A very powerful message encoded in a very clever narrative – it’s all a matter of perspective and choice, isn’t it? If that previous sentence seems a little cryptic – just watch the video titled Lost Generation – I just don’t want to spoil it.
What are you doing now that is making your world, and this world, a better place?
Some posts back, I blogged about Carl Sagan’s insightful and inspiring take on the smallness of mankind in the grand scheme of things – Earth was really just a speck in the universe, and humans are, in turn, specks on this little blue dot.
Here again, is yet another take on the smallness of Man in the grand scheme of Life. A visualization we might all be familiar with – the branches of life zoomed out in each frame to reveal its place and proportion in the overall picture.
And with this perspective, does the further divisions – the artificial divisions that we have erected in our existence – race, nationalities, religion, origins – start to fade away, and perhaps seem somewhat less surmountable?
A bit of amusement for the midweek.
Found this bit of recollection on the Times of India (excerpt below):
And if you did have a phone, it wasn’t necessarily a blessing. I spent my high school years in Calcutta, and i remember that if you picked up your phone, you had no guarantee you would get a dial tone; if you got a dial tone and dialed a number, you had no guarantee you would reach the number you had dialed. Sometimes you were connected to someone else’s ongoing conversation, and they had no idea you were able to hear them; there was even a technical term for it, the ‘cross-connection’ (appropriately, since these were connections that made us very cross). If you wanted to call another city, say Delhi, you had to book a ‘trunk call’ in the morning and then sit by the telephone all day waiting for it to come through; or you could pay eight times the going rate for a ‘lightning call’ which only took half an hour instead of the usual three or four or more to be connected. As late as 1984, when a member of Parliament rose to protest this woeful, appalling performance by a public sector monopoly, the then communications minister replied in a lordly manner that in a developing country, telephones were a luxury, not a right; that the government had no obligation to provide better service; and that if the honorable member was not satisfied with his telephone, he was welcome to return it, since there was an eight-year waiting list for this supposedly inadequate instrument!
Indeed, it’s probably easy to take for granted these infrastructure that have improved communication so drastically – even as we’re now looking at the imminent decline of the phone line as mobile communication and VOIP now makes the fixed-line phone looks somewhat inadequate. Still, some great perspectives!
If you pinch your nose with your fingers, usually it means you smell something awful. If you’re a trader on the floor though, that’d mean ‘Gasoline’ (not too far an association, I might say). An interesting set of hand signs over at New York Times.
There are quite a few bag designs in the series, though I particularly liked how this Square Bag designs by the Dutch design group XS-M-L takes the familiar bag-toting posture on the shoulder, and highlighting it through the kidney-bean shaped opening. A bag to wear and not to carry – interesting! Check out other interesting works too – the site is in Dutch though.
I wonder if this elephant takes freelance work, or if it has a gig on fiverr.
“Real people going on game shows. When we were kids, we’d watch ‘The Price is Right,’ and the contestant would have curlers in her hair — she’d look like your neighbor next door. Real people got a chance to shine. Now, everyone comes out of some stupid mold from a moronic casting director’s idea of what is exciting to watch. All the reality is removed.”
“Dictionaries and encyclopedias. They’ve been replaced with Google, Wikipedia and online dictionaries. It’s been years since I looked at the dictionary or encyclopedia on my family’s bookshelf.”
True blind dates. “In the beginning, courtship on the Internet extended this trend. It was the place where, literally and figuratively, no one knew you were a dog. No longer. Now, if a friend sets you up with someone, and you don’t automatically Google that person, check his or her “relationship” status on Facebook and do a quick vetting via Cheaternews.com (the modern answer to stocks and pillories), one might question if you are really fit to date at all. “
Interesting perspectives on what is lost in each generation – Washington Post Magazine asked experts, celebrities and average Joes to cast their minds back to objects, habits and paradigms that have been left behind just in the past couple of decades. What habits/products/items have you shed?
I’m sure you can recognize the context of these photos, even though they’ve been recreated in LEGO sets – some very interesting photography art by Balakov in his Classics in Lego Flickr set!
(Pic: Ryan Block leads Engadget (left), Brian Lam leads Gizmodo)
If you’re a gadget/design person (like many industrial designers are, I’m sure), you’d certainly have come across Engadget and Gizmodo, the twin titans in the consumer gadgets arena. And if you’re a frequent visitor, you’d certainly also notice a less-than-friendly relationship between the two blogs, as in any good ol’ fashion rivalry, with each blog racing to bring the latest and juiciest in gadget-o-dom. But just how bad (good?) is it?
Wired has a rather comprehensive and interesting look behind the scenes, outlining how much the bloggers do to get an edge over the other. In a battle for online eyeballs lusting for gears, speed and exclusivity is indeed critical – many times it can really boil them to a matter of minutes for one blog to earn the bragging rights for being the first to cover major product releases. Much like high-school fraternity rivalry, perhaps.
Describing the ‘war strategy’ for Gizmodo during the Consumer Electronics Show (the SuperBowl equivalent in Gadget-dom) coverage, for instance:
No wonder Lam has been devising his CES strategy for the past 12 months. As soon as the 2007 show ended, he made a 2008 reservation at the Hilton, the hotel closest to the convention center, to serve as Gizmodo’s war room and “infirmary” for bloggers needing a midday break. He also reserved a block of rooms at the Imperial Palace because it was close to the Las Vegas monorail. That meant his writers could avoid the hour-long taxi lines that have come to define CES. And, of course, Lam expects his staff to sacrifice for their art. “In Thai boxing, the trainers don’t allow their fighters to have sex for two weeks before a match,” whispers Lam, a onetime kickboxer, “and the trainers can tell if they have, because it makes them lazy.” He shakes his head and pokes an accusing finger at one of his bloggers.
Head on for the full article.
