It was touching to see that Douglas Bowman, Google's visual design leader, chose, in announcing his resignation, to stroll down Steve Wozniak Honesty Avenue.
In a blog post, he summed up his feelings, as all the best designers should, in one simple statement: "I won't miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data."
He talked of how data was being collected (and one can only wonder what fine, laborious methods are used in the process) to judge the acceptability of a shade of blue, the width of a pixel, or the hair bang length of a brand manager.
Well, he didn't mention that last one, but I am prepared to believe it might be possible.
I know that there are some engineers out there who will delight in yet another triumph for alleged data over some subjective, sniffy, superior artist. I also know that there will be many, many artists and other sentient human beings who wish that they would just take a run and jump.
The artists wouldn't be sure, having seen Steve Wozniak's dancing exploits, that the engineers would all be able to coordinate the running and the jumping, but they would happily examine the living, breathing data.
I know we're all supposed to be heading into a rationalist phase, in which science dominates and judgment ruminates. But surely, there is (at least) one company that has proved that it is possible to marry engineering and something that might be described (by humans with no pixels to grind) as taste.
That company is Apple.
If Apple had been a purely data-driven company, would its products have ever looked as they do? And would its products ever have sold as they have?
(Credit:
CC David G Steadman)
I wouldn't even dream of attempting to compare the technical quality, brain power, or even dress sense of engineers at Apple and Google, though I have my subjective suspicions. But can anyone dispute that someone, somewhere along the line at Apple, made a judgment--a human, instinctive judgment--about what looks good and what doesn't?
Someone said, "I think," or "I feel," rather than, "The numbers tell me." And though I know it annoys some, Apple proved that people would pay more to be part of that tasteful world.
The fact is that human beings are astoundingly, depressingly, maddeningly human. Which makes them irrational, contradictory, capricious and, sometimes, just plain nuts.
These aspects are the hardest for engineers to get their talents around because, one hopes, they are impossible for engineers to get their talents around.
Apple recognized this from the beginning. The company understood that technology had to recognize humanity's irrationality and emotionality, with all the risk and subjectivity that entailed.
Apple managed to make it work. Google could too. If only it had a little more confidence in its own sense of taste, rather than in its apparent knee-jerk need to place a numerical value on every aspect of life, never mind business.
I suspect that Google wasn't quite so data-dependent at the company's inception. Do you really think that if the company used the same research methods then as it uses now to, for example, name itself, that "Google" would have been the winner?
My subjective feeling is that the company would have been called "SearchThis." Or, perhaps, "FindOut." How many of us would be searchthising or findouting today?
My CNET handler called today. He is the man who yanks at the dog lead permanently attached around my throat and croaks: "Write, puppy, write."
My handler said he had been present at last week's Crunchie awards, something to do with giving chocolate bars to fine new Internet companies. And he told me that he heard Google's Marissa Mayer whisper that in these times of infinite woe, more people were googling "recipes" than "restaurants."
The first thought that came into my mind was just one word: raccoon. You see, these brazen, beady-eyed burglars waft around my neighborhood fueled by the desire to eat everything I own. Yes, even my house. And whenever I see them, I wonder what they would taste like barbecued with some roast potatoes and a little broccoli.
Now I discover that raccoon is rapidly becoming the other dark meat. The raccoon apparently had pride of place in the first edition of the Joy Of Cooking in 1931. And here's the good news: you can buy one for between $3 and $7.
With that tiny outlay, one that simultaneously eliminates one of the lower-level civil servants of the animal world, you can feed five people.
Knock my trash cans over one more time and you might find yourself baked with apples.
(Credit: CC Michael Sheltgen)Please enjoy these words, printed in the Kansas City Star, from Jeff Beringer, a furbearer resource biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation: "Raccoon meat is some of the healthiest meat you can eat. During grad school, my roommate and I ate 32 'coons one winter. It was all free, and it was really good. If you think about being green and eating organically, raccoon meat is the ultimate organic food."
Yes, those varminty scavengers who try to knock over my trash cans have no steroids, no antibiotics, no growth hormones--just my evil thoughts drifting around their systems.
If you are, by any chance, offered a raccoon by a man in a highway rest area, here's the simple test: Trappers chop only three of the raccoon's four paws off. This is simply to prove that the carcass is not that of a cat or a dog.
Thankfully, when you Google "raccoon recipes," the first one that comes up is from Cooks.com. It is, indeed, barbecued raccoon. And it sounds, I know you'll agree, very tasty.
I feel confident that the minute I post this elegy to one of man's favorite little critters, demand for raccoon cuisine creativity will shoot up. Perhaps there will soon be an edition of Top Chef devoted to the furry one. (Can there possibly be such a thing as rack of raccoon?)
I sincerely hope that Marissa and the other steaming brains at Google are fully prepared for a massive change in America's eating habits.
It is, quite literally, a cliff hanger.
