Rolandt

Vancouver Magazine with our shadow boy, looking like he is putting the bed away himself (I'm behind him)

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Allison Cross for an article in Vancouver Magazine about how families are living in Vancouver despite unattainable real estate prices.  What I assumed would be a small quote in a larger article ended up on the cover of the magazine. I'm grateful to be a part of a positive perspective on living in Vancouver.  It's not always easy living in this city but we make choices everyday to stay here.  And these are choices we are proud of. Mainly our choices to live smaller, with less material things and focus on our time and experiences together (as I write this I laugh a little, because with a 2 month old and 3 year old I am not getting a moment alone lately and could REALLY use one [more everyday moments on Instagram @600sqftandababy]. But, despite this crazy season of motherhood, I remained un-swayed in our efforts to live thoughtfully with less). 

Thanks again to journalist Allison Cross, Art Director Paul Roefels and Vancouver Magazine for the feature. Also beaming that they chose to use photos from our friends of Blue Window Creative.

UPDATE: Here's a link to the article online (HERE)

OK, so 2 things:

1. If you send me a CV and they're hired to work on self-driving algos – machine vision/learning/mapping/navigation, I'll pay you a shitton of money. (Details over email.) These teams want CS/math/physics/similar degree with great grades, and they want programming ability. They'll hire quite a lot of people.

2. The position below is for my team and if you refer a CV, I cannot pay you a shitton of money. But:

We're developing an array language that we want to efficiently compile to our in-house accelerators (multiple target architectures, you can think of it as "compiling to a DSP/GPU/FPGA.")

Of recent public efforts, perhaps Halide is the closest relative (we're compiling AOT instead of processing a graph of C++ objects constructed at run time, but I'm guessing the work done at the back-end is somewhat similar.) What we have now is already beating hand-optimized code in our C dialects on some programs, but it's still a "blue sky" effort in that we're not sure exactly how far it will go (in terms of the share of production programs where it can replace our C dialects.)

As usual, we aren't looking for someone with experience in exactly this sort of thing (here especially it'd be hopeless since there are few compiler writers and most of them work on lower-level languages.) Historically, the people who enjoy this kind of work have a background in what I broadly call (mislabel?) "discrete math" -  formal methods, theory of computation, board game AI, even cryptography, basically anywhere where you have clever algorithms in a discrete space that can be shown to work every time. (Heavyweight counter-examples missing one of "clever", "discrete" or "every time" – OSes, rendering, or NNs. This of course is not to say that experience in any of these is disqualifying, just that they're different.)

I think of it as a gig combining depth that people expect from academic work with compensation that people expect from industry work. If you're interested, email me (Yossi.Kreinin@gmail.com).

All positions are in Jerusalem.

Kilburn isn't the nicest place in London, and is somewhere I try best to avoid. If I'm there, you bet it's for a good reason. Unfortunately, I had one recently. I was initially planning to send Nokia my faulty Lumia, but plans changed and I decided to drop it off at my nearest Nokia Care store instead. Kilburn.

As you can see, it's no Apple store. Not in terms of size. Nor location. There was no Genius Bar inside, but one staff behind a counter sporting an unfashionable goatee. A reminder of the 90s. Actually the whole shop felt like a throwback to that decade. Maybe it's a combination of the Nokia brand intertwined with the decade where they ruled.

Once my IMEI number was shared, the bad news came. As I purchased the phone in Dubai when on holiday, my 920 is only under warranty in the United Arab Emirates. You may be surprised to read that this was not news to me; the shop assistant where I bought the phone made this clear. Why did I go ahead with the purchase? Let me explain. At the time, I thought the chances something could go wrong in the short to medium-term were slim to non-existant. This is Nokia after all. I also knew there's a strong possibility that I'd have changed to the 920's successor or the Surface phone before the end of 2013 i.e. I'm not going to own it long enough for this detail to matter. Most importantly, it was unlocked and more than £100 less expensive than if bought in the UK. Still, dumb move.

The friendly (and surprisingly knowledgeable for a non-genius) shopkeeper said I could have it fixed in the UK, but it would most likely require a new screen, which would cost more than £100. I was advised that it's best I send it back to Dubai, and have the problem repaired under warranty. Although mailing the phone from London to Dubai isn't inexpensive, it does cost significantly less than £100. And, so, I sent it back . But, just like my Touch Cover, I'm not brimming with confidence that the returned 920 won't freeze on me again. Watch this space.

We’ve been saying “never forget” for so long that we don’t even know why we’re saying it. At JFK airport, panic over… nothing. On the other side of the country, at LAX, panic over… nothing. As it turns out, if you tell people to be afraid all the time for long enough, it will work. Meanwhile, as always, the greatest danger to Americans, by several orders of magnitude, is each other.

I try to work as hard as I can at not getting cynical. Each year when I observe the anniversary of the attacks, I try to return to my mindset that day. More than anything else, I felt an overwhelming sadness. Not anger, not a desire for revenge, not some intellectual detachment or irony, just sadness. That’s not to say I haven’t moved on; I clearly have, as evidenced by my newfound ability to visit the new World Trade Center or the surrounding complex and have it be just an ordinary part of my day. But it still catches me off guard pretty easily.

It’s hard to explain the perspective of that day in our culture now that everyone under the drinking age is too young to really remember what happened that day, and nearly everyone under the driving age wasn’t even alive at the time. Sometimes it feels like everything has been reduced to meaningless platitudes and reductionist catchphrases and ironic memes. I don’t know how to convey the fact that we could see the towers aflame, smell the smoke, and yet our sadness and grief was even more powerful than our sense of fear or disbelief.

And of course, the ones who literally have forgotten, who publicly ignore the lessons of that day, are the most cynical “leaders” who most sought to profit from it. They ignore that the attacks happened as they did, and deny that we felt as we did when witnessing them, in favor of creating a narrative that only serves their agenda. “Never forget” is the rhetoric of “let me make up a story to suit my aims”.

But I was there that day, and I haven’t forgotten. And the feeling of being in New York City on 9/11 was not about jumping at our own shadows, even though the fighter jets flying overhead did give us a good scare. It was not about being sold on endless cycles of violence and oppression, but of unbelievable, unimaginable kindness and humanity to complete strangers.

