Edison said, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Lasse Gjertsen from Norway, decided that he’d like to (at least seem to be able to) play the piano and the drums. The normal person’s way to do it through Edison’s motto would be: to learn the instruments and practice like there’s no tomorrow. Lasse decided that he’d pay his perspiration dues in another way – massively timeline-editing clips of him playing the instruments. No matter how music-dumb you are, you can definitely hit just one note. And if you edit the clips of various notes together, voila, you get music!
Here is the world’s most valuable brands for 2006 according to a study done by BusinessWeek. I have sorted and presented them according to the relative magnitude of their brand value – the area of each circle represents the worth of the brand within.
Once put on a chart like this, it is very easy to notice the relative (and rapidly diminishing) worth of brands down the list. Some of the brands that I grew up with, or are very familiar with, are hardly visible when compared to behemoths like Coca-Cola and Microsoft.
While brands are intangible, their worth are far from trivial. Little circles may not show them clearly, but the worth of the top ten brands (almost $400 billion) would eclipse the Gross Domestic Product (PPP) of the world’s 80 poorest countries ($350billion). Or perhaps another way to illustrate it – if we place the country’s GDP within the brand-chart, Kuwait’s entire economy would sit just about where GE is now; meanwhile, Iceland would be as difficult to spot as UPS; and Brunei can snuggle comfortably with MTV (bottom left corner, smallest circle).
Juggling – well someone throws stuff up the air, catches them again, and again, and again. Most of the time it’s the same old same old: the variations are usually either in the props used (clubs, balls, knifes, etc.), as the spectators become more awed as the number of props increase. But there’s little surprise. So how do you break out of this mold?
The answer by Greg Kennedy was simple – make a mold and put yourself in it! He ‘juggles’ inside an transparent, inverted cone in the video above. In other routines, he also juggles with other geometrical shapes – perhaps inspired by his background as a professional engineer. He’d really need to spice up his performance with some cool music though. Right now, it’s just monotonous, hypnotic sound from the rolling of the balls that sounds more like someone blowing directly into the microphone.
With game control and typing right under your thumbs at all times, the Texter™ is for anyone who needs to enter text while playing their videogames or simply wants to chat online. It’s for online gamers who need to message with their buddies and enemies. It’s great for Xbox Live Chat. It’s perfect for entering cheat codes. Use the Texter™ anywhere you would normally use a USB keyboard or an on-screen keyboard.
If your life revolves around gaming consoles like the PlayStation and Xbox, and you use them for typing games (?!), you can consider getting this plug-in: Blueorb Texter.
Its mannerism is the SMS equivalent for gaming controllers. Alphabets and numbers are assigned colors, based on sectors of the circle around the joysticks. In the example above, to scream “WOOT” at others in Xbox online, you’d have to execute the super combo: L-Up R-Right, L-Left R-down, L-Left R-down, L-Right R-RightDiagonal.
While it may sound too complicated to be useful, there may just be the day where someone would set a world record twirling their joysticks spelling “The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.” (official text of World Speediest SMS) in 40 seconds flat.
What is this? You might guess that it’s perhaps an illustration from a children’s book. Well as fake as it looks, it’s a real picture of a real hotel room – the only reason it’s so comical looking is: an artist had hand-drawn thin black lines around the edges of walls, cupboards, corners etc, so it looks really fake.
This is just one room out of the many interestingly decorated rooms in Art Hotel Berlin. They invited a different artist for each of their rooms, resulting in about 50 unique interior. This one shown above is one of the better ones in my opinion: there are many others which still couldn’t shake off the look of a typical hotel room – they were just adorned by some installation or display art pieces.
Are you a god in design, and command (salary) like a king? Check out Coroflot.
