Hsiufan

This appositely named Tumblr blog collects screen shots of software before users have input their own data. Its goal is to encourage designers to “delight users by designing the empty states”—details matter. Here’s an example from Conjure.io. See more at Emptystat.es. +

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Sleep tracking is one of the best features of the Jawbone Up fitness tracker, but it could serve a purpose beyond helping you feel less groggy in the morning. Jawbone's data science team has collated the sleep information from last night in northern California — which was hit by its biggest earthquake in 25 years — and used it to show what percentage of Up wearers in each city were woken up at 3.20AM PT. Napa was among the worst affected areas, whereas Santa Cruz barely registered a tremor, according to the sleep data.

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Minetta Tavern serves Heinz, but Cherche Midi opts for fancy-ass ketchup.

At Cherche Midi, Keith McNally's latest restaurant, the French fries are truly outstanding. They retain all the best attributes of fast-food fries — uniformly golden, very thin, perfectly crispy — while still managing to feel handmade. They nail the sweet spot on the spectrum between elegant, old-school New York dining, and the generic greasy drive-through that you frequented as a teenager. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the ketchup that arrives, in a small, nondescript ceramic cup, with the fries. Is it Heinz? No, it's darker than it should be, and not nearly smooth enough. There's too much spice, not enough sweetness. It is fancy-ass ketchup, and all it does is make you wonder why you can't just have Heinz — like at McNally's other restaurants, Minetta Tavern and Balthazar.

Fortunately, Heinz remains the go-to brand at most restaurants, even in establishments like the NoMad Bar, the Dutch, and, surprisingly, Gramercy Tavern, a place otherwise wholly committed to a fully homemade ethos. Even at Daniel, where the seven-course tasting menu costs $220, Heinz is what arrives if a guest requests ketchup. When I called up Minetta Tavern chef William Brasile, he told me, "When customers have strong connections to a product like that, you have to respect it, no matter what your beliefs are," he says. "I don't like it when Heinz is not offered. And I do prefer the taste."

So why, after 138 years, in an era when practically every food gets an artisanal makeover, has no ketchup competitor even come close to replicating Heinz's success? Why is it that Heinz, and only Heinz, is what we not only love, but what we demand with every French fry we eat?

Because as Malcolm Gladwell once explained, Heinz doesn't just taste good, or even great. It tastes objectively perfect:

When Heinz moved to ripe tomatoes and increased the percentage of tomato solids, he made ketchup, first and foremost, a potent source of umami. Then he dramatically increased the concentration of vinegar, so that his ketchup had twice the acidity of most other ketchups; now ketchup was sour, another of the fundamental tastes. The post-benzoate ketchups also doubled the concentration of sugar — so now ketchup was also sweet — and all along ketchup had been salty and bitter. These are not trivial issues.

[...]

Salt and sugar and umami are primal signals about the food we are eating — about how dense it is in calories, for example, or, in the case of umami, about the presence of proteins and amino acids. What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz's ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo.

If anyone has the ability to create a next-level ketchup to knock Heinz off its throne, it's wd~50's Wylie Dufresne. But he won't even try. "I'd like to think, that as a professional, if someone said, 'Make me a ketchup that tastes better than Heinz,' I could do that," he says. "But that doesn't mean it would be commercially successful. You're fighting a goliath. You can't give people homemade ketchup. They don't want it."

What's funny is that the Heinz formula actually predates our cultural awareness and obsession with the very flavor receptors it activates. "We've come to understood those fundamental tastes so much more recently, and the role that they play in how and why we like foods," Dufresne explains. "The conundrum is not that Heinz can't be beaten, but that Heinz landed on this formula by accident. Staying there is calculated, but getting there appears to be a confluence of things. When Heinz landed, nobody was talking about umami. They got very lucky, with this wonderful swirl that happened to hit all the right notes."

In other words, Heinz very well might be actual lightning in a bottle, and perhaps the rare confluence of factors that make it not just unmistakably good, but also culturally dominant, just cannot be replicated. This results in competitors like Sir Kensington's, which falls awkwardly in between two schools of ketchup — Heinz and homemade — and manages to strip away the real benefits of both: It's still a processed, pre-bought product, which isn't really what you want in a restaurant setting (like at Cherche Midi), and it's not nearly as good as Heinz.