I don’t dismiss or deny that so much has gone so wrong in the response and the reaction that our culture has had since the attacks, but I will not forget or diminish the pure openheartedness I witnessed that day. And I will not let the cynicism or paranoia of others draw me in to join them.

What I’ve realized, simply, is that 9/11 is in the past now. In culture it is a story we tell each other, not an event that we witnessed or a moment that we experienced. That was inevitable, I know. But the mythologizing of that day into a narrative that justifies more paranoia, fear, and violence is not an inevitability, and I still will not concede to those who work to do so. I still remember what it felt like.

In Past Years

Each year I write about the attacks on this anniversary, as a means of recording for myself where I am compared to that day. I don’t think I’m saying much that’s profound or original, but it’s a ritual that’s helped me fit those events into my life.

Last year, Fourteen is Remembering

For the first time, I clearly felt like I had put the attacks firmly in the past. They have loosened their grip on me. I don’t avoid going downtown, or take circuitous routes to avoid seeing where the towers once stood. I can even imagine deliberately visiting the area to see the new train station.

In 2014, Thirteen is Understanding:

There’s no part of that day that one should ever have to explain to a child, but I realized for the first time this year that, when the time comes, I’ll be ready. Enough time has passed that I could recite the facts, without simply dissolving into a puddle of my own unresolved questions. I look back at past years, at my own observances of this anniversary, and see how I veered from crushingly sad to fiercely angry to tentatively optimistic, and in each of those moments I was living in one part of what I felt. Maybe I’m ready to see this thing in a bigger picture, or at least from a perspective outside of just myself.

Two years ago, Twelve is Trying:

I thought in 2001 that some beautiful things could come out of that worst of days, and sure enough, that optimism has often been rewarded. There are boundless examples of kindness and generosity in the worst of circumstances that justify the hope I had for people’s basic decency back then, even if initially my hope was based only on faith and not fact. But there is also fatigue. The inevitable fading of outrage and emotional devastation into an overworked rhetorical reference point leaves me exhausted. The decay of a brief, profound moment of unity and reflection into a cheap device to be used to prop up arguments about the ordinary, the everyday and the mundane makes me weary. I’m tired from the effort to protect the fragile memory of something horrific and hopeful that taught me about people at their very best and at their very, very worst.

In 2012, Eleven is What We Make:

These are the gifts our children, or all children, give us every day in a million different ways. But they’re also the gifts we give ourselves when we make something meaningful and beautiful. The new World Trade Center buildings are beautiful, in a way that the old ones never were, and in a way that’ll make our fretting over their exorbitant cost seem short-sighted in the decades to come. More importantly, they exist. We made them, together. We raised them in the past eleven years just as surely as we’ve raised our children, with squabbles and mistakes and false starts and slow, inexorable progress toward something beautiful.

In 2011 for the 10th anniversary, Ten is Love and Everything After:

I don’t have any profound insights or political commentary to offer that others haven’t already articulated first and better. All that I have is my experience of knowing what it mean to be in New York City then. And from that experience, the biggest lesson I have taken is that I have the obligation to be a kinder man, a more thoughtful man, and someone who lives with as much passion and sincerity as possible. Those are the lessons that I’ll tell my son some day in the distant future, and they’re the ones I want to remember now.

In 2010, Nine is New New York:

[T]his is, in many ways, a golden era in the entire history of New York City. Over the four hundred years it’s taken for this city to evolve into its current form, there’s never been a better time to walk down the street. Crime is low, without us having sacrificed our personality or passion to get there. We’ve invested in making our sidewalks more walkable, our streets more accommodating of the bikes and buses and taxis that convey us around our town. There’s never been a more vibrant scene in the arts, music or fashion here. And in less than half a decade, the public park where I got married went from a place where I often felt uncomfortable at noontime to one that I wanted to bring together my closest friends and family on the best day of my life. We still struggle with radical inequality, but more people interact with people from broadly different social classes and cultures every day in New York than any other place in America, and possibly than in any other city in the world. And all of this happened, by choice, in the years since the attacks.

In 2009, Eight Is Starting Over:

[T]his year, I am much more at peace. It may be that, finally, we’ve been called on by our leadership to mark this day by being of service to our communities, our country, and our fellow humans. I’ve been trying of late to do exactly that. And I’ve had a bit of a realization about how my own life was changed by that day. Speaking to my mother last week, I offhandedly mentioned how almost all of my friends and acquaintances, my entire career and my accomplishments, my ambitions and hopes have all been born since September 11, 2001. If you’ll pardon the geeky reference, it’s as if my life was rebooted that day and in the short period afterwards. While I have a handful of lifelong friends with whom I’ve stayed in touch, most of the people I’m closest to are those who were with me on the day of the attacks or shortly thereafter, and the goals I have for myself are those which I formed in the next days and weeks. i don’t think it’s coincidence that I was introduced to my wife while the wreckage at the site of the towers was still smoldering, or that I resolved to have my life’s work amount to something meaningful while my beloved city was still papered with signs mourning the missing.

In 2008, Seven Is Angry:

Finally getting angry myself, I realize that nobody has more right to claim authority over the legacy of the attacks than the people of New York. And yet, I don’t see survivors of the attacks downtown claiming the exclusive right to represent the noble ambition of Never Forgetting. I’m not saying that people never mention the attacks here in New York, but there’s a genuine awareness that, if you use the attacks as justification for your position, the person you’re addressing may well have lost more than you that day. As I write this, I know that parked out front is the car of a woman who works in my neighborhood. Her car has a simple but striking memorial on it, listing her mother’s name, date of birth, and the date 9/11/2001.

In 2007, Six Is Letting Go:

On the afternoon of September 11th, 2001, and especially on September 12th, I wasn’t only sad. I was also hopeful. I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t just Never Forget that we would also Always Remember. People were already insisting that we’d put aside our differences and come together, and maybe the part that I’m most bittersweet and wistful about was that I really believed it. I’d turned 26 years old just a few days before the attacks, and I realize in retrospect that maybe that moment, as I eased from my mid-twenties to my late twenties, was the last time I’d be unabashedly optimistic about something, even amidst all the sorrow.

