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I love this SO VERY MUCH.

(Via.)

If you were planning on not reading this week’s NYT Mag cover story because it’s, um, about Guitar Hero, reconsider. It’s really good. And the photo at top is mesmerizing. (And whoever came up with the headline, I salute you.)

A link, and then a long digression (or several).

Andrew Robinson at the Oxford University Press blog writes about attempts at universal languages:

In the mid-1970s, with increasing international travel, the American Institute of Graphic Arts cooperated with the United States Department of Transportation to design a set of symbols for airports and other travel facilities that would be clear both to travellers in a hurry and those without a command of English. They invented 34 iconic symbols. The design committee made a significant observation:

Awesome story from MeFi. You know that Nat King Cole song “Nature Boy”? The haunting one that opens and closes Moulin Rouge? Turns out it was written by a vagabond hippie and left in an envelope for Cole after one of his performances. Much more in the thread.

Now that my dissertation is good and filed, I want to share a few fragments of what I’ve been working on, on-and-off, for the past few years.

Here’s a few selected grafs from the first chapter:

The history of Modernism is part of the history of paper. That is, the transformation of literary and visual culture announced by Modernism and the avant-garde is inseparable from the transformation of the largely paper-based communication and information technologies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries…

From the daguerrotype to the cinema, the history of photography simultaneously parallels and intersects the development of paper and print. A single image, handmade by an artisan, is succeeded by a continuously-fed reel of industrially-made material. In fact, the chemical treatment of wood pulp cellulose with sulfurous acid to produce paper is only slightly different from the chemical treatment of wood fibers with nitric acid to produce celluloid film. Nitrocellulose (also called guncotton) in ether or acetone yields collodion, the albumen alternative that allowed for glass-plate photography; the evaporation of collodion in turn led to the discovery of celluloid film. Celluloid emerges as a paper alternative with Eastman Kodak, the company credited with the introduction of flexible film and the supplier of continuous film rolls for Edison’s early motion pictures. Kodak had originally used ordinary paper treated with collodion in their famous

It has been indicated, correctly, that I am in possession of two (2) copies of The BLDGBLOG Book. How this came to pass, only Etaoin Shrdlu knows. But two copies is clearly too many for one man; the double-dose of enthusiasm and imagination threatens to consume me.

Therefore, a contest: SNARKMARKITECTURE.

The premise is simple. Imagine Snarkmarket as a physical space. What is it? Where is it? What does it look like? What does it feel like to walk through or around it?

I’m intentionally leaving this open-ended—maybe it’s a gleaming HQ, maybe it’s a storefront, maybe it’s a feral house of Detroit. Maybe it’s like one of those taco trucks…

Leave your pitch in the comments. Focus on creativity and brevity. It can definitely just be a sentence or two—though, by all means, if you want to Etaoin Shrdlu it up, I’m not going to stop you.

The contest ends Sunday, August 9 Monday, August 10 at midnight EST. (Update: I wanted to accommodate non-weekend-readers.) I’ll choose my favorite comment and send its creator a copy of The BLDGBLOG Book. (Be sure to use a real email address in the comment form so I can contact you if you’re the winner!)

Snarkmarket co-bloggers are not eligible to win but they are required to enter.

Snarkmarket as a physical space. Go for it.

Filmmaker John Hughes passed away today, too young at 58. In the 1980s, Hughes had an astonishing run of iconic teen comedies that, almost a quarter century later, hold up as honest-to-goodness movies: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

My generation (I was born in 1979) was too young to see these movies in the theater, and too old for the kiddie comedies Hughes wrote (but didn’t direct) in the 1990s. We ate these movies up on VHS and basic cable, badly cut (to protect US) for broadcast TV, but seeing in them our older brothers, sisters, and cousins, and later, ourselves.

However, since everyone’s talking about these four movies, I want to single out the one great comedy Hughes made for and featuring grownups – Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. I saw this movie just last week – and it’s terrific. What’s more, it shows that the world Hughes created in his films, of humiliation and catastrophes offset by unlikely friendships, isn’t just a sympathetic take on kids in fictional midwestern high schools, but a distinct comic take on the world itself. And every buddy comedy from the 1990s just follows this movie’s playbook, with half the brains, a third of the timing, and a quarter of the heart.

Five years ago, Rupert Murdoch sat down at his computer and spent a few minutes watching a movie made by two journalism students. When he rose, he proclaimed that “he and his fellow newspaper proprietors risked being relegated to the status of also-rans if they did not overhaul their internet strategies.”

Then he bought MySpace and the WSJ. He also bought a locket with Matt and Robin’s picture inside.

But now, instead of following the clear lesson of that movie – that is, merging these two properties to make WallSpace? MyStreetLiveJournal? – he just might out-grey-lady the Grey Lady by contending to become King Cash on Paywall Mountain.

I wrote about Joshua Glenn’s new schema for generations a year ago – basically, Glenn’s MO is to toss out distended categories like “Generation X” for tighter, single-decade groupings with names like “Hardboileds” or “The Net Generation.”

That was at Brainiac, the blog for the Boston Globe. But at Hilobrow, Glenn’s still working back, decade by decade, which is especially awesome for 1) people who are geeks for the nineteenth-century, like me, and 2) all of us, who have a much less intuitive sense of generational changes or continuities the longer we look beyond living memory.

For example, consider the generation born between 1854 and 1863. Glenn calls them “the Plutonians“:

Pluto is the god of the underworld, and members of this generation

Some great ideas are sparking here, helped along by Robin’s notion of a “Starbucks API.” Noah Brier calls it a “physical API” (see also the smart comments) and Kit Eaton at Fast Company extends the concept (tongue-in-cheek) to Microsoft, Apple, and Twitter. But I like Drew Weilage’s proposal at Our Own System the best:

The idea: create a “physical API”… of the Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic. Copy their entire way of doing business and paste it into hospitals around the country. In a nicely wrapped package deliver their systems for decision-making, integration, coordination, and expertise. Include their human resources practices, innovation efforts, and technology. Import their employment model, their bargaining power, and of course brand recognition. This is a beta release so if anything is left out, it can be included in a later version.

Mix with water. Implement. Poof! Great health care!

Just think about it, Local County Hospital, powered by the Mayo Clinic or Our Lady Health Care System, supported by the Cleveland Clinic; it’s a definite brand extender.

Seriously — this has, potentially, amazing public policy implications. My dad, who’s worked in the government for-practically-ever in Wayne County/Detroit (first at the jail, then in public health, then in lots of places), always used to stun his bosses, co-workers, everybody, because whenever they ran into a persistent problem or one they couldn’t solve, he would get on the phone to people he knew in Oakland County, or Chicago, or Denver, to see how they handled it, who would in turn refer him to other people, etc.

You can get these information bottlenecks even when there’s no competing interests, and nothing proprietary — it’s just hard (without an API) for people to know where or how to look.

Read more…