I love this Instructable and wish I could do it for me. The author, responding to that clear-but-squishy-edged school of thought that various stimuli are good for infants, created a remote-controlled pattern of fiber optic lights in his soon-to-be-born baby’s ceiling. He can remotely control the overall brightness, the rate of twinkling, and the phases of the moon (waxing and waning):
Full lesson at Instructables
Nifty little exercise where a group of designers turn a train station staircase into a piano keyboard (a la the classic scene from Big) in order to get people to engage in the healthier behavior of taking the stairs rather than the escalator. THey conclude:
“Fun can obviously change behavior for the better” and the slightly more difficult translation “Add fun changes common behavior”
We have the classic line from Picasso about artists being people who manage to hold on to their childhood curiosity, energy, and willingness to experiment. We sometimes connect them to toys and play (MAKE Magazine has the “Permission to Play” t-shirt). This ignite talk takes us into the ________ world of adult Lego fans or __________.
I’m leaving those words blank, cuz I’m not sure this talk demonstrates the value of re-connecting with toys. The speaker doesn’t talk about sparking lateral thinking, improving brain age, the wonders of a refreshed and open mind, or the chance to create. He just really digs it, and he’s amused about the mania that comes with playing with Legos.
Still, he has a great line at the beginning, “the dark ages are the time between you stop playing with Legos as a child and decide as an adult that it’s OK to play with a kid’s toy again.” (One other great moment is when he’s having dinner with a woman from Lego and he describes all “these marketing people who keep asking (in a whiny voice)’aren’t you afraid it will hurt your brand? how do you control your brand?”
A more interesting, or more immediately useful, look at Legos come from the editor of Nuts & Volts and a class he teaches at Harvard Medical School.
Riding to and from Washington on the Acela yesterday, we were only able to find seats in the quiet car. At 5:45 in the morning, I reminded my colleagues to bring their DSes so we could play some head-to-head games (which, sadly, I hadn’t done on the DS before).
For those who haven’t been in a quiet car on Amtrak, it’s a trip. Manna from heaven for people who need to concentrate, want to sleep, or hate the loud cell phone conversations. The self-policing, however, can be over-zealous. Two co-passengers yesterday sat behind a woman who was sitting next to a man who apparently was a loud PC-typist. In reportedly pissy tones, she grilled the percussionist-emailist about how long he planned to type, with heavy sighs, and pointed intonation. It’s a tough crowd.
But three of us are punchy with morning coffee and adrenaline and lack of sleep (It was a 7 AM train, with boarding at 6:30) and need to play Mario Kart, a competitive racing game with all the cute characters from Nintendo. In addition to racing, you pick up power-ups which can give you speed boosts, but which can also be offensive things to lob at your opponents (turtles that you trip, octopus that sprays ink on your windshield so you can’t see, and the classic banana peel). So, while we’re playing, we’re desperately trying to be quiet — whispering trash talk, creating Nintendo-appropriate equivalents of flipping the bird, celebrating wins, taunting when you’ve done something clever — it was awesome.
Better yet, though, on the way back, we played Mario Party, a game where you roll dice and move around collecting points and things, but also where the squares allow you to play mini-games (like whack a mole, connect the dots, tangoes). One of the games required you to blow into the microphone in order to knock down a wall. Hard, fast breaths were advised. I was sitting at a table with three strangers, determined to win, and blowing into the mic as discreetly (and quickly and powerfully) as I could. It was crazy awesome funny. (The scotch from my flask helped, but it was fun under any circumstances.)
Nintendo are geniuses.
NYT article today about the last pinball machine manufacturer. One of those articles that makes me love living in NY and love the Times. The article is a reporter’s dream: a small world of pinball fanatics (including a “historian of the sport”), a 62-year old owner who yells at his employees for not playing enough pinball and bruised a rib snowboarding in December, really cool pictures of the craft and the mass of the enterprise, and fun quotes like a bug list which includes the comment “flipper feels soft.”
This article also highlights how well the Times has evolved into its digital presentation of itself. I’ve been getting caught up on my podcasts and just listened to a conversation about Eric Alterman’s New Yorker article on the death of newspapers. Articles like this show that, on the content side at least, that some papers are finding ways to embrace the medium: interactive slideshows that highlight photography and have a slightly different narrative arc, the nice incorporation of sound files into an otherwise conventionally formatted article, the use of thumbnails on the top page to pull people in (the two pics above are intriguing at thumbnail size).
I can’t remember if I liked the first Harold and Kumar movie. I LOVED the DVD menu, though (*), seriously. Anyway, I’m very excited about Harold and Kumar go to Guantanamo Bay. I love Kal Penn (who’s in House, some charming movie about fobidden love outside of one’s ethnicity, and, sadly, was in the last season of 24) and haven’t seen enough of John Cho. The trailers were funny, but some of them were locked for mature content. When you try to unlock them, you get this gate:
Points for being funny. It reminded me of iD software’s abusive prompts in the first couple of Quake games. But it seems odd that you have to give so much more information than what I’m told is your typical adult entertainment site. Over the top MPAA regs? Cheap attempt at getting data?
(*) The DVD menu on the first one had the usual menu items, but the background was a video of Harold and Kumar in a car talking to each other and doing schtick. Since it’s funny, you keep watching, and then eventually, the two start talking to the viewer, trying to convince them that there’s no more funny stuff and they should watch the movie already. It was awesome.