In 2006, After Five Years, Failure:

[O]ne of the strongest feelings I came away with on the day of the attacks was a feeling of some kind of hope. Being in New York that day really showed me the best that people can be. As much as it’s become cliché now, there’s simply no other way to describe a display that profound. It was truly a case of people showing their very best nature. We seem to have let the hope of that day go, though.

In 2005, Four Years:

I saw people who hated New York City, or at least didn’t care very much about it, trying to act as if they were extremely invested in recovering from the attacks, or opining about the causes or effects of the attacks. And to me, my memory of the attacks and, especially, the days afterward had nothing to do with the geopolitics of the situation. They were about a real human tragedy, and about the people who were there and affected, and about everything but placing blame and pointing fingers. It felt thoughtless for everyone to offer their response in a framework that didn’t honor the people who were actually going through the event.

In 2004, Thinking Of You:

I don’t know if it’s distance, or just the passing of time, but I notice how muted the sorrow is. There’s a passivity, a lack of passion to the observances. I knew it would come, in the same way that a friend told me quite presciently that day back in 2001 that “this is all going to be political debates someday” and, well, someday’s already here.

In 2003, Two Years:

I spent a lot of time, too much time, resenting people who were visiting our city, and especially the site of the attacks, these past two years. I’ve been so protective, I didn’t want them to come and get their picture taken like it was Cinderella’s Castle or something. I’m trying really hard not to be so angry about that these days. I found that being angry kept me from doing the productive and important things that really mattered, and kept me from living a life that I know I’m lucky to have.

In 2002, I wrote On Being An American:

[I]n those first weeks, I thought a lot about what it is to be American. That a lot of people outside of New York City might not even recognize their own country if they came to visit. The America that was attacked a year ago was an America where people are as likely to have been born outside the borders of the U.S. as not. Where most of the residents speak another language in addition to English. Where the soundtrack is, yes, jazz and blues and rock and roll, but also hip hop and salsa and merengue. New York has always been where the first fine threads of new cultures work their way into the fabric of America, and the city the bore the brunt of those attacks last September reflected that ideal to its fullest.

In 2001, Thank You:

I am physically fine, as are all my family members and immediate friends. I’ve been watching the footage all morning, I can’t believe I watched the World Trade Center collapse… I’ve been sitting here this whole morning, choking back tears… this is just too much, too big. I can see the smoke and ash from the street here. I have friends of friends who work there, I was just there myself the day before yesterday. I can’t process this all. I don’t want to.

The Clintons were feted here in the 1990s, but two decades on Hillary Clinton is viewed with cool suspicion. That’s because both the economy and values have moved on, too. Jobs went south to Mexico or east to Asia. Somewhere on the winding road from whites-only bathrooms to choose-your-gender bathrooms, many white, blue-collar Kentucky workers — and the state is 85.1 percent white — feel their country got lost. The F.D.R. Democrats who became Reagan Democrats and then Clinton Democrats could well be November’s Trump Democrats.

America is no longer white enough for that to be decisive, but it is significant. To these people, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is not the empty rhetoric of a media-savvy con artist from Queens but a last-ditch rallying cry for the soul of a changing land where minorities will be the majority by the middle of the century.

Hazard, set in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, is a once bustling town with its guts wrenched out. On Main Street, the skeleton of a mall that burned down last year presents its charred remains for dismal contemplation. Young people with drugged eyes lean against boarded-up walls on desolate streets. The whistle of trains hauling coal, once as regular as the chiming of the hours, has all but vanished. So have the coal trucks spewing splinters of rock that shattered windshields. In the age of cheap natural gas and mountaintop removal mining, a coal town is not where you want to be.

With all the backward-ness around the teaching of grammar at primary school (talk to any primary school teacher, and you’ll see what I mean), and the announcement by the UK Prime Minister that we need more Grammar schools, I had to create this.

I’d love to see educators in charge of UK education. I’m not holding my breath…

The post Wot we need is more grammar schools appeared first on Visual Thinkery.

Things of note for the week ending Sunday 11th September, 2016.

1. 15

Fifteen years ago, I was working at Good Morning Television – aka GMTV – on London’s Southbank (literally five minutes from where my office is now).

Working in TV-land meant there were always TVs on everywhere. Everywhere. The one in my office was above my desk. It was coming up to about 2pm I think when someone said, ‘Oh my God, look’. I looked up, and everyone was looking up above me, at the TV.

We were watching a live feed from New York. I remember seeing the second plane hit, live, and being in shock. We had no idea what we were witnessing.

It’s a small, little known fact but back then, GMTV wasn’t just a TV show. It had its own news team, outside of ITN, Reuters, and the BBC etc. It was its own weird little entity.

Within the next 30mins or so, every news correspondent in the building must’ve come into our office demanding flights to New York. ‘We can’t get them. New York is closed.’ we’d say, and we’d carry on watching the TV. I remember a few days later, those flights finally took place (all except for one savvy correspondent, Lara Logan, who flew the other direction – to Afghanistan – but that’s a whole other story).

There were rumours we were going to be evacuated too. Every tall building was suddenly a target. We were right near Westminster, the building was filled with media / news etc… we were surely next.

The brain does funny things in crisis.

Waking up on the 12th was the first time I woke up feeling afraid. Terrorism was something I’d read about / barely remembered from the days of the IRA etc. The world was – and still is – a very different place.

This morning, Sunday September 11th, I woke up, made my son breakfast, drank some coffee and read this account of the movements of Air Force One by those that were either onboard or simply encountering her on that day. A long, sobering piece that you should find the time to read today.

Really.

I wept when I finished it.

A horrid, horrid day.

One that will never be forgotten.

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Hard to follow that.

I’m just going to publish what I’ve gathered this week below with no changes.

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2. WHEN INFINITY GETS BORING (+ PS4 PRO STUFF)

Another week, another post/link/comment about No Man’s Sky (I think this might turn into a general gamery section actually – there are a few other bits to cover off).

