s so much invested (financially and otherwise) in those products! It just has to work, right!? And besides… who needs customers anyway?
I’ve been helping Thomas migrate & update his Wordpress install today, and I figured I’d upgrade mine as well. So here we are at Version 2.7. Hooray!
Reading Kotaku this morning, I came across an article about the character design for Faith in Mirror’s Edge. Some folks, it would seem, were unsatisfied with the percieved “western interpretation of asian beauty” in Faith, and took it upon themselves to “localize” her appearance.
Original Version
Re-interpretation
Later, I was checking out a blog about the “Top 60 popular Japanese words/phrases of 2008” (Hey, shut up! I don’t bust on how you choose to spend your time off work…=) and so anyway, number 33 describes the debate surrounding the character design of the official mascot character for the Commemorative Events of the 1,300th Anniversary of the Nara-Heijokyo Capital, Sento-kun.
A Buddhist child monk with a rack of deer antlers sprouting from his head, Sento-kun is supposed to evoke the image of Nara’s rich Buddhist history and the wild deer that roam freely around town. But some citizens were angry at officials for shutting them out of the decision-making process and wasting 5 million yen (about $50,000) of taxpayer money on what they saw as an ugly mascot.
So a group of local designers got together and held a contest to create a mascot that, “more closely represents the will of the people and the true spirit of Nara.”
Deer Baby vs. Baby Deer
Anyway, I just found the whole thing pretty interesting, re: the convoluted Venn diagram intersection of “cute” and “sexy” and “western” and “Japanese” and all that.
Probably looks something like this
For additional bonus amusement, do be sure to read the comments from the Kotaku post in which the various implications of eye, boob and nipple size are hashed out in some detail (a large-ish subset of this discussion being devoted to the hypothetical practicalities of being a large-chested parkour practitioner.) And the other submissions to the Nara mascot design contest are worth a look too.
In conclusion, I now feel that if I am ever asked for my advice on creating an ass-kicking sexy female deer character for the Japanese market, I will be well-qualified to offer an informed opinion.
Not that this is any kind of big surprise, but damn, it sounds like working for Thomas Kinkade must be a royal pain in the ass. In a memo to the crew on his forthcoming (why?!) film, “Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage,” he tackily tackles topics both large and small, micro-managing everything from the inclusion of “hidden teddy bears” to the importance of LOVE and BEAUTY in every shot. Also he is a big fan of Barry Lyndon and suggests “stopping down” in general. Anyway, I don’t want to spoil it for you. Just read the horrible thing already.
A couple of great articles on the past, present & future of investment banking from the past week or so:
- Malcolm Gladwell on Goldman Sachs & “The Uses of Adversity“
- Michael Lewis on “The End of Wall Street’s Boom“
Somewhat less engaging, but still worth reading:
- George Soros on “The Crisis & What to Do About It“.
And here’s a soundtrack to accompany your reading:
- The Wu-Tang Clan on: C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)
I like the iPhone and everything, but this vision of it’s future capabilities from AT&T:
Before the iPhone wakes you up in the morning with its alarm clock, De la Vega says, it will have already loaded all of your daily news feeds onto the phone. It will also have already sent a wireless message to your coffee maker to get the coffee ready.
Later on, at your office, the iPhone initiates a conference call between you and two potential customers in Japan. On the call, when you speak English, the iPhone translates it to Japanese so that your potential customers can understand you. When they answer in Japanese, the iPhone converts their speech into English so you can understand them.
Just brings to mind Jim Carrey’s satellite-dish soliloquy from The Cable Guy:
(Also, the Washington Post may want to note that despite all it’s other awesome capabilities, the iPhone will still not magically fix broken HTML character entities on your website.)
