Project 10 to the 100th
Posted by Michael Opperman in Consumption, Economy, Environment, Ethics, Google, Solutions on October 6, 2009
A call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. Voting ends October 8, 2009.
Vote Now>>
Chromeography
Posted by Michael Opperman in Fonts on October 5, 2009
How To Read a Column
Posted by Michael Opperman in Newspapers, Politics on September 28, 2009
I’m not a fast fan of William Safire. I find his columns on language in the NYT Magazine to be patrician and prickly (not that it’s impossible that I might find that interesting). But I did like this recent column on reading columns.
More on Newsweek’s Green Corporate Rankings (thanks to Joel Makower)
Posted by Michael Opperman in Business Models, Consumption, Economy, Environment, Ethics on September 22, 2009
“The Newsweek rankings assess the S&P 500 — the 500 largest publicly held companies that trade on either the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ, the two largest American stock markets — on three metrics:
1) an “environmental impact score,” based on more than 700 metrics, compiled by Trucost, a leading provider of data and analysis on company emissions and natural resource use;
2) a “green policies score,” an analysis of corporate policies and initiatives by KLD Research & Analytics, one of the pioneers in socially responsible investing research; and
3) a “reputation survey score” resulting from a survey of CEOs, corporate environmental officers, and academics conducted by CorporateRegister.com, an online directory of company-issued CSR, sustainability, and environment reports from around the world.
Each company’s score, and thus its ranking, was based on a weighted average of those three components: 45% for the impact score, 45% for the policies score, and 10% for the reputation score.”
Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates Power of the Pentatonic Scale
Posted by Michael Opperman in Music on September 21, 2009
Minneapolis’ own McFerrin. “It’s funny just how low the average person’s opinion of their musical ability can be. Ask an average “non-musician,” and they’ll often claim to be deaf to rhythm and pitch. Push the issue, though, and typically you’ll discover quite the opposite. Listen as the crowd laughs at discovering they all share some basic intuition about how pitch works. These are, after all, science and neurology types, not musicians.”
World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
Microfiche Reader Updated: Google FastFlip
Posted by Michael Opperman in Browsers, Google, Microsoft, Search on September 16, 2009
Browsing news article using Fast Flip is satisfying. Almost like having the coolest microfiche reader ever – yeah, I know that I date myself. Still playing with it, but would love to embed that in a page with a set of saved searches. Every morning, I could quickly flip through the visual equivalent of news feeds. Microsoft is doing something similar with Bing’s Visual Search, but I find it less intuitive and useful.
A Boy Can Dream: Falcon Motorcycles
Posted by Michael Opperman in Business Models, Motorcycles on September 15, 2009
Falcon Motorcycles are custom built, original bikes, that begin as the salvaged frames and engines from vintage British motorcycles and are then rebuilt entirely from the ground up.
Inglourious Basterds (or film qua film)
Posted by Michael Opperman in Film, Marginalia on September 11, 2009
Have to say that Tarantino’s newest flick is a romp through post-war Italian, French, German, American cinema. Callouts to the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone (including font treatment in opening credits and the splash of introduction for character Hugo Stiglitz), the BRD Trilogy of Fassbinder (Shosanna in shadow is haunted by the shots of Maria Braun), not to mention the 1978 movie of the same name by Italian director Castellari. Nods to The Searchers, Good Bad & Ugly, Clouzot, Goddard, Metropolis (big face in last chapter). Wickedly entertaining & morally problematic. Because Tarantino also renders a strange fantasy dimension where the Nazis are comically close to topple by less than a dozen saboteurs, where revenge strategies and dehumanizing violence can be used effectively against a precarious paper regime.
Facebook Launches ‘Lite’ Version
Posted by Michael Opperman in Business Models, Social Networking on September 11, 2009
Successful online evolution often means taking the best (& proven?) components from competitors. Facebook Lite is garnering comparisons to Twitter with ‘@’ nomenclature, stripped downed UI.
http://www.switched.com/2009/08/12/facebook-testing-easier-abbreviated-facebook-lite