New Scientists has published the above named article this week. Quote:

“All of the screenshots that came out to promote the game were phenomenally beautiful. But of course these shots were hand-picked to show the best that the game could produce. Not every world looks like that – and you don’t see such variety when moving from one planet to the next. You need to explore a lot of worlds to find those interesting places. But after a number of them –  20 or 50, wherever your threshold lies – the thrill of planet hopping fades.”

And, in all fairness, I think they have a point. I’m still playing – dipping in and out, trying to find the perfect ship etc – but it’s just a a grind now and I’m not enjoying it as much as before. I’ve decided to put it back on the shelf for the interim and wait for the next content update.

That said, the game is deeply tranquil and it is still quite enjoyable to just go and fly around for a bit, and find different materials etc… well, we’ll see. But my play-time has definitely dropped off.

Also this week: the PS4 Pro was announced.

The lack of a UHD Blu-Ray player onboard seems like a real misstep for me and was super close to being a deal-breaker. But then two things happened: first, my buddy, Matt pointed out that if anybody has any clear visibility on how well 4K blu-rays are selling, then it’s Sony. It might not be cost effective to put a high-end player in this machine if the whole world is going digital… and I think he might be right. The second thing (also via Matt) was that I watched this 4K Horizon: Zero Dawn gameplay trailer via the 4K YouTube app on my Sony TV – AND IT LOOKS RIDICULOUS. Honestly, if you’re reading this on your phone, then just add that trailer to your YouTube Watch Later list and find a way to see it at the highest quality available… it’s immense.

Can I justify a new machine right now? No, probably not. Especially with PSVR around the corner. Can I campaign my family and friends to get me GAME vouchers for my birthday and Christmas and put them towards this machine? Probably yes.

So let’s see.

PS. If you’re unsure about the PS4 Pro, Kotaku has a good take that’s worth reading.

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3. NEW PHONE TIME OF YEAR

I’m considering a new phone. My Sony Z5 broke and I managed to lay my hands on a Huawei (wah-way) P9 which is really, really impressing me.

It may still be a contender.

If you’re considering a new phone here are two things that might be of interest. One: I asked Twitter what phone I should get – here is what it said. Two: I asked Stefan – my podcasting partner in crime – which phone I should get on Episode 178 of The Voicemail and you can listen to that here.

Hope that’s useful.

Related: this made me laugh.

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4. DUREX EMOJI

The Durex Eggplant emoji flavour story was pretty big this week but my favourite take on it comes from Fast Co Create:

“Last year the brand launched a campaign for a condom emoji, to give young people a way to talk about safe sex that didn’t involve actual words. However, the condom wasn’t added to the the Unicode Consortium’s official emoji alphabet, so the brand may have found the perfect troll to protest the decision. While the new flavor is still just a concept, the brand’s campaign for a safe-sex emoji continues. Until then, feel free to just use an eggplant + balloon.”

Good quick reading.

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5. MCDONALD’S + ADVERTISING

You may or not be aware but apparently McDonald’s has just appointed itself an ‘agency of the future‘ model, via Omnicom. If you know everything or if you know nothing about this, these two opposing views on the news are well worth your time.

• Mark Ritson (for)
• Ad Contrarian (against)]

I must admit, I’m closer to the contrarian…

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6. NEW IPHONE THIS WEEK

Unsurprisingly, The Register was not invited. I’ve had my fair share of run ins with them but, that aside, I had to doff my hat to this epic trolling of Apple’s comms team.

Made me chuckle.

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7. CIALDINI’S 7TH

Familiar with Cialdini’s six six principles of influence? You should be.

Apparently he’s adding a seventh.

Details here.

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Bonuses this week are as follows:

• Here is an exceptional rant on Silicon Valley only choosing to solve the hard problems that it wants to solve.
• When you change the world and no one notices.
• Ach.
• Don’t tell me how to hold my phone.

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Right, I’m outta here.

Courtesy of Tweedeck

Reply to this post

Project Titan suddenly looks more sensible. 

• I think that the scaling back of Apple’s ambitions to produce an electric car heralds the realisation that making a car is much more difficult than it sounds and that a vehicle was never going to work for Apple financially.
• The change of guard at Project Titan earlier this year appears to have gone hand in hand with a change in strategy that has resulted in around 50 people leaving the project.
• I understand that the focus is no longer to produce a vehicle but to focus on some of the underlying systems as well as autonomous driving.
• I think that this means that Apple will work on two areas.
  • First: Infotainment.
  • I have long been of the opinion that an in-car infotainment system makes much more sense for Apple than to make the entire vehicle (see here).
  • This is because the infotainment unit is where the car will intersect with all of Apple’s other products and where Apple’s key strengths are by far the most relevant.
  • Furthermore, Apple might just be able to make 40% gross margins on the infotainment unit whereas it will be almost impossible to show this kind of profitability on brake pads, wheels, pressed aluminium and so on.
  • Failure to produce a product with high gross margins is likely to have very serious implications for Apple’s already lowly valuation.
  • This why I still believe that if Apple is going to launch any hardware for the auto, it will be an infotainment unit.
  • The problem with this strategy is that, Apple will have to get the automakers to play along, all of whom, have become increasingly wary with regards to Apple and especially Google over the last 9 months.
  • Second: Autonomous driving
  • While this is a hotbed of investment at the moment, I struggle to see why Apple should be a leader in this field.
  • RFM research indicates that a successful autonomous driving offering is likely to require a combination of skills and assets.
  • These are: a very high quality map, many millions of miles driven and first class artificial intelligence to control the vehicle.
  • Combine this with the huge issues I see with the regulatory environment (see here) as well as liability (see here)and I think it will be a very long time indeed before this is in the mass market.
  • Furthermore, I do not see Apple as a leader in any of these skills, leaving Google way out front with Baidu leading in China.
  • Uber, HERE and most of the auto makers are all working on this but I suspect that it will be Google that gets there first.
• Consequently, from a pragmatic standpoint, the likelihood of Project Titan reviving Apple’s growth sometime in the next 5 years looks to be extremely remote which is what I suspect prompted this rethink.
• This leaves the dilemma for Apple unchanged in that there is nothing on the horizon likely to restore growth in the short to medium term.
• For long-term value investors, I continue to think that there is substantial value to be had in Apple shares but for the short-term I continue to prefer Microsoft, Baidu and Samsung.