Brasile reveals that at Minetta Tavern, McNally actually spends more money to ceremoniously present Heinz in glass bottles. "It costs us more to put that bottle on the table, as opposed to using bulk Heinz," he says. "You may have noticed that the other condiments are served in ceramic cups, but there's a glass bottle of Heinz. I think that it allows people to relax into their meals a bit more." He recalls one memorable customer who really let herself go: "We had a woman who wanted to know if she could have black truffles shaved over her Black Label burger. We did it, and charged her a reasonable amount." And then, he says, "She dumped ketchup all over the thing." Even the most refined foods — the most sought-after delicacies and the funkiest dry-aged beef — are no match for the pull of Heinz.

Read more posts by Sierra Tishgart

Filed Under: summer eating, cherche midi, heinz, keith mcnally, ketchup, minetta tavern, william brasille, wylie dufresne

Vox's coverage has been solid  

Poor Mrs. Lin. She never saw it coming.



Surprise! You've just been posterized by Jeremy Lin. It appears that our favorite Asian American point guard is getting a little restless in the off-season. In this Instagram video, he shows off some moves by dunking on unsuspecting loved ones for no apparent reason. Including his poor mom:

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Red Alert gives 15 seconds notice before bombs hit  

Craig Mod, who convincingly argues that app development (and their success) is often completely senseless, drops this astounding wisdom on readers about halfway through the article:

The first pass should be ugly, the ugliest. Any brain cycle spent on pretty is self deception. If pretty is the point then please stop. Do not, I repeat, do not spent three months on the radial menu, impressive as it may be. It will not save your company. There is a time for that. That time is not now. Instead, make grand gestures. General gestures. Most importantly, enumerate the unknowns. Make a list. Making known the unknowns you now know will surface the other unknowns, the important unknowns, the truly devastating unknowns — you can’t scrape our content! you can’t monkey park here! a tiny antennae is not for rent! You want to unearth answers as quickly as possible. Nothing else matters if your question marks irrecoverably break you. Do not procrastinate in their excavation.

Craig’s words ring loudly in my ears. You want to unearth answers as quickly as possible. Do not procrastinate in their excavation.

Superb advice for the exploration phase of just about any project, not just app development.

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Don Miyada was sent to an interment camp one month before his high school graduation



It took over 70 years, but Don Miyada finally got to graduate from high school.

In 1942, at age 17, he was pulled out of class at Newport Harbor High School and sent to an internment camp in Arizona, along with his family and thousands of other Japanese Americans, just a month shy of graduation. A teacher later mailed him his diploma. But you know, it's never too late to party like a senior.

Former student interned in World War II gets high school honors

This month, Miyada was invited to participate in the rite of passage he was unjustly denied 72 years ago. The 89-year-old retired university professor donned a cap and gown alongside 560 high school seniors and accepted his diploma with Newport Harbor High's class of 2014.

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Taken recently off the coast of Bali, these surreal photos are the creation of Montreal-based director and photographer Benjamin Von Wong, known for his exceedingly difficult photoshoots. Where it might be more practical to create the complex aspects of these photos digitally, Von Wong took a different path and assembled a team of two models who also happen to be trained freedivers, 7 additional support divers, and obtained special permission to utilize a 50-year-old underwater shipwreck. The entire shoot took place 25 meters below the surface, and because of the extreme conditions and limitations, he relied heavily on natural light to create the final images you see here.

You can watch the video above to see how the photoshoot came together and read more about the process over on his blog. (via PetaPixel, My Modern Met)

What do you do with your Lamborghini if you think it isn't getting enough attention? For some of the Yakuza in Tokyo's underground, you customize it with vinyl wraps, flashing lights, and strings of colored LEDs. Japan-based director and cinematographer Luke Huxham created a mini-documentary last year offering a wonderful peek inside this subculture, which has blossomed from illegal, loud bōsōzoku motorcycle gangs full of young daredevils. Huxham managed to gain access to a man named Morohoshi-san, who invited him to shoot the short film about the gang and its customized rides.

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Photographer Romain Laurent (previously here and here) continues to create a new looping animated portrait each week. The photographer began the project as a way to break free from the pressure of commercial work, and we’re glad to see the project is still ongoing. These are some of the best portraits since the new year, but you can see lots more on his Tumblr.

