Design: September 2008 Archive Page

This is from the robots category of Paleo-Future, which also has categories devoted to picturephones, jetpacks, and each decade's collected futurism (that is, see what our future looked like to people writing in the 1880s, the 1930s, or the 1980s).

Try as it might the robot could not make its desired turn. Its little broken wheel jerked and jumped, but to no avail. Malorie then started crying uncontrollably, quietly pleading, "Why won't someone help that robot! All he wants to do is pick up the ball and put it in the middle so that he can get some points!"

This may be an extreme example, but it illustrates our ability to anthropomorphize robots.

Renowned scientist Stephen Hawking is going to unveil a remarkable clock that has no hands and shows time with the help of light. Known as the Corpus Clock, the machine has been invented by and designed by Dr John Taylor for Corpus Christi College Cambridge for the exterior of the college's new library building. The Clock will be unveiled on 19th September by Stephen Hawking, cosmologist and author of the global bestseller, A Brief History of Time. Dr Taylor, an inventor and horologist, has put 500,000 pounds of his own money and seven years into developing the clock, which has been inspired from a design by a clock made by the legendary John Harrison, the pioneer of longitude. Of John Harrison's many innovations, he came up with the 'grasshopper escapement, explained Dr Taylor, referring to the device used by Harrison to turn rotational motion into a pendulum motion for timekeeping. No one knows how a grasshopper escapement works, so I decided to turn the clock inside out and, instead of making the escapement 35 mm across, it is 1.5 m across, he said.

Good editing skills and random, candid video = 2 minutes of awesomeness. This is why I love the internet.

Takes just a tad too long to get started -- give it about 45 seconds before you decide to bail out. You'll be hooked by the second time you see the flip-flops. Via.

"Ah-ah-ah ooh, ah-ah, ah-ah-ah-ah ooh!"  I'll be humming it all week.

A wonderfully expressive, almost wordless essay on language, problem-solving, and code.
The Synonym Problem  (See also Jono DiCarlo's "These Things I Believe" -- a humanist manifesto about computer code.)

Most gamers have never heard of Braunstein. Sad but true. In the hierarchy of self-awareness you'll find the circle of gamers who know what D&D is (a very, very large circle), then inside of that is the circle of gamers who know what Greyhawk is (large but smaller), and inside that the circle who knows what Blackmoor is (smaller still). And then in the very center, vanishingly small, are the people who've heard of Braunstein. Which is a pity, because Braunstein is the granddaddy of them all. (Metafilter)

Great use of 3D technology to enable the study of an historic art form. Virtual Vaudeville:

Watch legendary comedian Frank Bush in a vaudeville performance from a variety of perspectives in the theater, from the most expensive boxes to the cheapest balcony seats. Compare the reactions of different spectators and even experience the act through the eyes of the performer. Switch between any of eight perspectives at any time and read the extensive hypermedia notes to gain a richer understanding of the performance in its historical context.

Sounds like a promising peek behind the curtain at Wired.  I'll watch this for a while and see whether I can use it in my journalism classes.

What Is This?

An almost-real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the assigning, writing, editing, and designing of a Wired feature. You can see more about the design process on Wired creative director Scott Dadich's SPD blog, The Process. This is a one-time experiment, tied solely to the Charlie Kaufman profile scheduled to run in our November 08 issue.

What Are The Rules?

We will post internal e-mails, audio, video, drafts, memos, and layouts. We reserve the right to edit our posts, out of sympathy for the reader or to protect our relationships with our sources. We will not post emails with sources or reproduce communications that take place outside of Wired.

Why Are We Doing This?

See our The Birth of Storyboard video and An Experiment post.