The Italian Job gang has stolen the gold. But their bus is hanging over the edge of a cliff. Michael Caine, who survived to become Batman's batman, utters the words: "Hang on a minute, lads. I've got a great idea."
So how can the gang save themselves and their illegally obtained life savings in this '60s cult classic? Now the Royal Society of Chemistry is asking the world's engineers to find a solution to one of the great movie endings--no helicopters allowed.
The rules are quite simple: Assume that in 30 minutes, the truck will topple down the mountain. As a very clever engineer, you provide a strictly mathematical calculation, coupled with an accurate diagram and, perhaps most difficult for some engineers, 150 words of explanation.
Professor Chris Pearce, fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, offered this frightfully imaginative solution to the Daily Telegraph: "I would suggest that the gang get out of the coach, let it fall, and get down the mountain as quickly as possible to retrieve the gold from the wreckage. That is the only logical thing to do, as it preserves their lives, and the gold isn't going to bother about the fall."
Now here's the thing. Michael Caine, who played the lead character named Charlie Croker, actually revealed the ending The Italian Job's producers intended a few years ago.
"The next thing that happens is, you turn the engine on," he told the BBC. "You all sit exactly where you are till all the petrol has run out, which changes the equilibrium. We all jump out, and the gold goes over the cliff. And at the bottom are the French mafia, sitting, waiting for the gold."
You see, the point of the cliffhanging ending was to prepare for a sequel. The second movie was to tell the story of the gang's quest to retrieve the gold from those devious onion-garlanded, bereted mafiosos.
However, Americans didn't mob movie theaters to see The Italian Job in sufficient numbers, so the sequel tumbled off the production pile.
Still, there is a spectacularly stingy prize--three nights, surprisingly, in Turin--for the fine mind that can bring this classic cult movie to a dramatic and scientifically accurate conclusion on the 40th anniversary of its release.
You have until January 1 to prepare your case. Involvement in the so-called Bridge to Nowhere does not disqualify you from entry.
Bill's friend, the one with whom he was going on a motorbike holiday in Tasmania, suddenly died. Bill, being upset and Australian, went out and got drunk.
A cab dropped him off back at his house. But he collapsed before he could get to his front door.
So along came a friendly Google StreetView camera car. The Australian version of the service was to be launched August 4. So the Googler had a lot of filming to do.
He shot the prostrate Bill who was lying on his back, his feet sticking out into the road.
This was a click and run.
(Credit:
CC re-ality)
The driver didn't stop to see whether Bill was all right. He didn't even get out of his camera car to move Bill's feet away from the curb. Like a TMZ.com paparazzo, his deadline seemed to be more important than something that could have been a dead body.
Did his shot of the beFostered Bill make the first edition of Google StreetView Australia? Too right, mate.
Bill (he doesn't want his last name plastered all over the place as well as his drunken pose) was as sanguine as the Australian Prime Minister, who, when he was seen getting drunk in an New York strip club, remarked: "I think any bloke who's honest about their lives can point to times in their lives when they've got it wrong."
Speaking of his dead friend, Bill said: "'I know what he would have done if I left --he would have partied, too. That's what I would've wanted him to do, so that's what I did with some friends."
However, he added: "I wasn't really thinking there would be someone driving by with a video camera on the roof filming me, either."
Who was the anti-Samaritan driving that Google camera car? Are his parents made of metal? What sort of instructions did he have? Why didn't he get out to help? And why didn't anyone at Google Australia notice that there was, well, a body lying in the street? (Google only removed the image after Bill's story came to light)
I know that people make jokes about Google being the quintessential engineering company. And that is something this blog will never stoop to (being an engineering company, that is).
But I hope you, too, would like to know how the company reacted to one of its drivers leaving a man lying in the street while he filmed him.
Or could it be that this driver was, in fact, yet another robot with vision problems?
Today, your eyes might not deceive you. But soon, they very well might.
Some extremely clever people at Cal (the one at Berkeley) have created a material that can control the direction in which visible light travels.
Apparently, this mystery material, some details of which might be revealed in Science and Nature magazines this week (People and OK weren't interested), deflects light around an object as perceived by an insouciant eye.
"In the case of invisibility cloaks or shields, the material would need to curve light waves completely around the object like a river flowing around a rock," the leader of the Cal researchers, Xiang Zhang, told London's Times newspaper.
(Credit:
CC dogbomb)
In essence, you are looking at, say, the Empire State Building or a John Malkovich-piloted Boeing 747 full of nasty missiles. If these objects are coated with the material, your eyes will see light from behind them, hence creating the illusion that the object in question simply isn't there. I know that there are terrible consequences that may leap to mind in these examples.
For the more technically-minded amongst you, I can tell you that the material the scientists created had to have elements engineered to within 0.00000066 of a meter. This appears to be in a realm that might make wafers suddenly feel ridiculously overweight.
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