firehose

“Silence is of the gods; only monkeys chatter.” ― Buster Keaton

stinkdude:

ash i am a foot tall mouse and that is some godzilla shit happening over there

Protestors against a marijuana tax issue will hand out free joints before a fundraiser for the pot tax at Denver Beer Company that will be attended by Gov. John Hickenlooper.

The patent war has gotten out of control.

The U.S. is overtaking Russia as the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas, a startling shift that is reshaping markets and eroding the clout of traditional energy-rich nations. U.S. energy output has been surging in recent years, a comeback fueled by shale-rock formations of oil and natural gas that was unimaginable a decade ago. A Wall Street Journal analysis of global data shows that the U.S. is on track to pass Russia as the world's largest producer of oil and gas combined this year—if it hasn't already. The U.S. ascendance comes as Russia has struggled to maintain its energy output and has yet to embrace technologies such as hydraulic fracturing that have boosted American reserves.

archimaps:

Suggested development for the site of the Old Art Museum on Copley Square, Boston

Given how often credulous media outlets breathlessly extol the revolutionary nature of our 3D printed future, you’d think that the market for cheap, accessible 3D printers would be exploding. Mostly, you’d be wrong. According to a report by Gartner, subsequently picked apart by the Wall Street Journal, in the entire world only 56,507 3D printers costing less than $100,000 will be sold in 2013.

For comparison, about 293,000 conventional 2D printers are sold every day, the report’s author told the Journal.

Gartner projects that the market for 3D printers will grow 97% annually over the next five years, which would mean 826,000 will be sold per year by the end of 2017. That’s still just a couple of thousand printers per day. Even if most of them end up in the “prosumer” market of designers and small scale manufacturers, they’re not about to transform how we make everyday goods.

A Brazilian drug trafficker was killed by his own stock when he was crushed by half a ton of marijuana.

Twitter filed for an IPO yesterday, and amidst all the excited speculation, I couldn’t help but notice that yet again, we are about to witness the gender gap in corporate America widen ever so slightly. Among the faces of the company’s leadership team, its executive officers and board of directors, and its key shareholders, I see only one woman: Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s general counsel and secretary of the board. I count 11 men, on the other hand, and that’s not including the venture capital firms listed—none of which appears to have a woman partner.

Of course, this won’t likely raise many eyebrows; after all, only 27% of Fortune 500 companies have even one woman on their executive teams, and women CEOs head up just 22 of those 500 firms. And the tech industry is notoriously male-dominated.

In supposedly-meritocratic Silicon Valley, it’s unlikely many will bat an eyelash as these men cash in their chips and become wealthy beyond most people’s wildest dreams. While I’m tempted to rail against the economic injustice of it all, and point to the widening gap between America’s wealthiest citizens and the rest of its population, I doubt any of that will convince corporate CEOs or investors to get more women into the C-suite. So let’s talk about the business case for gender diversity.

For starters, there’s the research showing that diverse teams are more innovative—surely a concern for Twitter as it shifts from a privately-held concern to one that will be working to maximize shareholder returns.

There’s also evidence that companies with more women on the board of directors perform substantially better in terms of return on equity, return on sales, and return on invested capital.

And finally, there’s the common-sense argument that if your customer growth is slowing down, and your user base skews male, there might be a substantial benefit to getting some women in the room to help you figure out how to get more women using your platform.

Tech may indeed have a pipeline problem, but if companies like Twitter want to continue to push the edges of innovation and garner significant shareholder returns, they’d do well to at least get their women-to-men ratio into the double digits.

You can follow Lauren on Twitter at @laurenbacon. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com. 

Harmut Esslinger was already a big name in the field of industrial design in 1982, when his firm, Frog Design, bid on a secret project to help Apple become the company that would transform computers from “business machines” into consumer goods.

After he submitted the Red Book—a binder full of design inspirations ranging from Walt Disney cartoons to the pioneering Sony Trinitron televisions designed by Frog—Esslinger won the Apple contract, and an intimate, decade-long relationship with Steve Jobs began.

Now retired from Frog Design, Esslinger wants to set the record straight about the history of design at Apple. In a new memoir, Keep it Simple, to be released October 9 at the Frankfurt Book Fair, he claims that almost everyone has missed the true lessons of Apple’s early days.

Throughout the book, Esslinger slams the bad guys—mostly John Sculley, the Apple CEO who pushed Jobs out, but also other project leads and executives at Apple—and describes his own work with the kind of superlatives that Jobs was famous for applying to Apple’s products. Ultimately, Keep it Simple is either a monumental act of egotism or the epitome of the inspired bluntness that Jobs was famous for—most likely it’s both.

