http://blog.thoughtwax.com Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:37:51 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Google Video: How Buildings Learn I'm contractually obliged to post this. Author, futurist and all-round Thoughtwax hero Stewart Brand has uploaded all six parts of the documentary based on his book How Buildings Learn to Google Video. This six-part, three-hour, BBC TV series aired in 1997. I presented and co-wrote the series; ... http://blog.thoughtwax.com/2008/08/how-buildings-learn-documentary Some photos on Flickr. Also, bonus sets of pilgrimages to Industrial Light & Magic and the Long Now Foundation. http://blog.thoughtwax.com/2008/07/california Sitting in a soul-destroying traffic jam in Moate the other day, I realised that the design of cars is basically broken: 1. Metcalfe's Law says that the value of a network increases in proportion to the number of nodes in that network. The canonical example is a global network of fax machines: ... http://blog.thoughtwax.com/2008/06/join-the-dots Something from real life: my girlfriend Paula is having an exhibition entitled Ties in the Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick Street, Galway. It's going to be running from tomorrow, May 8th, to the end of the month. Also, I finally made a new website for Paula. She has a blog there ... http://blog.thoughtwax.com/2008/05/plug This week I dinged a thousand bookmarks on del.icio.us and thought it might be interesting to examine how I've used the service over the last couple of years. Firstly, some raw data: I've posted 1000 bookmarks since 25th March 2004. That's 1480 days ago, so I posted an average of 4.73 ... http://blog.thoughtwax.com/2008/04/1000-bookmarks I read an odd little book last week that lends itself particularly well to an immediate, flippant description, so here it is: The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker is a short novel about a man going up an escalator, and what he thinks about while doing so. It's also about experience design ... http://blog.thoughtwax.com/2008/03/the-mezzanine Kevin Kelley: 1,000 True Fans Kelley simply presents an obvious enough idea, but one that's worth saying out loud anyway: an artist (or writer, programmer, or whatever) can make a sustainable living if they manage to get about 1,000 dedicated fans who will support them on an ongoing basis. One thousand is ... http://blog.thoughtwax.com/2008/03/1000-true-fans The longest shot in the trailer for the new Indiana Jones film shows an army jeep with the code 1B7731 printed on the side. That's pretty close to 1B1337 (or I Be l337, geekspeak for "I am elite"), but not quite enough to constitute a hidden reference. Perhaps more surprisingly ... http://blog.thoughtwax.com/2008/02/1b7731 Driving in New Zealand takes a bit of getting used to. For a start, other than the sparse network of state highways that link the main towns, there are no real roads. Sometimes it's possible you'll have to drive a long, roundabout route to get to a destination that's geographically ... http://blog.thoughtwax.com/2008/01/the-enduring-mystery-of-corrugated-roads Yesterday on the connecting flight home from Seoul I watched In The Shadow of the Moon, a documentary about the Apollo space missions. Having returned from their long journeys to a strange and wonderful place far away, after splashdown, astronauts would have to spend some time in a small isolation ... http://blog.thoughtwax.com/2008/01/new-zealand