michael fives

If any arts have lasting beauty, they must certainly exist in utilitarian objects created by people aware of the materials, forms, and colors, and surfaces that please the eye and the body—and consequently live on through the years, growing more mellow and beautiful as time passes.

—Sam Maloof

But you? You are not Steve Jobs. You are not better at design than everyone in your company. You are not better at programming than every engineer in your company. You are not better at sales than every salesperson in the company.

It is not, as it turns out, necessary to be a micromanaging psychopath with narcissistic personality disorder (or even to pretend to be one) if you just hire smart people and give them real authority. The saddest thing about the Steve Jobs hagiography is all the young “incubator twerps” strutting around Mountain View deliberately cultivating their worst personality traits because they imagine that’s what made Steve Jobs a design genius. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, young twerp. Maybe try wearing a black turtleneck too.

—A VC: The Management Team - Guest Post From Joel Spolsky

speakin my language.

The main ideas I was interested in visualizing were what happened, when, and who was present.  The whenquestion is particularly interesting due to Wallace’s use of Subsidised Time.  It became clear as I was preparing the data that much of the book is set during the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, but I pressed on with the visualization anyway.

So cool.

Baroque.me (2011) by Alexander Chen. Video capture. baroque.me visualizes the first Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suites. Using the math behind string length and pitch, it came from a simple idea: what if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music’s underlying structure and subtle shifts.