Quartz got an exclusive advanced look at Esslinger’s book, and what follows are some of the more interesting excerpts:

“I make no secret of my disgust for all those books written by outsiders who, if they mention design at all, describe it as Steve’s hobby or some kind of whimsical ‘add-on’ to his main product focus. Even Walter Isaacson’s much-touted Jobs biography falls into this disappointing category.”

One of Esslinger’s central assertions is that Steve Jobs was no design genius when Apple began, and yet design became central to Apple’s subsequent success. Getting the company to the point that it could produce world-class consumer goods required something akin to a corporate civil war, pitting Jobs and small groups of engineers and designers against the rest of the company.

In this formulation, Jobs is something like Luke Skywalker, fighting the forces of evil, both without (IBM and its drab PCs) and within (the power struggle that ultimately forced Jobs out of Apple in 1985.) That essentially casts Esslinger as Obi Wan Kenobi.

When Silicon Valley didn’t know what design was

“When we started to work together […] Steve intuitively sensed what design could do for Apple, but both he and his team remained stuck in the provincial perception of design that permeated the engineering-driven culture of Silicon Valley. […] Steve wanted World-Class Design. He was still trying to define what that meant, but he knew that Apple didn’t have it—in fact, aside of Bill Moggridge who had come from London, there wasn’t any true design talent in all of Silicon Valley.”

A friendship with Jobs is born

The day Esslinger met Jobs, he showed up in a t-shirt and jeans. He’d been informed that Jobs was the sort who might throw him out of his office immediately. Already nervous, his anxiety only increased when the first person to come out of Steve’s office was wearing a three-piece suit.

As it turned out, on that day Steve was wearing clothes even rattier than Esslinger’s. When Esslinger asked about the man in the suit, Jobs laughed and said, “That was Governor Jerry Brown—he’s looking for a job.”

Almost immediately, Esslinger told Jobs that designers were often hamstrung by their low position in corporate hierarchies, including at Apple, which resulted in “structurally determined mediocrity.” This irritated Jobs, but Esslinger continued:

“I explained that to make design a core element of Apple’s corporate strategy, it would have to be seen as a leadership issue; world-class design can’t work its way up from the bottom, watered down by the motivations and egos of every layer of management it passes through.”

Their conversation also touched on areas they had in common.

“Steve didn’t really know much about design, but he liked German cars. Leveraging that connection, I explained that design like that has to be a complete package, that it must express the product’s very soul; without the excellent driving experience and the history of stellar performance, a Porsche would be just another nice car—but it wouldn’t be a Porsche.”

An outsider becomes chief of design at Apple

Before long, Jobs had signed an exclusive, $1,000,000 a year contract with Frog, guaranteeing that the firm would only design computers for Apple. (Years later, this contract would become problematic when Esslinger followed Jobs to NeXT computer; Tim Berners-Lee later invented the World Wide Web using the iconic NeXTcube, which Frog also designed.) Esslinger insisted on being in charge of all product design at Apple. All of the company’s internal designers would answer to him; and Esslinger himself would be answerable only to Jobs.

It was a direct implementation of what Esslinger insisted upon, in his first meeting with Jobs: Designers couldn’t simply be at the table: They had to be in charge. This leads to Esslinger’s central lessons for all companies aspiring to be like Apple: Beautiful design requires designers in charge.

“…bottom-up design never succeeds, because even good efforts by departments within such systems remain insulated within the layers of the company’s organizational structure and everything really new, courageous and potentially game-changing is destroyed by its passage through ‘the gates of rejection.’”

Judging by how often he repeats it, this is the most important message of Esslinger’s book. This is also the lesson that Apple’s imitators seem to miss most often—that good design arises as much from the internal structure of a company as from whether or not it’s a priority. Technology firms are founded and often run by engineers—and the natural tendency of engineers is to ruin good design.

Apple’s future is its past—is that a problem?

One of the shocking things that comes from reading an account of the early days of design at Apple is how the groundwork for almost all of the company’s subsequent successes—slim notebook computers, the iPad and the iPhone—was laid in the early 1980s. Phones, tablet computers, Powerbooks were all realized by Frog Design in models, at a time when the technology to realize them simply didn’t exist. Then Jobs was kicked out of Apple, learned some hard lessons at NeXT, started a little company called Pixar and returned to Apple just as technology was catching up with his vision.

If Apple’s greatest successes are all rooted in a time when Frog and Jobs were in their creative prime, is Apple in danger of running out of ideas, and turning into a company that is devoted not to innovation but endless refinement of its greatest hits?

One possible interpretation of Keep it Simple suggests that Apple’s recent promotion of Jony Ive—the Esslinger of Apple’s later years—is exactly what the company needed to remain a design-centric, innovative company.

