"Death Star" 747 Airborne Laser Shoots Down Missile- Combine a Boeing 747 freighter with the Star Wars Death Star and what do you get? Probably something that looks like the YAL-1 Airborne Laser, a prototype missile defense program under development for the Pentagon. In it's first major live-fire test, the Airborne Laser successfully knocked down a Scud-like missile last night over the Point Mugu Naval Air Weapons Station in California. The Los Angeles times explains:
During the experiment, a 747-400F took off from Edwards Air Force Bas…(more)
- Restored Streetcar Looks Strangely Like "a Rolling Howard Johnson's"
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Photos: Telstar Logistics
There's a brand-new old streetcar roaming the streets of San Franicsco. Built in 1946 for Minneapolis-St. Paul, PCC streetcar No. 1076 later carried passengers in Newark, New Jersey. Upon retirement, it was sold to San Francisco, restored to join the city's vintage streetcar fleet, and given the turquoise-and-orange 1950s livery of Washington DC Transit. We've already heard several locals say 1076 has become one of their favorites. But, this being San Fr…(more)
- Snow-Eating Serpent Keeps Boston's Airport Open
- Big snowstorms have been pounding America's East Coast, and as regular readers of this Internet Weblog know, we loooooves us some heavy-duty snow-removal equipment. So it was with much gratitude we received a pointer today from loyal reader Jon Coifman steering us to a Wall Street Journal article about the Vammas, a giant machine now in use at Boston's Logan airport. The WSJ explains:Manufactured in Finland and used by only a couple of airports in North
America, the 68-foot-long machine has …(more)
- A Google Snowmobile for Olympic Slope Views
- Brrrrrrrr. To provide Street Slope View coverage of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, the geeks engineers at Google fitted a panoramic camera rig to a snowmobile so folks at home can experience the Olympic venues and Whistler-Blackcomb Mountain from the safety and comfort of their desk chairs:
This marketing-oriented promotional video with somewhat-grating background music explains how it was done:
To see the end result, pour yourself a cup of hot chocolate and start exploring.LINK…(more)
- Finally! A Home for Rear-Load Garbage Truck Fetishists
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As the folks at Apple Computer like say, no matter what your predilection or need, "There's an App for that." And for the most part, it's true. If we were running the Marketing Department over at Flickr, we might spin that slogan to say "There's a Group for that." Because for the most part, that's true too.
For example, what if you have a fetish for rear-load garbage trucks? Not those cumbersome front-load garbage trucks. Or those nouveau side-load rigs. Or those smelly roll-off b…(more)
- Free to Good Home: One Top Secret Stealth Ship
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Our friends over at SF Citizen picked up on our recent post about the Great Mothball Fleet at Suisun Bay to call attention to one resident of the fleet that's in search of a good home.
The vessel in question is the former Sea Shadow (IX-529), a ship built under a cloak of secrecy during the 1980s to test various radar-eluding, stealth technologies for use in maritime environments. This video gives a good sense of how the ship looks -- inside and out -- as accompanied by a propagandisti…(more)
- Custom Vans as Endangered Art Form
- Photos by Joe Stevens Once upon a time, when we were wearing Toughskins and "Hotel California" ruled the AM airwaves, America had a fling with customized vans. With shag carpets on the inside, and airbrushed graphics on the exterior, custom vans were -- for one brief, shining Zeitgeist moment -- the mainstream embodiment of stoner cool. That moment came and went, but many of those vans are still on the road, rolling along like internal-combustion refugees awaiting the opportunity to appear …(more)
- A Peek Inside the Mothball Fleet at Suisun Bay
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Photos by Amy Heiden
The San Francisco Bay Area is home to a vast collection of modern military ruins that are a joy to explore, but of all the relics located here, none is more inviting, or as inaccessible, as the sprawling mothball fleet of inactive ships stored by the US Department of Defense at Suisun Bay, some 30+ miles northeast of downtown San Francsico.
