The Friday Five

  1. What was the last song you heard?The Blue Train – “Trio II” – Dolly Parton/Emmylou Harris/Linda Ronstadt

    I’m riding the blue train
    Over the miles yet to cover
    A ghost in a hurry to fade
    I’m taking it one way to nowhere
    Afraid you might be there
    To find me inside this blue train

  2. What were the last two movies you saw?
    • “Starsky and Hutch” with my 10-year old son
    • “The Sure Thing” while working out
  3. What were the last three things you purchased?
  4. What four things do you need to do this weekend?
    • Finish the first draft of a report on technology commercialization for a client
    • Mail a copy of my Ph.D. thesis to a doctoral student in Singapore
    • Replace the windows shades in my 15-year old’s bedroom
    • Serve as the vestry usher at the 11:15 service at Christ Church on Sunday morning.
  5. Who are the last five people you talked to?
    • Morry Fiddler
    • Michael Krauss
    • My wife
    • My two boys

Adding Jim Kunstler to my reading list

Buzz is now the third or fourth person I trust who’s told me I need to go see what Kunstler has to say. This, of course, is the risk of following people you trust in the blogging world. Your reading list grows well beyond anything you can possibly hope to complete no matter how fast you can read. Instead, you have to exercise your own judgments about how you are going to manage your information world. Of course, thinking about how you are going to do this explicitly is far better than doing it by default, which is what most of us do.

Talking to Jim…. One of the very bright guys that I met at PopTech! was Jim Kunstler. Jim is a critic of things that I care about. I am trying to get him into the blogging world, but in the meantime, go read… [buzzmodo]

New insights from Tufte

More fascinating examples from Tufte about how to squeeze more meaning into data displays. The interesting tradeoff to be managed here is between design time to find compelling and meaningful representations and interpretation/decision time by those who will use the representations. As a gross generalization, design time gets short shrift at the expense of increased problems with interpretation and decision. A bad cost/benefit tradeoff.

Spaklines. Edward Tufte: Sparklines or Wordgraphs–some draft pages from Beautiful Evidence… [Emptybottle : Coasters]

Strange Harmonic Convergence

Although I only took a handful of classes at MIT while I was in graduate school up the Charles river a bit, I did get this one since I frequently walked across the Harvard Bridge and was naturally curious about the markings along the way. Strange harmonic convergence indeed.

Strange Harmonic Convergence. This is a bit of MIT arcana that I expect only some of you will get, but it is something that I did not know that gave me pause today: Unit of measurement elected head of standards board [Via Everything Burns] Oliver Smoot is one of the quintessential pieces of … By furd (mailto:furd@mit.edu). [Furdlog]

New Gadget Site – Engadget

Not being as disciplined as Ernie, I have both gadget sites in my subscriptions list.

New Gadget Site. Gizmodo’s Peter Rojas has started a gadget weblog of his own called Engadget. I’ve replaced the blogroll link for Gizmodo with a link to Engadget, which will give you some indication of my preference between the two sites…. [Ernie The Attorney]