Finally found new music that I can listen to. Their MySpace page is here.

The disaster in Georgia reminded me of why I love the Guardian so much. Their articles covering the war are almost good enough for me to begin having faith in the journalistic profession.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/10/russia.georgia1

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/09/georgia.russia1

And for once, The Nation also delivered:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080818/ames

I’ve always been fascinated by the sheer irrationality of the shampoo purchasing process. You have to make a decision regarding the selection of a product that you know almost nothing about, but that the rules of social behavior require you to have. The only seemingly objective information is the list of ingredients, which doesn’t even include the amounts in which the listed chemicals are used. Assuming that this list is accurate, and I am under suspicion that it is entirely up the shampoo manufacturers to provide it, it is absolutely meaningless to a consumer who is not a chemist. The decision is then almost always has to be made based on the factors other than the quality of the product.

Of course, something as trivial as shopping for shampoo highlights a serious social problem. Visual design today is leveraged almost exclusively for propagandistic purposes by the seller, and almost never to help individuals make better decisions. Public signage and the nutritional facts labels seem to be the only examples of visual design used for public good.

Shampoos can be differentiated by a consumer by:

Listed ingredients
Smell
Color
Size of the bottle
Color of the bottle
Texture of the bottle
Price
Price per unit
Name
Typefaces used on packaging
Layout of the label
Marketing blurb
User-experience
Long term user-experience
Shopping environment of where it is purchased
Shelf placement

We are almost done booking our trip. We’ll be going to Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong this spring. The airplane tickets are already bought, and the hotels are reserved. Now we only have to get train and plane tickets for travel within China. In Beijing, we’ll be staying at the awesome looking Hotel Kapok.

…an incredible device that opens incredible possibilities — an open reconfigurable hardware platform with an SDK kit! It’s a beginning of something really big and fresh in the world of consumer electronics. Pre-ordering starts on Monday, with first units getting shipped on March 17th. The first modules include a gps, an lcd screen, a webcam and a motion sensor…with more to come.

more details here
engadget video

Today I got an incredible urge to eat pickled herring.