Rumor has it that Microsoft will stop selling Lumias by the end of the year. Time to remember the big party in Abu Dhabi.

It was 2013, I was using the brilliant Lumia 1020 phone with the 41 megapixel camera. I had an iPhone 5, but I preferred the Lumia by a long shot. After having the Nokia World in London for a couple of stints, there were rumors about an event in New York, but eventually Nokia sent out invitations to Abu Dhabi. This is were we all realized this would be the big farewell party, before the smartphone business would be taken over by Microsoft.

If you have never been to the Emirates, this is a very strange place. Everything is brand new and shiny, it's incredibly cheap to get there, and you can stay in 5 star hotels for very reasonable rates. And it feels even more fake than Las Vegas.

So we gathered in Abu Dhabi and Nokia went out with a bang. A 6 inch Lumia 1520, when Apple was still thinking 4 inch were big. And the magnificent 2520 tablet with its gorgeous display. As we know today, both were running the wrong software. Microsoft fumbled Windows RT, and they set out for a third restart of their Windows Phone offering. Everything they made after the 1520/2520 was lackluster.

Yesterday I looked through my Abu Dhabi photos and I noticed that I was carrying a Lenovo Yoga 11 from 2012. Windows RT as well. I dragged it out of storage, dusted it off, reset the system to factory conditions and let Microsoft patch it. 100+ updates and multiple reboots later, it works just like it did in 2013. A very clean Windows RT 8.1 experience that still had the charms when swiping from the right.

At the time we did not know why Nokia was releasing a competing tablet to Microsoft's Surface line, but they did it anyway. And it was beautiful. Two years later Microsoft would release the last of their Lumia flagships, and they were not.

I miss bits of it (like the old Finder), but it’s amazing to think that people are still using OS 9 to this day, and utterly flabbergasting to read about how they’re still doing it.

Peter Byrne, Nautilus, Sept 14, 2016

I read Bas C. van Fraassen's The Scientific Image (248 page PDF) not too long after it came out. I had been studying the positivists in depth and while the rejection of positivism (and consequent embrace of continentalism and existentialism) was all the rage, I found in van Fraassen the essence of what I considered the right response to the positivists (which did not involve rejecting empirism). van Fraassen's approach, called 'constructive empiricism', asserted  that "science is a large scale, human enterprise and we need boundaries to determine what we can say is true or not about the world around us. Empiricism is a stance, a pragmatic attitude that is self-constrained by what I call 'bridled irrationality.' That means that the data itself restricts what is rational to believe about the world; it creates a boundary." van Fraassen is one of the towering figures of 20th century philosophy, and this interview is well worth a read.

I went to the World Trade Center yesterday… to get my son’s mac fixed.

The strange normalcy of walking into an Apple store only steps away from hallowed ground presented me with a set of mixed feelings, highlighting that life moves on but the scars still exist. Last year, I talked about a return to normalcy. But truth be told, that return is still only a surface one for most of us.

For the first time in nearly 15 years, I returned to a part of New York I had not visited. Tentatively, over memorial day, I tried to make it to the WTC memorial, a place where I hoped I could grieve and relieve. But while intellectually, time has passed, being there brought feelings that were long buried. I am not proud of the fact that I could not spend more than 10 minutes there, the pain overtaking my body still so intense after all those years.

In an odd parallel, I found myself visiting the Pompeii and Herculaneum ruins on the day of the most recent Italian earthquake. On the one hand, 9/11 was human made and what happened in Italy came from nature but in either case, no one saw things coming. In Herculaneum, skeletons remain, 2000 years in repose, waiting for the storm to pass; In New York, only the ground and the memories remain.

Every year, those of us who were affected may choose to take pause but for a new generation, 9/11 is a part of history, as far removed from their reality as is Pompeii or some other man-made or nature-made disaster. It’s been said that outside of your neurons and your central nervous system, every cell in your body gets replaced every 7-10 years. The cells powering memories and the nerves that got those of us who were there through these terrible days are the only things that remain of those days. That, and the wheels of commerce that sat under the world trade center and are now back only a few paces away.

In Memoriam

Car­los Dominguez, Mark Ellis, Melissa Vin­cent, Michael DiPasquale, Cyn­thia Giugliano, Jeremy Glick, David Hal­der­man, Steve Wein­berg, Ger­ard Jean Bap­tiste, Tom McCann, David Vera.

This post is part of a continuing series in which I remember those I knew who were lost on that day. Here are the previous years: 2015,  2014,  2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, and 2002. For context, you might want to read The day after, which is about as raw as one can get about that day as I wrote that piece less than 36 hours after the first plane hit. This is the longest series I’ve ever written and I expect to continue yearly until I can no longer write.

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My book publishes tomorrow. This is the first book I’ve written without coauthors and a company behind me. How did I get here? Why a book on  this topic? I received 10,000 press releases in my 20 years at Forrester. I estimate that 2% of those had any relevance at all. In the ones that … Continued

The post Writing Without Bullshit: How I got here appeared first on without bullshit.

Christian Thompson, Lamenting the Flowers, from the We Bury Our Own series, 2012. C-print on Fuji Pearl Metallic paper. Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. © Christian Thompson

A recent exhibition at the Harvard Art Museum set out to change how we view and contextualize Australian Indigenous art—not as relics of the past, but as contemporary, internationally relevant contributions. Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, was guest curated by Stephen Gilchrist, an associate lecturer of art history at the University of Sydney. As an Indigenous Australian himself, of the Yamatji people of the Inggarda language group of Western Australia, Gilchrist shaped the exhibition with an insider’s perspective, hoping to broaden some minds in the process.

“I think people are surprised by the diversity—that there’s more to Indigenous art than just dots and bark painting,” he shared in an interview.

Emily Kam Kngwarray, Anwerlarr angerr (Big yam), 1996. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. © Emily Kam Kngwarray / © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VISCOPY, Australia.

