The Week's Links: May 17, 2013

All the links posted on social networks this week:

  • These Stunning Photos Show Miraculous Plane Crashes Where No One Died ➞
  • This 17-Year-Old Coder Is Saving Twitter From TV Spoilers (Spoiler: She's a Girl) ➞
  • The 10-Year-Old Inventor and the World's Cutest Patent Drawing ➞
  • Shakespeare 'first great writer entrepreneur' ➞
  • BBC: The arts get less than .1% of public spending but deliver four times that in gross domestic product, report says. ➞
  • Is Massively Open Online Education A Threat Or A Blessing? ➞
  • 50 Jaw-Dropping Examples Of Street Art From Around The World ➞
  • Richard Branson Wants You To Be Good ◉
  • Creative Review names Bloomberg Businessweek Design Studio of the Year ➞
  • Ballet students from 18 international schools perform together via livestream at Toronto conference ➞
  • A Focus on Distraction ➞
  • Masterpiece In A Mug: Japanese Latte Art Will Perk You Up ➞
  • The robots speak! Daft Punk On 'The Soul That A Musician Can Bring' : NPR ➞ 
  • Lessons in Creativity. ➞
  • Two Dozen 15,000-Year-Old Words We Still Use Today ➞
  • Apple : Lincoln Center :: Google : Broadway ◉
  • 5 Lessons From Warren Buffett's Office Hours ➞
  • If you want to see which kids will grow up to be the most successful adults, visit their second-grade classroom. ➞
  • Steven Heller: Do Good Logos Need to Actually, You Know, Look Good? ➞
  • The Design That Conquered Google ◉
  • A brief history of admission tickets. ➞
  • The true value of a live performance audience. ➞
  • Artists behind iconic Houston sculpture sue Honda over ad claiming the ad stole design. ➞
  • The Most Important Details From Google I/O So Far ➞
  • A year inside The Australian Ballet: Boys' Day, Episode 4 ◉
  • Adobe Explores the Future of Responsive Digital Layout with National Geographic Content ➞
  • Lost Lands Found by Scientists ➞
  • Street Art Across The Globe: The Best Cities In The World For Graffiti And Urban Art ➞
  • Ha: 38 Signs You’ve Been in Advertising Agencies Too Long ➞
  • Amazing: National Geographic Traveler Magazine 2013 Photo Contest ➞
  • How to Spot a Weak Argument ◉
  • YouTube Launches Trend Map To Show Who's Watching What Where ➞
  • Creativity Top 5: Week of May 13, 2013 ◉
  • Games Before Bed Will Help Kids Sleep Better ➞
  • Elephants Communicate in Sophisticated Sign Language, Researchers Say ➞
  • How to Listen When Someone Is Venting ➞
  • Project Re:Brief, the documentary ◉
  • Mario Batali on digital strategy: How a Restaurant Menu Is Like a Website ➞
  • Rock’n’roll + Typography = Rock That Font ➞
  • Cheap Nanotech Filter Clears Hazardous Microbes and Chemicals from Drinking Water ➞
  • The Story Behind 'This Is Water'. Without permission, video agency created an amazing homage to David Foster Wallace ➞
  • A Few Rare People Hallucinate Musical Scores ➞
  • Eight New Things We've Learned About Music ➞
  • What Countries Around The World Eat For Breakfast ➞
  • Joi Ito’s Trends to Watch in 2013 ➞
  • The Scientific 7-Minute Workout ➞
  • Businessweek has a fantastic profile of Reed Hastings and the Netflix turnaround from a year ago. ➞
  • It Is in Our Nature to Need Stories ◉
  • Space Is Now a Reality TV Show. A very good reality show. ➞
  • 10 Great Quotes From The Great Gatsby ➞
  • Oreo's New "Wonderfilled" Campaign Wants to Sap the Cynicism Out of Your Day ➞
  • Fast Company's The 100 Most Creative People 2013. Topping the list, Nate Silver. ➞
  • Charlie Rose interviews 'Bill Gates 2.0' on 60 Minutes: the man after Microsoft ➞
  • Fmr. Frog Design Strategist: What We Need For Wearable Computing To Work ➞
  • The Quest For Perfection ◉
  • Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’ ➞
  • The Invention of David Bowie by Ian Buruma: The New York Review of Books ➞
  • Around the World in 80 Instagrams ➞
  • The illusion of simplicity: photographer Peter Belanger on shooting for Apple ➞
  • Two.js is a two-dimensional drawing api geared towards modern web browsers. ➞
  • Molecules in the brain trigger aging. Activity in the hypothalamus affects cognitive and physical decline. ➞
  • Creative People Say No ◉
  • The Man Behind the Google Brain: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI ➞
  • What Is Nothing? A Mind-Bending Debate about the Universe Moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson ➞
  • The 100 Most Creative People In Business ➞
  • Merlin Mann: Broken Meetings (And How You'll Fix Them) ◉
  • Sir Ken Robinson: 10 talks on education ➞
  • Our Very Normal Solar System Isn't Normal Anymore ➞
  • Theater's Expiring Subscription Model ➞
  • Watch ABC app: First live stream by broadcaster ➞
  • Merrill Brockway, Producer of TV’s ‘Dance in America,’ Dies at 90 ➞
  • iPad apps for young coders ➞
  • Infographic: Majority Of Earth’s Population Resides In This One Relatively Small Circle ➞
  • The Man Behind the Google Brain: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI ➞
  • Five overlooked abilities of the Finder's Path Bar ➞
  • Why Is Facebook Blue? The Science Behind Colors In Marketing ➞
  • A Clever iPad App Gets Kids Drawing On Paper Again ➞
  • Better way to add Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and any other external scripts ➞
  • Colours: The colors of the web. ➞
  • MIT Can Put A Digital Interface On Any Object ➞
  • Type design inspiration: Inside the evolution of typography at Monotype ➞
  • Behind The Scenes Shots From Popular Movies ➞
  • How I Work: IDEO's Duane Bray On Creating Great Digital Experiences ➞
  • 27 Bits of Wisdom from 2012 Commencement Addresses ➞
  • The coming era of ‘on-demand’ marketing ➞
  • How to Really Understand Someone Else's Point of View - Mark Goulston and John Ullmen ➞
  • José Luis Antúnez: What is Design? ➞
  • Can you tell a four-word story? ➞
  • The Economist explains: How does China censor the internet? ➞
  • The 12 Trends That Will Rule Products In 2013 ➞
  • What happens to our brains when we have stage fright: The science of public speaking ➞
  • 25 Gorgeous Typographic Experiments ➞
  • 10 Display Faces that Digital Forgot ➞
  • Study: Teenagers Feel More Entitled Than Ever. Teens are less willing than ever to work hard ➞
  • Bringing Backstage Onstage with Social Media ➞
  • Are you scaring your customers with how you talk about your art? ➞
  • Steven Soderbergh on the state of cinema. ➞
  • Meet A Modern-Day Master Of The Classic Neon Sign ➞
  • Why "The Great Gatsby" Endures: The New Yorker ➞
  • Carl Sagan’s Undergrad Reading List: 40 Essential Texts for a Well-Rounded Thinker ➞
  • Google teams up with the RSC to create Shakespeare for the internet age ➞
  • What makes The Great Gatsby great? ➞
  • So clever: An Ingenious Cookbook Uses Infographics Instead Of Words ➞
  • Scientists Figure Out What You See While You're Dreaming ➞

