Normally I pay no attention to YouTube ads before my video content loads, but damn did Prada do a fine job on these spots for their Fall/Winter 2012 collection. These are “Real Fantasies” that I can most assuredly get behind.
I love the way the scene vanishes to reveal the credits at the end of this one.
The most intriguing game of moon-chess you’ll ever see, guaranteed.
[F]or anyone who has had to squint at a PowerPoint presentation that was essentially just the unedited text from the reader’s speaking notes, Haiku Deck offers a merciful alternative. In an academic lecture or a business meeting, an overly dense slide show is like a Pavlovian signal to zone out.
For students, colleagues or coworkers who struggle with creating compelling, simple and memorable PowerPoint slides, Haiku Deck from Giant Thinkwell may offer salvation.
The free app for iPads allows users to type in just a few keywords about each slide and then it automatically scours Creative Commons images for bold background photos that tell the story for you. Even better, it plops in correct attribution information for each slide created, a godsend for some class settings, as I’m sure you know.
While the aesthetic may not be for everyone right of the box, a $2.99 expansion pack will provide another 11 themes and there are plans to offer some font packs in future versions to tweak the basic text layout.
Learn more about Haiku Deck at the Co.Design blog.
Really big stuff, in fact. Like 20 km high towers into space big. At least that’s what Neal Stephenson is up to with his amazing Hieroglyph project. io9‘s article on the potential impact of a massive stairway to the stars led me to “Innovation Starvation“, an essay by Mr. Stephenson in which he derides science fiction – his own chosen genre – as being dreadfully lazy for a generation. Some choice quotes that sum up the gist of his argument:
The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.
In a world where decision-makers are so close to being omniscient, it’s easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past.
Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age.
io9 further quotes Stephenson from another interview as saying “Everything got put on hold for a generation,” while civilization busied itself with figuring out the Internet. While this point is certainly likely to be true, it does provide some hope. Not only does the Internet enable us to access all of the optimism of innovative science fiction thinking of the past (plug: and even take a class about it online), it also immediately connects visionaries like Stephenson with the young engineers in Israel, Finland and Japan who are itching to build something really big. (There was no Kickstarter when Clarke pitched the space elevator, after all…)
And that’s not such a small thing, is it?
“They were a bit puzzled how the image was going to be done. But once they start seeing the resulting image, most of them start to see the deep impact of such a session. There’s a very deep longing in their sentiments. You can sense that they miss each other very much, and yet it’s something we have to accept in the current fast-paced society.”
Artist John Clang explains his new exhibition Being Together with The Atlantic.