To the extent that it reflects the attitude that Jobs and his lieutenants brought to their work, Keep it Simple could become a classic of both business and design school reading lists. If you’re like Steve Jobs or Harmut Esslinger, good design is about getting your ideas past the “morons”—which, Esslinger recalls, was “Steve’s favorite word.”

NDTV

Atlanta woman says she's the voice of Siri USA TODAY Recognize the name Susan Bennett? If you own an iPhone and make use of personal assistant Siri, you've likely heard her voice. In an interview with CNN, Bennett claims she is the voice behind Siri. "It seemed like everyone was clamoring to find out who the ... Voice of Siri steps forwardChicago Tribune Voice of Siri Reveals Herself — And Why The iPhone “Assistant” Sounds So ...TIME 'I'm the original voice of Siri'CNN International 14 News WFIE Evansville -WUKY all 68 news articles »

Banksy in NY

This is a tombstone in my city Lund, Sweden. It is there in the memory of a boy that died when he was 5 years old. I don't know anything else about the boy but I love this tombstone.

TunnelBear is a simple VPN app that provides users with a more secure, encrypted internet connection and, as LifeHacker points out, can be used to access regionally restricted content. The app is available for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android devices, and prospective users can sign up for a free or paid account at the TunnelBear website.

image via TunnelBear

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

If she’s able to point out the incredible misogyny in the gaming industry in an intelligent and articulate fashion, she is not bad for feminism. 

She’s brave enough to speak out about problems in gaming despite the complete hell she’s had to go through for it. I don’t care about this supposed past, or her “questionable” friends. She’s correct in her assessment of gaming culture and that’s all that matters. 

I’m sure the sources for these rumors are childish internet trolls so I refuse to pay them any mind and suggest you do the same. 

Back in 2004, Laura Starecheski visited a state mental hospital in Queens, New York, called Creedmoor. She stumbled on to a mystery there that would take almost ten years to unravel.

Buffalo Bills quarterback EJ Manuel couldn't get out of bounds on a scramble before Cleveland Browns safety Tashaun Gipson hit Manuel on the right knee, a scary-looking injury that sent Manuel out of the game. Although Manuel's return was announced as doubtful, his cleats were off by the end of the third quarter.

Brian Hoyer, the Cleveland Browns' third-string-to-starting-quarterback hero who won his first two starts with the team, was helped off the field after suffering a right knee injury in the first quarter of Thursday's game against the Buffalo Bills. NFL Network's Alex Flanagan reported that Hoyer was done for the game, scheduled to have an MRI of his knee. She said that Browns officials were concerned that Hoyer tore his ACL.

World-renowned artist Sinead O’Connor took some time out of her life to try to impart some wisdom onto world-renowned bimbo Miley Cyrus by writing her an impassioned 1,000 word letter on what the music industry tries to do to female artists. So here's what Miley did.

As of Thursday night, we have more questions than answers as to why a 34-year-old dental hygienist engaged with police and the Secret Service on the steps of the Capitol building.

the-science-llama:

The Mir Space Station
Taken by Atlantis (STS-71) in July 1995

A group of water activists and big ratepayers who want to wrest control of water and sewer bills from city council hands continues to haul in big donations.

In transactions posted to the Secretary of State's ORESTAR website earlier today, the group Portlanders for Water Reform reported $42,100 in new money to play with as it mounts it's effort. The group took in five donations since mid-September, but the bulk of the money comes from three big cash infusions:

Portland property management firm Commerce Properties kicked in $10,000. American Property Management, another Portland company, kicked in $20,000. And the Portland wing of Siltronic—a German semiconductor firm—donated another $10,000.

That last one is no surprise. Siltronic and other industrial interests have backed this effort since the beginning. Portland Bottling Company gave the water reform group its only other contribution to date—$25,000—in early September. But this is the first time we've seen robust support from property management folks.

As the Mercury first reported, the effort's backers have hired a professional fundraiser to coax cash.

The proposal, which Portlanders for Water Reform is working to get on the May 2014 ballot, is to establish a seven-member elected board that would take control of the Portland Water Bureau and Bureau of Development Services. Board members would be beholden only to the electorate.

Proponents say the body would be less prone to abuses of ratepayer money and setting exorbitant rates. Their detractors—city officials and environmental groups, largely—paint the effort as a takeover attempt in order to score rate decreases for big water users.

Portlanders for Water Reform needs to collect almost 30,000 signatures by January 21 in order to land the measure on the May ballot. Before it can collect signatures, though, two challenges to the initiative's ballot language need to work their way through Multnomah County Circuit Court.

Attorneys are scheduled to meet in court to argue that matter tomorrow morning .

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