The four most common varieties of Chinese egg noodles and how to cook with them.[Photographs: Shao Z.]

From crispy pan-fried noodles to a bowl of wonton noodle soup, fresh Chinese egg noodles are a staple of Chinese restaurants. Just like Italian pasta or ramen, when cooked properly, they should have a firm bite and springy texture, and the wide variation in thickness and springiness makes Chinese egg noodles some of the most versatile to cook with. All week, we've been talking about the various types of noodles you might find at a good Chinese market and how best to cook them. Check out the whole series here.

Noodle Varieties

If you're new to cooking with fresh Chinese egg noodles, the assortment of varieties can be a little overwhelming. Located in the refrigerated section at most Asian markets, fresh egg noodles are yellow and mainly made with wheat flour and eggs. But just because they look like egg noodles, doesn't mean they are! Some varieties of alkaline noodles have a yellow appearance, while some brands dye their noodles yellow to skimp on the eggs. Make sure you check the label for real eggs when purchasing any of the varieties listed below.

Just like all fresh pasta, fresh Chinese egg noodles should be kept in their original sealed package in the refrigerator until ready to cook, and once opened, will last only a couple of days. Unopened, they should be good for about a week, but remember to check the expiration date!

The four most common varieties of fresh egg noodles you'll find are thin wonton noodles, wide wonton noodles, Hong Kong-style (chow mein) noodles, and lo mein noodles. Here's a closer look.

Wonton Noodles

Thin Wonton Noodles

This is the kind of thin, springy noodle you find in wonton noodle soup. It's perfect for dishes like this Wonton Noodle Soup With Chicken and Shiitakes where the broth is light and delicate. Think chicken soups or wonton soups made with a mixture of pork and seafood. They're also great in very simple dishes cooked with ginger and scallions or oyster sauce; any dish where the noodle is really the star. They're often served by boiling, draining, then drizzling with sizzling oil and topping with a simple sauce.

Wide Wonton Noodles

Similar to thin wonton noodles but...thicker. I use these noodles for heartier noodle soups, like this Beef Noodle Soup, or other dishes with braised beef and heavier, oilier flavors.

How to Cook Wonton Noodles

First, bring a large pot of salted water to boil. Once boiling, add in the noodles and spread them out with a set of long chopsticks or tongs. To want to stir them quite vigorously to make sure they're separated—they have a tendency to stick together.

For both the thin and wide wonton noodles, they take about 30 to 40 seconds to cook and should never be boiled for longer than a minute. Once they are done, drain them in a colander. If you are using the noodles in a soup, rinse the noodles under cold running water and drain well. Since the noodles will be sitting in hot broth, you want to minimize any further cooking.

If you're using them in a simple stir-fried dish, to rinse or not to rinse depends on the sauce that's being mixed in or drizzle on top. My rule of thumb is that if it's going to take longer than 5 minutes for you to prepare the sauce, then you should rinse the noodles under cold running water.

The important thing to remember is the texture of the noodles. You want them to have that nice springy texture—overcooking spells death.

Hong Kong-Style Pan-Fried (Chow Mein) Noodles

Sometimes also labeled as chow mein noodles, these look similar to thin wonton noodles. The main difference is that noodles labeled "Hong Kong" or "pan-fried noodles" are par-cooked in boiling water, which makes them ready to stir-fry. Use this variety for dry stir-fried noodle dishes, like this Chow Mein With Four Vegetables and whenever you want the noodles to be slightly (or very) crispy.

If you can't find Hong Kong noodles, you can substitute thin wonton noodles. Boil them in water until they're just barely tender (under a minute), drain and carefully dry them (you don't want any excess moisture if you're planning on stir-frying), and then toss 'em with just a bit of oil.

How to Cook Hong Kong Noodles

Hong Kong noodles are ready to fry. Before cooking, open the package and loosen the noodles in a large bowl or work surface. Sometimes a few strands will be clumped up, so make sure to separate them before they go into a wok or pan. They should either be briefly stir-fried with a thin sauce and cooked until the sauce coats each noodle, or shallow-fried in a bit more oil until they form a crispy cake before they're topped with a saucy stir-fry.

