The story of Han Van Meegeren, a fascinating tale of art forgery.
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More on fancy multi-touch displays, with some insightful commentary on where the technology might be heading. I’ve posted about this stuff before.
Usability issues with the standard stove. If you like this article, you should definitely read The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.
This post by Jason Kottke on how he blogs pretty much describes how I feel about blogging as well. Jason’s blog is a fantastic site, I highly recommend it.
Two interesting articles: one fairly aggressive one on the energy costs of food, and one by Jared Diamond on why agriculture is a bad thing. If you haven’t read it yet, I can highly recommend Jared’s book Guns, Germs and Steel.
A short article on how we cleverly figured out how many tanks the Germans were manufacturing during WW2.
Reinventing the mail client describes some novel approaches to organizing and displaying email. I really like the person-centric one (see picture) but feel that (a) the lists should be automatically constructed and (b) purely sorting per person is too simple an algorithm.
The big news of the day is of course the launch of the Tesla Roadster, the first electric sportscar. I’m pleasantly surprised at how good it looks – apparently they poached a lot of people from Lotus for the design. Check out Autoblog’s video and write-up. I bet I’ll see a few of these at Google when they become publicly available (mid 2007).
Fascinating research on the half-life of online news, trying to determine how long a story stays ‘live’. I highly recommend Barabasi’s book Linked, about the science of networks.
Article on the design of the GooglePlex, i.e. Google’s main office. I work there, and it truly is a fantastic work environment.
