Factoid of the day
“Last year migrants from poor countries sent home $300 billion, nearly three times the world’s foreign aid budgets combined.” (Source: New York Times, 11.22.08)
Is snow the new sand?
So I’m in Dubai, UAE, for a presentation. I arrive Monday night local time, do an all-day program on Tuesday, then race back to my hotel afterwards to deal with a few urgent matters back in the States. Soon it’s 7pm and I’ve got only a few hours to explore a place I’ve been only […]
Copyright craziness or subtle Dadaism?
Cory Doctorow has a great column in the Guardian about a Pop Artists exhibit at London’s National Portrait Gallery. The show celebrates the fizzy remixing typical of Pop Art and is replete with “cut up magazines, copied comic books, . . trademarked cartoon characters like Minnie Mouse, reproduced covers from Time magazine, made ironic use […]
Signs of a movement?
Last month, Kate Fitzpatrick, town manager of Needham, Massachusetts, heard me yap about emotionally intelligent signage. Last week, she sent me an email: “As it happens, I was scheduled to teach four classes of eighth grade social studies at the end of the month. This was actually much more interesting and enjoyable than it sounds! […]
Unempathic signage meets user-generated content
(from R.A. Swigert, though this has apparently made the rounds elsewhere)
Hunters with empathy?
Jim Malloy of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, shares this example of emotionally intelligent signage. Nice.
Manga makeup
Several of you have told me I did a crappy job of explaining what’s in Wired‘s November package on manga. Okay. Let me try again. There are five pieces: 1. A story I wrote, based on my stint in Japan, about the dojinshi movement. Sure, these amateur comics creators are trampling all over copyright law. […]
Tiger has a whole new mind
(photo taken today at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport)
Two cool tools
Like many of you, I’m a productivity geek — an devotee of David Allen, a fan of 43 Folders, a lover of Lifehacker. That’s why October 2007 has been so exciting. This month I discovered two of the best new tools — one high-tech, the other decidedly low-tech — that I’ve encountered in a long […]
Asymmetric wagging
Humans aren’t the only ones who use different brain hemispheres for different purposes. Turns out that dogs do the same. Just watch their tails. In an intriguing experiment reported in the SciAm blog, Italian researchers found that a dog typically “wags the tail more to the right while greeting its owner but more to the […]