Lo Mein Noodles

The thickest variety, lo mein is reserved for stir-fried noodle dishes with a heavy or rich sauce. Think sliced beef, like in this Stir-Fried Lo Mein with Beef and Broccoli, or the thick brown gravy you find at food court steam tables. Right off the bat, they're thicker, denser, and less springy than wonton or chow mein noodles, which means that there's less of a loss in quality when they sit for too long or are reheated—they're simply less time-sensitive than other noodles. This is good news if you've got traveling or potlucks on the itinerary, or if you want to make a noodle dish that will still taste good a few days later.

How to Cook Lo Mein Noodles

Since the lo mein variety of noodles are thicker than wonton noodles, they usually take about 3 to 5 minutes to cook in boiling water. As with wonton noodles, they should be rinsed under cold water if you're not going to serve them immediately.

About the Author: Shao Z. was born in Guangzhou, the birthplace of dim sum, and raised in the Chinatown neighborhood of Philadelphia. As a sibling-less child, cooking was a way to cure after school snack attacks and a way to keep herself entertained. That's how her love for food and cooking started, and it continues to grow. She blog at friedwontons4u.com and is on Twitter at @friedwontons4u.

Recipes!

• Stir-Fried Chow Mein With Four Vegetables
• Wonton Noodle Soup With Chicken and Shiitakes
• Stir-Fried Lo Mein With Beef and Broccoli
• Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup

artist Cory Arcangel, on a hunch, digs up digital history  

In this recent series of digital artworks, Brooklyn-based graphic designer Victoria Siemer begins with dreamy landscapes of mountainous forests shrouded in fog and clouds and then inserts giant reflective fragments that rise from the ground. The inversed image creates the uncanny effect of a monolithic mirror that towers over the photograph like a kind of portal. Siemer says via email that the images are open for interpretation, but her work often deals with the idea of visual or emotional fragmentation which originated from her college thesis. Another example is her recent series of humanized computer error messages recently making the rounds. You can see more over on her blog (occasionally nsfw). (via My Modern Met)

Rooftops in the Snow

Times Square Lights

7th Ave. Night

Hell’s Kitchen

Manhattan Nights

The City Tempest

The Last Light of San Francisco

The Market Street Steamvent

It’s almost impossible for me to select a favorite piece when looking at paintings by San Francisco painter Jeremy Mann (previously). Each of his works seems so wholly genuine, a mix of mystery and grit that brings a sublime light to iconic cities like New York and San Francisco. Above are a selection of paintings from the last two years or so, and you should also check out his recent Figures series. (via one of my favorite new art Tumblrs, Anita Leocadia)

Just announced today, The Sand Storm is a short film directed by New York filmmaker Jason Wishnow that was shot completely under the radar in China, starring none other than dissident artist Ai Weiwei in his acting debut. How such an audacious and risky endeavor came into being is pretty mind-blowing given the heavy amount of surveillance surrounding the artist. The movie takes place in a dystopian future where Ai Weiwei plays the role of a smuggler in a world without water.

The existence of The Sand Storm was kept heavily under wraps while shooting in Beijing. Ai Weiwei has been closely watched by the government since his 2011 imprisonment and authorities still have yet to return his passport. While the short film has already been shot beginning to end, the filmmakers are raising a bit of money on Kickstarter to finish the movie and recoup some costs as crowdfunding beforehand was too risky. Had this been announced yesterday I would have assumed it was a hoax.

Tom O'Donnell imagines how the police would function in a totally libertarian society.

I was shooting heroin and reading "The Fountainhead" in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.

"Bad news, detective. We got a situation."

"What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?"

"Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars' worth of bitcoins."

The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. "What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?"

"Not yet. But mark my words: we're going to figure out who did this and we're going to take them down ... provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so."

"Easy, chief," I said. "Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair."

(via @moleitau)

Tags: Tom O'Donnell

I’m not sure what part of this story I enjoy more: the fact that there’s a two-story building somewhere in the world that’s constructed to look like a giant Rolleiflex Camera; that the walk-in camera doubles as a coffee shop and miniature camera museum; or that the entire endeavor is the brainchild of a former helicopter pilot for the South Korean airforce. Located about 60 miles east of Seoul, South Korea, The Dreamy Camera should be high on the list for any coffee or camera enthusiast heading to the area. Check out more photos and info over on their blog. (via Peta Pixel, DIY Photography)

Jen Lowe tracks her heart rate with a Basis watch, and she's showing the last 24 hours of that data in One Human Heartbeat.