The title of the exhibition references a term coined by Australian anthropologist William Stanner to illustrate Indigenous people’s circular conceptualization of time, which weaves together past, future, and present. The show asks visitors “to think about time from an Indigenous perspective, to consider how it is marked, observed, and sensed,” writes Gilchrist in a museum announcement.

Many of the 70 works on view had never been shown outside Australia until now, offering a panorama of themes that revolve around nature, transformation, belonging, and memory, and comment on colonial oppression and ecological matters. To set alongside the contemporary works, historical objects were pulled from the collections of Harvard’s Peabody Museum and the Met—objects whose makers remain anonymous, and thus speak to the dehumanizing practices of early collectors, who rarely recorded names.

Stephen Gilchrist in front of Vernon Ah Kee’s many lies (2004), during preparation for the exhibition. © Vernon Ah Kee. Photo: Kris Snibbe/Harvard University, © President and Fellows of Harvard College

“Many of the narratives that we have inherited from art and social history are at the very least incomplete. The exhibition is about time, but it is equally about power and who gets to claim it,” comments Gilchrist. “Indigenous people are not merely from the past. We are couriers and keepers of what has been, what is, and what could be.”

The exhibition advances our understanding of these works from a technical standpoint: In preparing for the show, conservation scientists mapped the elemental composition of traditional bark paintings, comparing them to various ochre samples collected while touring Indigenous art centers in Australia—many of which have since been added to the Forbes Pigment Collection.

Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Two Women Dreaming, 1990. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © The artist licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency Ltd

View of the Seasonality-themed gallery in the exhibition. Photo: Harvard Art Museums, © President and Fellows of Harvard College

Julie Gough, Dark Valley, Van Diemen’s Land, 2008—a “necklace” that hangs in the shape of Tasmania and is made of Tasmanian Fingal Valley coal. (Other materials include nylon, Northern Midlands Tasmanian dropped antlers, and Tasmanian oak.) Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Photo: AGNSW © Julie Gough/Courtesy of the Artist and Bett Gallery

Everywhen wraps up at the Harvard Art Museums, on September 18. But if time is a circle, then maybe this isn’t really the end.

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Images courtesy the artist

In an artwork sure to be used as a metaphor by every acid-dropping, mushroom-gobbling psychonaut on the web, Spanish muralist Okuda San Miguel has coated an entire train in Kiev with his trademark geometric technicolor artwork. Human faces and dancing animals add a splash of color to the Ukrainian city's railyards and train stations, making a statement that is both beautiful and political. "This train is part of a cry for freedom most of the country has been screaming lately," Okuda tells The Creators Project of his colorful throwback to illegally tagging trains in his youth.

"I've painted trains before, but those had a very different feeling. This time it is something special that the intervention on the trains is going to last longer, especially in a country like Ukraine," Okuda says. "Back in the day, the illegal side of painting trains was a spur, but when you painted a train you knew it would take a while to remove the piece. Nowadays, with new technologies, you can paint a train today and it will be 'clean' tomorrow."

An organization called ArtUnitedUs made Okuda's intervention in the Ukranian capital possible, but this is far from his first transformation of a large locomotive. Earlier this year, he drenched a big rig in polygonal characters as part of The Truck Art Project. When he's not painting trains and trucks, Okuda seems to have a fixation on holy architetecture, plastering his iconography on a Moroccan chapel and a cathedral-turned-skate park. 

His murals on the Kiev metro system are divided into 10 pieces spread across five cars. Check out the whole set in the imagery below.

See more of Okuda San Miguel's art on his website.

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New York, N.Y., September 21, 2001 — Rescue crews work to clear debris from the site of the World Trade Center. Photo by Michael Rieger/ FEMA News Poto - Location: New York, NY Photo via

Fifteen years after surviving the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Fritz Koenig’s bronze Sphere for Plaza Fountain is returning to the World Trade Center site this year. The sculpture, which remained standing as buildings crashed to the earth around it, is a monument to resilience and remembrance. Koenig’s work acquired a patina of history. Scarred, scorched, and dented, it is still beautiful, reminding people to “never forget.” 

Many enduring works of art resonate because of their survival, their past imbuing them with meaning beyond the artist’s intent. Sculptures from the Bronze Age exist today primarily because they weathered disasters. “If one knows the history, say that a statue was on a ship carrying bronze as scrap, and that it survives only because the ship sank before reaching the furnace, that adds extra poignancy. As does knowledge that it comes from, say, Pompeii or Herculaneum, where Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, paradoxically destroying and preserving those cities,” says Dr. Kenneth Lapatin, curator of antiquities at the Getty Museum.

Installation view of two statues of Apollo (courtesy of Musée du Louvre and the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Pompeii, Ercolano e Stabia) in “Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World.” Photo via

Countless works of art disappeared throughout millennia. “A monument like the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis is today a hollow shell of what it once was. The temple was emptied of its treasures in late antiquity, converted into a church, then a mosque, and then blown up during the siege of Athens in 1687. What we have today are the remains of a long historical process,” Dr. Lapatin says.

“When you’re an archaeologist or conservator, that’s what you see when you look at these works. You see history a certain way, essentially inscribed in them,” archaeologist Dr. Michael D. Danti tells The Creators Project. Art besieged throughout the centuries is once again under attack throughout the Middle East, however, and Dr. Danti is part of a task force striving to protect cultural sites in Iraq and Syria in partnership with the U.S. Department of State.

Destruction of the Baalshamin Temple (ISIL social media; August 24, 2015) Photo via

“When the Palmyra museum was threatened by the invasion of the Islamic State, Syrian antiquities workers spent three days loading trucks to get the material to a safe location, but a lot of stuff was immobile and had to be left behind, including mummies. When ISIS invaded, they immediately began destroying or stealing artifacts, and antiquities workers were killed during that evacuation. They risked a lot to do that,” Dr. Danti says. He describes these men and women as modern day Monuments Men, comparing them to Allied soldiers fighting to save art from the Nazis during WWII.

