rodcorpmobile, product design, user experience, project and team management ... and various thingsKraftwerk's Tour de France is aero dynamik- August 14, 2003 A new album from Kraftwerk, and music about Le Tour... you're thinking two boxes ticked. And so it proves: on a disc about the same length as a time trial, Kraftwerk keep their cadence up, relentlessly attack the peleton, and retain the yellow jersey. And as a bonus it has plenty of gravel-voiced speech in the Alphaville manner. It rocks. (Well, to be honest it actually clicks and beeps, but you know.)http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000A4G4N/ BBC: Phone tones to beat CD singles- August 13, 2003 The lines cross on the graph.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3143651.stm Marginalia around underground tube maps- August 12, 2003 NYC: both Todd Glickman and Peter Lloyd maintain records of NYC subway maps, which include a series of six or so issued in the daysweeks after 911. By all accounts, that period was handled very well. These maps occasionally come up on eBay and tended to have: a box which stated when the map was reissued and referred travellers to mta.nyc.ny.us for more updates, and a speech-bubble enlargement showing the lower Manhattan area. London: the best records of issued maps are probably Letch's London.http://radio.weblogs.com/0105728/2003/08/12.html#a488 National Gallery piracy risk for print-on-demand- August 8, 2003 NG considering extending its in-gallery digital print-on-demand service to accredited print shops around the world. Would the current lack of DRM prevent piracy, andor allow an effective redress via ntkhttp://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994030 Salt Seller not sold andor less sold of: Duchamp readymades fall short of estimates- August 8, 2003 Mark Kostabi once said there is no "Duchamp market", because he produced so little work: Many pseudo-purists will advise you to keep production low and prices high. But Picasso and Warhol are the kings and barometers of the art market because they had huge quantity as well as quality. Duchamp is just as important historically but no one makes an art-market decision based on how the Duchamp market is going. Because there is no "Duchamp market." He produced too little. Interesting...http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2002/05/20/bawar20.xml Mobile cameras. But not camphones.- August 7, 2003 Shaun Irving's Peanut is a mail-delivery truck converted to take 4x8 feet pinhole photos Rodney Graham's Millennial Time Machine is is a 19th century horse-drawn landau, whose carriage has been converted into a camera obscura via Wm. Gibsonhttp://radio.weblogs.com/0105728/2003/08/07.html#a480 The Art of Chess- August 5, 2003 Nineteen chess sets designed by artists at Somerset House, London On public view for the first time will be five recently commissioned chess sets designed by leading contemporary artists Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Paul McCarthy, Yayoi Kusama and Maurizio Cattelan. These new works will be set in context by chess sets designed during the 20th century by such major artists as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder and Yoko Ono.http://www.gilbert-collection.org.uk/whatson/art_of_chess/index.html Ducks, rabbits and Duchamp- August 4, 2003 In 'Of Two Minds and One Nature', Rhonda Roland Shearer and Stephen Jay Gould use the Jastrow duck-rabbit figure in discussing the idea that Leonardo, Duchamp and other artists successfully bridged art and science, and therefore show us the value of breaking downthrough the unhelpful (false, even - in the view of our authors, themselves a well-known partnership of art theorist and paleo-scientist) dichotomy between the two cultures. In a key passage from one of the most influential books of...http://www.artscienceresearchlab.org/rotoreliefs/sciencearticle.htm People tracking in surveillance applications- August 4, 2003 PDF. Bizarrely, courtesy of a Google search for the centroid of London for the How many ways can the (exact) centre of London be defined question.http://www.cvg.cs.rdg.ac.uk/PETS2001/PETSFINALPDF/fuentes.pdf Counter-factual history and fiction- August 1, 2003 Counterfactual History is sometimes controversial (see this discussion of E.H.Carr's 'Counterfactual History is Bunk', and this), but it can be very thought-provoking and tempting - many WW2 geeks will have considered an alternate outcome if Germany had taken Stalingrad, or if the US hadn't had logistical superiority in tank building (or any one of a dozen other scenarios). ed Robert Cowley: What If Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (1999) (am.co.uk allconsuming), and More...http://www.uchronia.net |