Basis doesn't provide an open API, so I access the data using a variation of this code. The heartrate you see is from 24 hours ago. This is because the data can only be accessed via usb connection. Twice a day I connect the watch and upload my latest heartrates to the database. I've been doing this for 33 days now.

It's March 25, 2014, and statistics say I have about 16452 days left.

On the surface, it's just a pulsating light on a screen, but somehow it feels like more than that. The countdown aspect makes me uneasy, as if I were watching a ticker on someone's life, or my own even. I want to keep watching though, because it continues to pulsate. It's hopeful.

Patricio Gonzalez Vivo, an MFA Design & Technology student, scraped depth from Google Streetview and then reconstructed it in openFrameworks. The result is Point Cloud City. See it in action in the video below.

Dreamlike.

Now I'm curious what else can be gleaned from this data, because this essentially means you could get really detailed data about the makeup of places, down to the window of a building. Although I don't imagine Google will let this stay so accessible for long. [Thanks, @pixelbeat]

Notes from the Newb.

I’m relatively new to MySQL having come from the world of embedded micro-databases, and though I’m pretty familiar with a number of database systems, I’ve discovered that I have a lot to learn about MySQL.

As a new member to the Percona team, I thought I’d have an ongoing blog theme titled “Notes from the Noob” and discuss common problems that our consultants have encountered when working with customers who are also new to MySQL. To which end, I’m going to make the assumptions that (1) you use InnoDB as your engine of choice (a database that ain’t ACID ain’t no database) and that (2) you are using the latest release, 5.6.

So last week I polled a number of our senior consultants and asked them, what are the most common mistakes made by our customers who are also new to MySQL? Overwhelming, I heard back that it was using the default settings and not configuring my.cnf to their specific workload. Having said that, one of the dangers of MySQL is that because there are literally hundreds of configurable parameters that can be set, one is inclined to start messing around and thus ending up with worse performance, rather than better.

The key to working with the MySQL configuration file is that a light touch is recommended, and generally only a handful of parameters need be re-defined.

So what are some of more important parameters one should consider changing from the default values?

First and foremost is the system variable innodb_buffer_pool_size. This defines the size of the memory pool used for caching InnoDB tables and indices and its default size is a piddling 128 MB. On a dedicated server, it’s generally a good idea to set this at 70-80% of available memory but remember that InnoDB will take up to an additional 10% for buffers and control structures. The idea is that the more memory allocated to the database, the less I/O you can expect when accessing the same data. Other issues you might want to consider when defining this value is the size of your dataset and whether you will have multiple instances of MySQL running. Be careful though if you plan to have your entire LAMP stack on a single machine, you might end up having competition for memory resources resulting in paging in the operating system thus negating the whole purpose of reducing IO.

Next up would be the system variable, innodb_log_buffer_size which can be important if you expect to be committing large transactions. The idea is that if you do have large transactions, setting this variable high enough will prevent the requirement of writing the log to disk before the transaction is committed. The default value is 8 MB, but if you expect to have larger transactions, you should definitely consider upping the value.

As expected, the innodb_log_file_size represents the size of the log files. The larger the value, the less checkpoint flush activity is needed in the buffer pool thus reducing disk IO. The downside however to a large value is that crash recovery can be slower. The default value is 48MB. As usual, you should do a reality check with regards to your actual workload. If your system is doing mostly reads, you may not need a large value, whereas if you’re storing blobs (which by the way, is generally not a good idea) you may want to have a larger value.

Another system variable to consider is the innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit, which by default is set to 1, which means that the log buffer is written out to the log file at each transaction commit and the flush to disk operation is performed on the log file. This is great if you can’t risk losing any data, however it can also come with a serious performance penalty. If you’re able to assume more risk and are able to lose up to a second of data, you might want to consider setting this to either 0 or 2. In the case of small ‘write’ transactions, this can provide significant performance improvements.

If you don’t have many tables in your database, you should be aware of the innodb_file_per_table, which as of 5.6, has a default value of ON. This results in MySQL assigning a separate .ibd file for each table in the database. There are a number of reasons why this can be beneficial, but the primary being that you are able to reclaim disk space. One of the quirks of InnoDB tablespace is that when a record is deleted, disk space is not reclaimed. So how are you able to get back that disk space you ask? Let’s say you have a table called biggiesmall and you have deleted 90% of the records. Simple execute the query, ALTER TABLE biggiesmall ENGINE=InnoDB. This will result in a temporary file being created with only the undeleted records. Once the process in completed, the original table is removed and the temporary table is renamed as the original table.