Pictured above is the average pay of designers from each country adjusted for purchasing power parity using the Big Mac Index. Meaning, if you’re a designer in Hong Kong, you could really purchase a lot of twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonionsonasesameseedbun with your monthly dough. If you’re in Spain, maybe tapas would be a better choice…
Alessi, one of the icons in product design, may remind you simply of extremely over-priced lemon squeezers. This year, however, they’ve decided to re-categorize their products into three branches – the Alessi main collection , ‘A di Alessi’ (Italian for from Alessi), which are designs that are priced at a lower price bracket , and ‘Officina Alessi’ which houses the more experimental, innovative and limited edition pieces.
Alessi’s decision to launch the ‘democratic, accessible products’ under the ‘A di Alessi’ marque spurred me into thinking – why? Alessi had enjoyed the status of being one of the most prominent “designer products” especially to the non-designers, and they have been able to capitalize on that for many years, leading to a perception where designer products are generally fun, whimsical, sometimes useless, etc.
That status, however, is being eroded. With introduction of players like Target and IKEA, mass-produced and very cheap products have shown their potential to be well-designed (or at least look good). In that way, Alessi was invaded on its home turf. The average person would likely not be able to distinguish plastic products from IKEA and Alessi – except that Alessi probably priced it 10 times higher. And that’s where Alessi’s relevance to the mass consumers may diminish and eventually erode its own brand base.
The pot above is by Jasper Morrison, heading off this year’s inaugural launch of A di Alessi. However, I have come to associate these design styles with brands like IKEA more than Alessi. While Alessi may gain some market share in the cheaper, mass-design products, I think it may eventually fare worse in terms of loss brand equity.
You can’t get rich by working
And love doesn’t last forever
In the public sauna they never ask
If it’s ok to throw water on the stove
Old forests are cut down and turned into toilet paper
And still all the toilets are always out of paper
Why products on sale drive the people crazy?
In the middle of Helsinki they built another shopping hell
…
Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen collected the pet peeves and angst-ridden pleas of people in Helsinki, and then composed this choral work around the list of complaints. Birmingham has also chipped in with their very own Complaints Choir, and I could see no reason why Singapore should not chip in too.
Complaining is for the longest time the national past time: forum pages are often inundated with them; kopi-tiams see groups of uncles-and-aunties rattling on about jobs, the gahmen (Government) and bus fare prices; school kids complaint about homework; adults complain about working hours and their bosses etc.
There are so many good reasons to channel complaining into a song like this. Turning negativity and pessimism into a creative work of art dissipates the grunt – as you sing along about the pet peeves, they may become a little more tolerable, a little more bearable, and perhaps even, a little cuter.
The issues sang in the Complaints Choir are also very localized – only those who’re here can really know and identify with it. In Singapore’s version, maybe there could be: NKF, forgetting to tap-out on buses, about choosing HDB flats close to your kid’s primary school, GRCs, .. these are stuff that makes it Uniquely Singapore. As much as it is a daily gripe, it still gives a facet of life here – something that once you see it, you know you’re here.
I can imagine Finns all over the world nodding in agreement with the song, identifying with the complaints – “Oh yeah! I’m really irritated by that!”, and yet among all these emotions evoke a warm sense of nostalgia and identity, a love for Helsinki for all its quirks and particularities.
Add corn starch to water and stir slowly. Keep adding until the suspension is near its maximum concentration – what happens next becomes rather interesting. It’d exhibit what is known in physics as “Non-Newtonian fluid” properties in which the viscosity changes with the applied strain rate.
In layman’s term, it means that if you apply abrupt force on it, the suspension behaves like a solid. For example, if you quickly poke it with a stick, the stick would bounce back. But if you slowly insert the stick into the fluid, the suspension would still behave like a liquid, and the stick would submerge.
This makes for interesting effects, like in the video above: it is entirely possible (or even, somewhat easy) to run on top of a corn starch pool. The first application that came to my mind is actually… freshman orientation games. But of course, the cleverer and more serious people are researching on this effect in applications like bullet proof vests – the armor would be soft and flexible in normal situations, but when impacted at high velocity by a bullet, that part of the vest would behave like a solid, repelling the bullet.