TriumphalArch in Palmyra (Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums; January 15, 2013) photo via

Terrorist factions in the Middle East routinely target cultural heritage sites, a practice of cultural cleansing Dr. Danti calls a form of genocide. “We believe that cultural rights are fundamental. Access to heritage and the right to participate in culture is a universal right,” he says. “What troubles me most is the potential for a complete break with the past. Whole landscapes are being reshaped and that changes your perception of the past and the way cultural memory is encoded and interpreted.” Restitution efforts from WWII continue today, and Dr. Danti says repairing damage in the Middle East is a Sisyphean task, considering the factors at play. “What’s the future of that monument? Who should rebuild it? Who has the right to rebuild it? Who should pay for rebuilding? And if it’s rebuilt what does it mean?” he asks.

As in the case of Koenig’s sphere, when art is spared, it becomes a powerful vessel for history. “I believe we’re constantly being shaped by and reinterpreting these things,” Dr. Danti says. “The World Trade Center is a perfect example. People bring expectations, they experience the site, and are changed. Over time perceptions are transformed, just as the site itself is transformed again and again and again.”

Temple of Bel (Michael Danti; 2010) Photo via

You can read reports about the status of historical monuments in the Middle East here, courtesy of Michael Danti’s team at ASOR Cultural Heritage Initiatives. BBC Radio 4 also produces Museum of Lost Objects, a podcast tracing the stories of antiquities and cultural sites destroyed or looted in Iraq and Syria.

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Ýr hangs the knits featured in Sweater Story from a tree outside the exhibition space. Photo: Art Bicnick at Reykjavík Grapevine. All images courtesy of the artist

It might be fashion week in New York City, but the most adorable knitwear collection in the world may have just been unveiled in a Reykjavík basement. Icelandic fiber artist Ýr Jóhannsdóttir spins a whimsical tale of amorous sweaters in a series of knits she calls Sweater Story, which opened recently at EKKISENS in Reykjavík. As Ýr tells The Creators Project, “Sweater Story is a simple story about two sweaters meeting in a pile of clothes one night at a bar downtown.”   

Although there are only two sweaters in the narrative, Ýr created several different pairs of sweaters to illustrate the changes that take place between the sweaters at different points in their relationship. “We get to see the sweaters reactions to meeting each other and their intense emotions, one gets confused and laughs way too much, while the other travels inwards looking for answers. After laughing too much, the sweater starts to dismantle, meanwhile the other one begins brainstorming. In the state of dismantlement it tries to get a grip on itself, at the same time the other sweater, having found the answer with the help of sweater science, shreds itself into its core threads. Following the unspoken agreement, the sweater picks up its pieces and the other rips itself into trillions of sweater molecules. Challenging fate, the sweaters of Sweater Story find the perfect way to live happily ever after, combining into a whole new sweater with the advantage of having long, pink sleeve-tongues to make out for eternity."

The story begins:"We get to see the sweaters reactions to meeting each other and their intense emotions.”

“One gets confused and laughs way too much, while the other travels inwards looking for answers.”

Ýr employs various techniques to create her remarkable garments. Sometimes the artist starts with old sweaters—"Then I make most of the decorations by hand, with knitting and embroidery,” explains Ýr. Other times, she makes an entire sweater from scratch using a hand-operated knitting machine. Once she’s knitted all the pieces of the sweater, she stitches them together, adding hand-knit and embroidered details to create the motif.

The 950i Brother knitting machine that Ýr uses to make her sweaters

Along with the sweaters that illustrate Sweater Story, Ýr created a postcard book “where the story is explained and photographs of each sweater fills every page.” Each of the photos feature the two sweaters that are involved in each scene in the story. In the last photo, the final sweater appears twice, one image shows off its “long, pink sleeve-tongues,” and the other depicts the sleeves entwined with each other to demonstrate how the sweater can “make out for eternity.”

The Sweater Story postcard book

“After laughing too much, the sweater starts to dismantle, meanwhile the other one begins brainstorming.”

“In the state of dismantlement it tries to get a grip on itself, at the same time the other sweater, having found the answer with the help of sweater science, shreds itself into its core threads.”

“Following the unspoken agreement, the sweater picks up its pieces and the other rips itself into trillions of sweater molecules.”

For Ýr, there’s a story behind every sweater, and the story doesn’t end when we’re done wearing it; each garment has a life of its own.

“Before every sweater arrived to you, the material and process comes from all over the world, touched by many hand by different people having all sorts of days. You put it into a closet and wear it depending on the time of year and the occasion. Even when you get separated its story just keeps on going with an unknown ending.”

Ýr created an animated GIF of the final sweater to illustrate the final lines of Sweater Story: “Challenging fate, the sweaters of Sweater story find the perfect way to live happily ever after, combining into a whole new sweater with the advantage of having long, pink sleeve-tongues to make out for eternity.” 

You can see more of Ýr Jóhannsdóttir’s work on her website, and keep on eye on her knitwear label called Ýrúrarí on her Instagram.

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John Provenzano, All photos: © Robert Torres for Celebrity Series of Boston. All images courtesy Celebrity Series of Boston

Sixty pianos, painted in full regalia by 60 artists, will flood the streets of Boston and nearby Cambridge when the instruments make their debut as playable art late-September.

Beckoning for passersby to “Play Me, I’m Yours,” the street-wise pianos are outfitted with each artist’s original design and aesthetic. All of the artists applied for the opportunity to decorate a piano, and most of this year’s contributors are new to the project. The creatives hail from a plethora of different disciplines and experience levels, and many have other professions besides creating art. An editorial assistant at a local publication contributes a piece; while a professor of chemistry runs with the unconventional opportunity to embellish a piano.

Howie Green

Jeanette Staley

Karyn Alzayer

The Street Pianos Boston series is production of Celebrity Series of Boston, an organization which brings art and performance to the community.

Watch a short montage of every piano located around Boston:

To find the exact location of each Street Piano, visit the project’s website. The pianos will be on view and available to the public September 23–October 10, 2016.

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Rory Capern, managing director of Twitter Canada, recently stated in an interview that there is “tremendous growth potential” for the social platform in Canada, which has already been noted as one of the company’s top ten markets.

Apart from bringing on new talent, such as Jennifer Hollett and Laura Pearce, Twitter rolled out new features for its 300 million users, namely the ability to watch live professional sports within your feed.