And finally, the best settings are based upon actual runtime statistics. Monitor and record what happens with your database and base your settings upon real numbers.

The post Notes from the Newb appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

The densely populated yet beautiful HubCab [hubcab.org] by MIT Senseable Lab is an interactive map that captures the more than 170 million unique taxi trips that were made by around 13,500 taxi cabs within the City of New York in 2011.

The map shows exactly how - and when - taxis picked up or dropped off individuals, hereby highlighting particular zones of condensed pickup and drop-off activities during specific times of day.

The map lead to the development of the concept of "shareability networks", which allows for the efficient modeling and optimization of the trip-sharing opportunities. The according sharing benefits consider the total fare fare savings to passengers, the distance savings in travelled miles, and the CO2 emission savings in kg of CO2 that result from potentially shared trips.

See also CabSpotting by Stamen Design and Tracking Taxi Flow Across the City by NYTimes.
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My fascination with the geography of place and businesses continues. We looked at pizza spots and grocery store locations, and as expected, saw variation and regionality across the country. This time we look at coffee places.

My expectation was that Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts would dominate, with 10,000-plus and 7,000-plus locations nationwide, respectively. This wasn't far-fetched when you look at the map above. It shows the nearest coffee place among the popular chains, within a 10-mile radius.

Starbucks is all over, whereas Dunkin' Donuts clearly dominates on the east coast. And like the pizza map that showed a favorite in Godfather's Pizza in the midwest, there's a midwest coffee favorite in Caribou.

I mapped popular Canadian coffee places, too, for good measure: BLENZ, Coffee Time, and Tim Hortons. I was mainly interested in Timmy Ho's though because of my three-year stay in Buffalo, New York. It seemed like you were either in the Timmy camp or Starbucks. My wife and I were more into Dunkin' Donuts. But I like that you can kind of make out the Canada-United States border just by looking at Tim Hortons.

Here are the coffee places in their own maps.

Again, Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts show high density in their respective regions. Seattle's Best is similar to Starbucks regionally, but there are far fewer locations. Not that it matters anymore, since it's owned by Starbucks now. Then you have Dutch Brothers in the northwest, Peet's in northern California, and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in southern California.

The spatial concentration in cities didn't surprise me so much, but the cumulative coverage of the coffee places did. I expected to see something more like the pizza map, however, there are lots of areas in the country where it is more than ten miles to the nearest chain. For reference, here's pizza coverage versus coffee coverage:

I'm not totally sure why this is. I've only lived on the east and west coasts. Not so much anywhere else. Maybe fancy coffee drinks aren't as ubiquitous as I thought. Or maybe people get their coffee from mom-and-pop places. Or maybe people in these areas tend to drink coffee at home, and it's not profitable enough for these chains to open shop? Are these areas more into soda and tea? The why needs more investigation.

We can at least see that where there is coffee (and donuts), there tends to be a lot of locations. You're not going to find several Pizza Huts in close vicinity to each other, but it's fairly common with Starbucks.

Thanks to AggData for feeding my location habit.

After a wildly successful Kickstarter last year, the Impossible Project have finally made their handy iPhone polaroid printer, The Impossible Instant Lab, available to the general public. The portable lab allows you to turn any photograph on your iPhone or iPod Touch into a bonafide polaroid print in just moments, harkening back to ye olden days when photos were regarded more as physical artifacts that could be shared in real life. Learn more about it over on Co.Design.

Dave Addey breaks down typography in sci-fi films and TV shows  

Created by Croatian-Austrian collective Numen/For Use, String Prototype is a design for an inflatable volume containing a network of cables that can be explored similar to a jungle gym. The design group is known for their large-scale interactive environments made from tape and netting and this is their first foray into what they call “large geometric inflated objects.” Via the project site:

When the volume deflates, the ropes get loose and lay on the ground enabling compression of the installation. When the object inflates, the ropes tense to a perfect line again, strained enough to carry the weight of a human being. Bodies entrapped in 3D grid, flying in unnatural positions throughout superficial white space, resemble Dadaist collages. Impossibility of perception of scale and direction results in simultaneous feeling of immenseness and absence of space.