Maintained as part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet, the dozens of "ghost ships" at Suisun Bay include ever…(more)
- An absence of magical objects
- What are the modern equivalents of medieval cathedrals? Design history buffs will always allude to dear old Roland Barthes and his declaration, in 1953, that the new Citroen DS fit the bill perfectly: "I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object." As the century …(more)
- March into march
- Is it really hip to be glum? Riffing on the insta-popularity of Unhappy Hipsters: 'US psychologists ... cropped pictures of models in ads so only their faces were visible, then asked people to rank them in order of mood. Overwhelmingly, models advertising pricier brands were judged to look glummer.' (pdf link: Facial Displays of Emotion in Folk vs. Elite Advertisements). *Antonio Contador's 6=0 consists of six copies of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence". "The records were bought on …(more)
- Spoilt Choices
- The US embassy proposal has become the online architecture subject of the week, with countless (or probably very countable, if you know what you're doing) virtual column inches devoted to the competition, the controversy, the winning scheme, the design, the constraints, the problems, the impossibility, etc. Will Wiles goes a little more in-depth in Why Ambassador, With This Perimeter You Are Really Spoiling Us, exploring the brave new world of Hostile Vehicle Mitigation ('there are such things, …(more)
- Gypsychique, a tumblr (occasionally nsfw) / work by John Whitlock / the impending Cupcake Bubble, looking for some kind of Gladwellian hook in the relatively recent spike in production/consumption of small fancy cakes. The trend is definitely there, but 'The real problem, though, is that the cupcakes are essentially reactionary.... willfully uncomplex, familiar, and comforting' / Is this your luggage? (via).Just What I See, iPhone street photography / you know, Vintage For Kids / all about the G…(more)
- An impending darkness
- An impending darkness. We've recently become aware of Blogger's intention to 'switch off' something called FTP publishing. Last time we looked, our settings said ominously 'You are publishing via FTP'. Admittedly there seems to be plenty of information out there (e.g. Blogger FTP info) but it highlights an unwelcome side effect of 'push button publishing'; that one inevitably forgets exactly what each button does, only that one needs to push it. The things facade is paper thin, jerry-built on a …(more)
- Into face
- The Overexamined Life: Finding Bits of Ourselves in Digital Ghost Towns: 'If I were to log into Friendster today I would see a perfectly preserved document of my life in 2003. The people I was friends with then (most of them, sadly, I'm no longer in touch with) and the inside jokes we shared, not to mention the photos of me at that age. It makes me really want to not log in or log in and destroy it all.' See also Caterina's defence of participatory media in the face of Jaron Lanier's contention …(more)
- Click here
- Hypertext as the death of arcana, or how the click killed curiosity. The depth of the internet is, of course, limitless, a bottomless pit of html that can take us off and away on any number of unexpected byways and diversions. Yet is this expectation of diversion flattening out our experience of the physical world? The days of an internet where every stumble was a moment of true discovery are gone forever, perhaps, as curatorial zeal fast overtakes quiet collectomania as the principle online act…(more)
- Dead ends
- The attraction of the technological failure, and how the internet serves as a dispensary of extended footnotes to otherwise forgotten history. Take the Sinclair C5, now firmly established in the canon of entrepreneurial also-rans, an idea not so much beyond its time, but out of time, the answer to a question that no-one was asking. But were it not for the internet, the C5 would languish in the very marginalia of cultural commentary, the nuts and bolts of its brief existence papered over by snide…(more)
- Interaction10: Coming Up for Air
- Interaction10 finally happened last weekend. I have barely blogged in a year. This is not a coincidence. A+B=C.
It’s hard to even know where to begin. Less than 100 hours ago, I completed the most significant accomplishment of my career (so far), a year-long project that filled all the nights and weekends outside my day job. Words fail. Holy crap, I just co-chaired a conference.
Interaction10 rocked. Our amazing team pulled off a 4 day event with over 500 people, 11 workshops, 40+ session…(more)
- Doing a Virtual Seminar for UIE
- Happy to announce that I’ll be giving a virtual seminar for UIE on the topic of Designing Humanity Into Your Products on September 9. For more info, check out UIE.
Please sign up and listen in! And hey, want a discount? Use my discount code BILLDER to save yourself some hard-earned cash. See you there.…(more)
- Check Ticket Data
- Experimenting with video…
Here’s a mini-diatribe on how simple phrasings in an interaction can confuse the interaction. Or, yet another fun example of pointing out silly technology. In this case, paying for airport parking and turning in your receipt so you can leave the parking area, and questioning what the machine says.
Plus, you can see how much my eyes wander while I’m driving. Safety first!
…(more)
- From Business to Buttons
- Earlier I in June, I was fortunate to be speaking at From Business to Buttons 09. It was a great event, hosted at Malmo University in Sweden. We got to see a lot of insightful student presentations as well as some great talks put on by the various speakers, include Garr Reynolds, Scott Berkun, Matt Jones and Dave Malouf.
Here is the video from my talk, Designing Humanity into Your Products.
I switched gears a bit from talking about buttons. I focused instead on words, writing and voice. How pro…(more)
- Why I’m Attending Interaction 09, and You Should Too!
- In February 2009, I’ll be heading up to Vancouver BC to attend Interaction’09, the annual conference organized by IxDA, the Interaction Design Association. I couldn’t be more excited. Why?
This is my tribe of people. Some call themselves interaction designers, some call themselves information architects, some have other variations. But really, they’re all intelligent, curious, kind people with a fascination for how people interact with technology, and improving it in thei…(more)
- Evolution of Symbols @CyborgCamp
- Last weekend, I attended and spoke at CyborgCamp. It was a helluva thing. It’s incredibly energizing to get a bunch of smart and thoughtful people in a room together for a day to talk about the intertwinement between people and technology. Ward Cunningham was a joy to watch and see how he visualizes massive data. Lia Hollander spoke passionately about her bond with her insulin pump. And I could watch Hideshi Hamaguchi diagram on a whiteboard all day long. The biggest thanks of all go to Am…(more)
- “The Human Button” on BBC
- BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting a 40 minute audio documentary on The Human Button, (today Dec 2) including interviews with the people who would’ve lived in the underground bunker, running the British government in the event of a nuclear war.
There is also a great audio slideshow of the discarded bunker, showing the rooms and dead technology from this forgotten era, and thankfully, never used.
Hopefully we can see/hear more programs like this to show the incredible amount of money wasted on te…(more)
- Pinball and bowling alleys and flow
- Recently, I played pinball and went bowling in the same week. The two games will always be linked together for me because that’s where I first really experienced interaction design: the bowling alley.
I enjoy saying that I grew up in a bowling alley. There’s tiny me camping under stinky shoes, scrounging stale nachos for dinner, and sniping smokes from the ‘dults. But in truth, from roughly the ages 7 to 13, my mom, aunt and uncle were all in bowling leagues, so I went once or…(more)
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Product design