Twitter has already established itself as a great resource to understand what’s happening at a global or national level, but it seems now the company is making a push for local awareness.

Twitter Canada is part of an infrastructure investment that will see a new engineering department created in its Canadian HQ in Toronto. The goal for the team is to have a deeper understanding of where Twitter users are located, so their experience with content is localized.

In addition, because local content provides the company sensitive information, specifically location and time, Twitter will also enable tools safeguard the privacy of your location.

Leading this effort is software engineer Kyle Galloway, who is currently based in New York but will be moving to Toronto.

“Adding Kyle and a geo-engineering team to our Toronto office is another big investment that Twitter is making in Canada as a market. In recent months, we’ve been spending more time within the local tech community, having conversations with talent at all levels and hosting events at our office. With Kyle coming aboard and more engineering talent joining us soon, our roots in the Canadian tech community will become even deeper,” said Capern in a statement to MobileSyrup.

However, always lingering in the background are concerns over safety. Twitter is rumoured to be planning a tool to filter out harassment through keywords. This would essentially remove tweets that contain a specific set of keywords and allow users to block swear words, racial slurs, and go beyond just blocking account owners.

Twitter now has 50 employees in Canada and the engineering team is currently hiring Data Scientist and a  Software Engineer.

Related: Twitter Canada’s new boss says country is top ten market, sees ‘tremendous growth potential’

Both The Verge and ZDNet have reportedly heard from sources that at least one new Surface all-in-one PC will be unveiled in late October at an event held in New York City.

The device is expected to be one of three Surface-branded all-in-ones rumoured to be set for launch this year. An earlier report from Windows Central stated the company was testing out three screen sizes: a Full HD 21-inch, and a 24-inch and 27-inch display with a 4K resolution.

Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet reports the device is known internally as ‘Cardinal’ and “could be positioned as a product that can turn your desk into ‘a studio.'”

The veteran Microsoft reporter also notes that the expected Surface Book 2 and Surface Pro 5 aren’t likely to be revealed until spring 2017, while a purported Surface Phone could arrive much later.

Related: Refreshed Surface Book could revamp fulcrum hinge, Surface ‘All-in-One’ in the works

Tony Valente sent on a pic from SeaBus on the morning of the Gran Fondo Whistler, as North Shore cyclists take advantage of transit to get to the downtown starting line:

Looks like about a 50:50 gender balance too.

Logos by the author

The Commodore 64 home computer is remembered, amongst its many nostalgic admirers, as a great 8-bit system for gaming and even music production. The computer is also fondly remembered for the distinctive bitmap fonts of its video games.

This colorful 8-bit typography has been resurrected by new media researcher Stijn Peeters in the form of C64 Charset Logo Generator. Users simply choose a font and enter the logo text, and the generator does the rest, though users can also tweak the bitmap colors. 

Numbers, however, cannot be entered into the generator. Peeters says that C64 Charset Logo Generator is open-source, and inspired by several other coders and researchers. Peeters ported the original tool written in PHP using gd by Chris ‘Cupid’ Heilmann. The charset ripping and credit research was done by Dejan 'Nucleus' Petronijevic, while the cleanup and transparency was added by Daniel 'Deekay' Kottmair.

Those who want to add to the open-source project are encouraged to check out the project’s Github page.

Click here to see more of Stijn Peeters’ work.

Via Boing Boing

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Jerry Whitehead did this small mural in a most unlikely location — the back wall of a parking lot under a small commercial building. In the alley near 8th and Ontario.

Jerry Whitehead — 2006

The Economist delves into building really big things out of wood.

New techniques mean that wood can now be used for much taller buildings. A handful are already going up in cities around the world. The 14-storey Treet block of flats in Bergen, Norway, is currently the tallest. But Brock Commons, an 18-storey wooden dormitory at the University of British Columbia in Canada, is due to be completed in 2017. That is when construction is expected to begin on the 21-storey Haut building in Amsterdam. Arup, a firm of engineering consultants working on the project, says it will be built using sustainable European pine. Some architects have even started designing wooden skyscrapers, like the proposed Tratoppen (“the treetop” illustrated above), a 40-floor residential tower on the drawing-board in Stockholm.

. . . Anders Berensson, the Swedish architect who designed Tratoppen, believes engineered wood will become the cheapest way to construct tall buildings in the future. Another benefit of the material, he says, is the ability to carve the wood readily. In his current design the number of each floor is cut into the building’s exterior.

. . . One big obstacle to this wooden renaissance is regulation. Building codes vary around the world. In America cities can restrict wooden buildings to five or six storeys (about the height of a fire engine’s ladder). Exemptions can be made, however, and proponents of wood are hoping that as taller timber buildings emerge, city planners will adjust the rules. If they do, an old-fashioned branch of architecture might enjoy a revival.

From the New York Times: 

A Glorified Sidewalk, and the Path to Transform Atlanta.

ATLANTA — Could this traffic-clogged Southern city, long derided as the epitome of suburban sprawl, really be discovering its walkable, bike-friendly, density-embracing, streetcar-riding, human-scale soul?

The answer is evident in the outpouring of affection that residents here have showered on the Atlanta BeltLine, which aims to convert 22 miles of mostly disused railway beds circling the city’s urban core into a biking and pedestrian loop, a new streetcar line, and a staggeringly ambitious engine of urban revitalization.

A man crossed an overpass above the undeveloped south side of Atlanta’s BeltLine. Only a fraction of the project has been completed so far.

It’s not just the battery in the Galaxy Note 7 that is having issues as Health Canada has officially recalled the Hype Roam Electric Self-Balancing Scooter, which is known these days as the common hoverboard.

While no incidents have been reported of the hoverboard catching fire and exploding, Health Canada notes, “the lithium-ion battery packs in the self-balancing scooters can overheat, posing a risk of the products smoking, catching fire and/or exploding.”

In total, there are approximately 650 units affected, which were sold exclusively at Bed Bath & Beyond stores across Canada. The model number are 888255159342; 888255159328; and 888255159304.

If you have one of these gems, Hype states you can connect with them and arrange for a repair or replacement.