The project is currently in development and you can see much more of it here. (via Designboom)

Valve's Steam Music beta will arrive soon for SteamOS users. The service is a new addition to the platform just announced last week, enabling players to listen to local music files from within the Steam client while playing games. To enter the closed ...

It seems like a good day to contemplate whiteness, since that’s what I’ve been doing in my driveway all morning with a shovel. (Eight inches of whiteness have fallen here in Chester County so far, with more coming down.)

It’s the beginning of February and thus, as Ari Kohen reminds us, it’s also the beginning of “Why is there no white history month?” month. As he wrote last year: “It’s February 1, so you know Twitter is lighting up with white people — mostly teenagers, which makes me so incredibly depressed — who are just baffled or angry about the fact that there’s no white history month when there’s a black history month.”

Depression is one appropriate response, but let’s shoot for something a bit more hopeful. Can we turn this depressing annual ritual of the privileged into some kind of teachable moment?

“Why is there no white history month?” is an ignorant question, a question that can only be asked from a place of ignorance. But ignorance is a big place — a large, diverse continent with a large, diverse population. It’s important to keep in mind, as Tolstoy said of unhappy families, that every ignorant person is ignorant in their own way.

When confronted with an ignorant question, then, it’s always helpful to try to discern what kind of ignorance we’re encountering. There’s innocent ignorance, willful ignorance, ego-affirming ignorance and contemptuous ignorance. There’s the ignorance of children who lack experience and exposure to information and there’s the ignorance of the powerful who are so dependent on falsehood that they’ve come to believe it themselves. Some people are unaware of the truth, others are unable to see the truth, others are reluctant to accept the truth, and still others are resolutely opposed to the truth. And that last group, in turn, creates another: those who are prevented or prohibited from learning. Some forms of ignorance are genuine, others are cynical poses adopted in furtherance of some other agenda. Some forms of ignorance are expressions of power and extensions of power over others. Some forms of ignorance are the consequence of being powerless.

Those distinctions matter. They ought to shape how we go about responding to ignorant questions because in any event they certainly will shape how that response is received and perceived.

This matters too: We’re all ignorant about something. We may no longer be residents of the country of ignorance, but we were all born there, and no matter how many degrees we acquire to attest to our citizenship in our new homelands, we’ll always be expatriates of the place. We owe a debt to those who helped us resettle as refugees, and so we’re obliged to pay that debt forward.

Or, in other words, the Golden Rule applies here, just as it always does.

But what, exactly, does the Golden Rule mean in this case. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Fine, then, how would I want others to do unto me if I were spouting off ignorant, racist nonsense on Twitter, parading my pampered privilege as though it were a badge of honor? Well, I’d want to be corrected — quickly and firmly so that I stopped hurting others and stopped embarrassing myself as soon as possible. But, since I know myself to be headstrong and stubborn, particularly when cornered, I’d want the others offering this correction to be as winsome and persuasive as possible. It would be nicest if they could be nice about it, but niceness would be optional and nowhere near as essential as just doing or saying whatever needed to be done or said to get me to STFU and sit down and think and learn and stop hurting myself and others.

That’s what I would want others to do unto me, so that is what I will try to do unto others.

And but so anyway, for every variety of ignorance we have a corresponding variety of potential responses: education, information, condemnation, patience, impatience, dialogue, diatribe, debate, argument, relationship, ridicule, moral suasion, storytelling, jokes, friendship, ostracism, mockery, art, prayer, profanity, scripture, satire, sermonizing, sarcasm, sincerity, irony, sentiment, etc.

Some people expressing ignorance may need help from a teacher, some may need help from a prophet, some from a pastor, a jester, an artist, an advocate, an attorney. Always punch up, always reach down. We can be, as St. Paul wrote, “all things to all people, so that we might by all means save some.”

We should do so for their sake, and for the sake of the people their ignorance may be harming. But we should also do it for our own sake as well.

Because the alternative would be very bad for us. Toxic, in fact. The alternative is that instead of becoming people who try to do whatever can be done to correct ignorance, we will make ourselves into the kind of list-making Inquisitors and witch-sniffers who are capable only of prosecuting the ignorant, seeking them out, and silencing all questions. And that, in turn, would mean that no one can ever learn anything ever again (not even us).