Recommended This Week: 

The Sparrow: A Novel
By Mary Doria Russell
Tree of Codes
By Jonathan Safran Foer
 
 
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Apple : Lincoln Center :: Google : Broadway

Google I/O is currently going on and Apple's WWDC is around the corner. This has led to many conversations between my developer and tech friends about which one is better, which one is moving ahead and which one is staying behind, and on and on. 

For me Apple is to Lincoln Center as Google is to Broadway. 

They both offer a multitude of products in various forms. They both have specific visions and financial goals. They both offer merchandise that intrigues me and makes me want to find out more. When they are good I seek them. But I definitely gravitate towards one and check it out first and more often because it is more in tune to what matters to me and what I enjoy. 

 
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The Design That Conquered Google

In April, 2011, the Google co-founder Larry Page took over as C.E.O. Besides moving to streamline Google’s increasingly sprawling scope as a company, he immediately launched Project Kennedy, an initiative to give all of Google’s products a more consistent look, so everything would be easier to use.

...

Nearly a year later, the crisp design cues of Google Now and the Kennedy Project have swept across Google, and cards are set to become one of the dominant ways in which Google presents certain types of information to users. In other words, a card will be the atomic unit of information display across all of Google. In addition to Now and Google’s Glass wearable computer—where all information is displayed as a card—they have started appearing across a multitude of Google's services and applications, like the Play Store, Gmail on iOS, and mobile search and Plus, to name a few. And today, cards are invading two of Google’s most important products outside of search, with a dramatic design overhaul of both Maps and its Plus social network. That change might seem minor in some ways, but there are profound implications in the proliferation of cards, given that they will become the way that billions of people consume and digest bits of information they’re seeking from Google over the next few years.
 
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How to Spot a Weak Argument

A brief excerpt from Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett:

When you’re reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for “surely” in the document, and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word “surely” is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument. Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about. (If the author were really sure all the readers would agree, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning.) Being at the edge, the author has had to make a judgment call about whether or not to attempt to demonstrate the point at issue, or provide evidence for it, and—because life is short—has decided in favor of bald assertion, with the presumably well-grounded anticipation of agreement. Just the sort of place to find an ill-examined “truism” that isn’t true!

 

 
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Creativity Top 5: Week of May 13, 2013

At number 5 the "I wish my son had cancer" campaign is potent and heartbreaking.

 
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