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• Channel 4 hires Ofcom's Tom Loosemore to drive £50m digital fund | Media | guardian.co.uk
• Novelist Neal Stephenson Once Again Proves He's the King of the Worlds "People who write books, people who work in universities, who work on big projects for a long time, are on a diverging course from the rest of society. Slowly, the two cultures just get further and further apart."

• Data-driven, realtime advertising: The aura of approach "The subtext of the ad is, of course, the chaos BA’s inflicted on travelers since its move into the new Terminal 5, and beneath that Heathrow’s horrible longterm reputation as an abattoir of on-time departures. Clearly, the ad’s objective is to reassure a flying public already wary of the brand-new, £4.3 billion terminal - once burned, and so on. There’s nothing in and of itself so very engaging about this, but the mode BA (or their agency) chose to drive the message home is of intense interest to me: gathering actual use data, foregrounding it in the ad copy at high resolution, and publishing within hours."
• Scifi's Greatest Space Builders — And How We'll Copy Them [Space Mega-construction]
• Army Funds 'Synthetic Telepathy' Research | Danger Room from Wired.com

• NEGENTROPY "A non-recommendable near synonym for information." via Webb
• lightning "The crystal structure spreads, architecture aligning, physics gentrifying, roads straightening, square paving slabs unfolding from one another. Another creak and a slump this time, L-- is caught in dust and rubble. I crouch over him; there's blood on my hands as I hold his head and the lightning is the same shape as his body. 'They're homogenising us out of existence,' he says. His teeth are red. 'Find the Deterritorial Army. Tell them the layers of emergence are becoming too tightly coupled. Tell them objects are no longer sufficiently mobile on the substrate. Don't wait.' It smells of wet brick; mysteriously I think of ferns. L--'s blood is thickening into hexagons. I turn and run."
• Storytelling by Design I like Santa-Maria and HappyCog's work, but this argument seems to have fallen through a portal from 1999. Is there any mention of interaction or service design at An Event Apart I wonder? (Update: Yes: Liza Danzico, Heather Champ, Luke Wrobleski etc etc) Also - misattribution of a Spiekermann quote to David (ptui) Carson. Man I'm grouchy today.
• Nokia Conversations: Thoughts on Nokia's carbon fibre phone "These sorts of features and physical gestures are emerging as more common methods of behavior, and when married with innovative materials, such as those used here, I think the experience becomes more natural and blends further into the unconscious, which is ultimately what we want - interfaces that don't feel like interfaces, they just do what you instinctively want them to do."
• Skyscrapers in Order via thingsmag
• The Escapist : Jonathan Blow's Shifting Intention

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• The Atlas of All Possible Bank Robberies "It occurred to me that you could make a map – a whole book of maps – detailing all possible routes of bank robbery within the underground foundations of a city. What basements to tunnel through, what walls can be hammered down: you make a labyrinth of well-placed incisions and the city is yours. Perforated from below by robbers, it rips to pieces. The city is a maze of unrealized break-ins."
• Pumpkin (musician) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Peak Energy: The Turning Of The Worm "Recently, however, soil ecology has developed to the point where we can open the lid on the black box of underground processes. We can begin to understand how micro-organisms maintain the structure and fertility of the soil. We learn that symbiotic relationships between plants and micro-organisms are not the exception but the rule."
• Secrets of the Metamaterials that Will Make You Invisible [Mad Materials Science]
• Adobe Design Center: Peter Hall: Living skins: Architecture as interface via gnat

• Fred Turner: The Politics of Design in the American Counterculture - confectious

• Leapfroglog - The making of a travel-time map of the Netherlands "It is becoming apparent to me that the act of building displays like this is playful in its own way. Through sketching in code, you can have something like a conversation with the data and get a sense of what’s there. Perhaps the end result is merely a byproduct of this process?"
• Automatic eagle "Dopplr talks to Fire Eagle. Pownce talks to Fire Eagle. In a roundabout way, Dopplr talks to Pownce."
• Service Design Network: Service Design Network Conference

• Reflections and Notes from SciFoo ‘08 - Avi Ma'ayan's blog - Avi Ma'ayan's blog on Nature Network "...in biology, theory is lagging behind the data. In climate science, where theory has been traditionally ahead of the data, a shift towards the opposite is soon coming."

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• The Believer - Interview with David Simon

• The illusion of control "If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” - Mario Andretti
• Density, via the Weaire-Phelan structure, the Holbæk Kasba and the Monaco House "The relationship between the units is so dense that it reminds me of the core design principle behind the Beijing National Aquatics Centre (aka 'Water Cube'), developed by the team of Arup, CCDI and PTW. Arup’s Tristram Carfrae has discussed how the design of Water Cube - see discussion here - was inspired by the way soap bubble structures efficiently sub-divide a space. This structural principle is known as a Weaire-Phelan structure, which emerged as a solution to the problem set by Lord Kelvin in 1887: how space could be partitioned into cells of equal volume with the least area of surface between them."
• Evolve.jpg (JPEG Image, 846×1060 pixels) - Scaled (75%)
• YAKKAY - brainwear for smart people. Bicycle Helmet with cover

• Deep Inside NORAD, with Only a Felt-Tip Pen and Twenty Science Fiction Writers [Norad]
• African Scientists Set to Create a New Developed World [Materials Science]
• MagCloud:International Shipping
• Open the Future: Making the Visible Invisible The flip side of "show me everything I want to know about the world" is "don't show me anything I don't want to know."

• 303 - World Government Plan: Aliens to Police USA « Strange Maps
• Strange Maps
• The Middleman's Creator Explains The Universe To io9 [The Middleman] "Doing the right thing will not kill you, will not destroy your friends. A lot of popular culture insists on sort of a pornography of despair." - now, that's an interesting phrase...
• How You Can Save The World | Visions for Tomorrow "My profound belief is that we need to give people sense of vision and possibility. They no longer can imagine what a better future might look like. And while the news media necessarily surfaces all the problems we face, it has been the realm of the arts and sciences that have given us a sense of what could be." c.f. "pornography of despair"
• k-punk: Rebel without a cause "What's interesting about The Dark Knight is that is not really about Good versus Evil at all but 'good causes' versus aberrant modes of cause/ causality."
• Cooking and Cognition: How Humans Got So Smart | LiveScience
• The Word for World Is Forest - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Always Coming Home - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• New Comic > Dr Strange & Spider-Man "To harmonise myself with the sublime 'Ditko Dimension', I have been digitally remixing some of his original 60's pages, trying to get a feel for them from another 'fresh' visual angle... And in doing so, realizing just what a total genius he is."
• (the teeming void): Array Aesthetics (Olympic Edition) The opening ceremony is sending the same message, then, as the Games architecture: cultural and technological leapfrog. The Water Cube and the Birds Nest don't simply display China's modernity, they claim a jump into a digital, sustainable, mega-scaled future. The computational aesthetics of multiplicity that mark these structures are, again like the opening ceremony, a powerful cultural narrative: coherence, strength and beauty made of countless tiny pieces.