The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
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Call it real estate p0rn, call it social envy, but Zillow.com put together some interesting eye candy here…
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After learning of Steve Jobs’ soon-to-be demolished historic home, and Mark Zuckerberg’s life as a month-to-month renter, we decided to see what other types of real estate today’s tech titans like to call home. Here’s where some of the biggest (and richest) tech-industry moguls take a break from their web-ruled world.
UNQUOTEWhatever excess is displayed bothers me less than the fact that so many of these “titans” have squirreled themselves away in suburban settings. Kudos to Ev Williams for choosing an in-town abode; ditto Zuckerberg (although the house looks suburban enough).
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Very worth reading, on “The Cities We Want,” by Witold Rybczynski
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All the cities that have experienced vigorous population growth during the second half of the 20th century—Houston; Phoenix, Ariz.; Dallas; San Jose, Calif.; Atlanta, Ga.—have grown by spreading out. These are horizontal cities, with generally low population densities, typically fewer than 10 people per acre compared with 15 to 20 people per acre in the older, vertical cities. Horizontal cities depend on automobiles for mass transportation and on trucks for the movement of goods. In a horizontal city, the difference between city and suburb is indistinct. People in both live chiefly in individual houses rather than in flats or apartment buildings, and the houses are organized in dispersed, semi-autonomous planned communities that are different from the urban neighborhoods of the past. Versions of the dispersed city can be found in large cities such as Los Angeles, small cities such as Las Vegas, and in the metropolitan areas surrounding all cities, old and new.
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Getting To Know The Six Species Of Arm-Chair Urban Planner… : Scout Magazine
Brilliant:
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The 6 Species Of Vancouver’s Arm-Chair Urban Planners1. Smarmy City Sucks!
No one can live here. Another high-end condo will just continue to force normal folk out of town.2. Resort City Sucks!
All anyone does is live here. We need more offices and jobs.3. The City is an Extension of my Ego!
A world-class city requires a grand statement to inspire [our journey over the Burrard Bridge]. And it’ll make the car ads better.4. Table Top City Sucks!
We, the Skyscraper Nerds, call for an end to monotonous rows of mid-rise, cookie-cutter buildings and demand taller, architecturally expressive, “signature” towers.5. That thing’s gonna block the fucking view!
Nimbys and View Coners united will never be defeated.6. Where’s Everyone Going to Park?!
These are the “think of the children” people when it comes to urban planning.
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Flavorwire » Photo Gallery: Ryan McGinley’s Naked Animal Kingdom [NSFW]
Amazing photos by Ryan McGinley.
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The photos — a mixture of black-and-white portraits and colorful road trip images — are different from his previous work in that some of the nudes are posing with live, wild animals. The results are strange, but stunning; a cheeky juxtaposition of the beauty and unpredictability of youth and the natural world.
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Profile of social psychologist Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School | Harvard Magazine Nov-Dec 2010
This is an excellent article (unfortunately, the “single page” link doesn’t work). The article really kicks in around p.3 or so.
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Amy Cuddy probes snap judgments, warm feelings, and how to become an “alpha dog.”
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The Future of Local Commerce = Facebook + Foursquare + Yelp + Groupon
Very interesting:
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…companies like Groupon, Gilt, and other group buying and private sale startups are changing the money flow. People buy online, and redeem offline. But this is just the beginning of a perfect storm brewing that will change the way we discover, shop, and pay for things. Let’s focus on the main function each of these different startups provide to understand how bringing them together will ultimately disrupt multiple trillion dollar industries:* Facebook: provides the Social Graph, which is fast becoming a utility. Through its open platform, and APIs, we share more about our lives and our interactions online and on mobile every day.
* Foursquare and Gowalla: provide location services and check-ins, along with game mechanics that motivate users to unlock badges, earn mayorships, and get discounts at local stores in the process.
* Yelp: provides crowdsourced reviews of local businesses. Now also provides check-ins, and offers.
* Groupon: provides discounted offers against a promise to increase sales and bring in brand new customers to local businesses.The interesting thing here is that there’s a lot of overlap between the features offered by these companies. Recently, Facebook launched Places, a mobile geo-location service that mimics Foursquare local check-ins. Yelp also added check-ins, and recently rolled out Yelp Deals, a Groupon clone.
Considering that Local Commerce will be mostly mobile, one of these companies still must bring all of these features together, along with one-click payments (IMHO), to truly tap into the potential of all these disruptive technologies. In my mind, the ultimate product combines all these features in a mobile app. A user would launch the app, see what special deals are in her area (location + group buying), whom of her friends already bought the coupon/item (social graph), local reviews from friends (social graph + reviews), and then she could buy the desired coupon in one click on her handset. She could walk into the local business with
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Quantum Honeybees | Animal Intelligence | DISCOVER Magazine
Make my head explode – while the honeybee dances…
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Mathematicians like to examine different manifolds the way antiques dealers browse through curio shops–always exploring, always looking for unusual characteristics that expand their understanding of numbers or geometry. The difficult part about exploring a manifold, however, is that mathematicians don’t always confine them to the three dimensions of ordinary experience. A manifold can have two dimensions like the surface of a screen, three dimensions like the inside of an empty box, four dimensions like the space-time of our Einsteinian universe, or even ten or a hundred dimensions. The flag manifold (which got its name because some imaginative mathematician thought it had a shape like a flag on a pole) happens to have six dimensions, which means mathematicians can’t visualize all the two-dimensional objects that can live there. That does not mean, though, that they cannot see the objects’ shadows.One of the more effective tricks for visualizing objects with more than three dimensions is to project or map them onto a space that has fewer dimensions (usually two or three). A topographic map, in which three-dimensional mountains get squashed onto a two-dimensional page, is a type of projection. Likewise, the shadow of your hand on the wall is a two- dimensional projection of your three-dimensional hand.
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Can the U.S. Rare-Earth Industry Rebound? – Technology Review
Oh boy. Time to wake up, America.
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Getting from rocks to the pure metals and alloys required for manufacturing requires several steps that U.S. companies no longer have the infrastructure or the intellectual property to perform.
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You cannot rely on outsourcing everything, you have to produce and manufacture STUFF yourself. -
ROLLOVERS | M. Seth Jones ≣ Fashion///Beauty///Retouching
Very well-done sophisticated images of women (models), but I’m not so sanguine as the photographer, regarding the meaning and message. I see good-looking women made to look perfect, and from that I see a narrative developing that tells all of us women that our natural state is never ever good enough. This isn’t something that pleases me, irrespective of the visual pleasures these photographs may provide.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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