Links for Tuesday 5 August 2008 (Phil Gyford’s website)

Kevin Kelly — The Technium - Neo-Amish Drop Outs: People who stopped using email etc.
Site statistics (Pepys’ Diary): Five and a half years in, 50,000 comments so far, 25,000 absolute unique visitors per month, etc.
Myliblog: Uncle Bobby’s Wedding: Imagine if every complaint about anything received a reply this thoughtful. (via Kottke)
YouTube - Orangina Naturally Juicy French version: I’ve seen this ad at the cinema in Paris and it doesn’t make me want to drink Orangina. It makes me want to never go to the countryside again.
Amazon.co.uk: An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned But Probably Didn’t: Judy Jones, William Wilson: Books: I’m interested in attempts to summarise everything one needs to know and this sounds vaguely promising.
Synium - MacFamilyTree: Very whizzy-looking Mac software for managing one’s family tree and outputting it in many different ways, including weird 3D grids and a globe.
New College, Oxford - College Oaks: That story from ‘How Buildings Learn’ about the oak trees being grown to replace the dining hall’s beams? The important part is apparently not true.

Comments

alanconnor 7 Aug 2008Permalink

Had you seen that SB has whacked the TV version of How Buildings Learn onto Google Video?

This six-part, three-hour, BBC TV series aired in 1997. I presented and co-wrote the series; it was directed by James Muncie, with music by Brian Eno. The series was based on my 1994 book, HOW BUILDINGS LEARN: What Happens After They’re Built. The book is still selling well and is used as a text in some college courses. Most of the 27 reviews on Amazon treat it as a book about system and software design, which tells me that architects are not as alert as computer people. But I knew that; that’s part of why I wrote the book. Anybody is welcome to use anything from this series in any way they like. Please don’t bug me with requests for permission. Hack away. Do credit the BBC, who put considerable time and talent into the project. Historic note: this was one of the first television productions made entirely in digital—- shot digital, edited digital. The project wound up with not enough money, so digital was the workaround. The camera was so small that we seldom had to ask permission to shoot; everybody thought we were tourists. No film or sound crew. Everything technical on site was done by editors, writers, directors. That’s why the sound is a little sketchy, but there’s also some direct perception in the filming that is unusual.