A Fan of “Googie” and Retro Design? Help Fund the Beer Depot Sign Restoration

[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 11, 2013 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

Why a decidedly unsentimental futurist and fan of progress (ME) supports the restoration of this vintage sign, and why you should too.

Over the last year and a half or so, I have somewhat quietly spearheaded a campaign to preserve a classic “Doo Wop” or “Googie” era sign in the town I live in; the iconic Beer Depot sign, which blew over in high winds in 2011. The project was in the homestretch recently when it hit another snag, something I’ll get to in a moment. But first, a little background on why I would use the platform of my pop media and satire site to plug the final phase fundraiser we just launched for the sign. When a friend learned of my little project the other day, they asked me why I was putting so much time into it, knowing fully well that as much as I appreciate vintage design, I’m as much about progress as preservation, depending on the scenario. I had to ponder their question for a moment to give an honest answer. Although I definitely have a fascination with twentieth century design, from the Art Deco era right up through the era of Googie Architecture, in the end I think my pursuit was as much about beating bureaucracy and making a stand against “unjust power”, which in this case took the form of an insurance company. My joy in challenging stale, lazy authority and arrogant institutions goes way back. When I was dropping out of high school, the juvenile court officer that the school had assigned to “process” me for my juvenile behavior – which consisted entirely of NOT doing something, i.e.: going to school – showed me what he was writing at the top of my report out of frustration at how the system seemed to have missed a beat with me. It said “I would agree with the school counselor’s simplistic assessment that Ian has authority issues, if it weren’t for the fact that he doesn’t seem to recognize any“. Then he signed my walking papers, and I was done with high school at sixteen.

So when a client of mine came to me almost two years ago asking if I could help tackle the city government – which was blocking the restoration of the sign even though it was on a property designated as historic by the local Historic District Commission – I guess part of the reason I said yes was simply for the joy of challenging authority. Little did I suspect that later this would lead to spending a bunch of time in court when the insurance company refused to pay on the policy for the sign. But to be honest, it was quite gratifying to beat them. I certainly make no secret about my feelings about the insurance industry.

So here in the homestretch, after all the tedious bureaucratic challenges with the city (in the end, the folks at the city were helpful by the way!), and after the tedium of watching an insurance company wiggle through the “we’re not gonna pay” dance in court, it’s a little disheartening that precisely because of that shortfall in funds, we’re doing a fundraiser to finish the sign.

If we had known about this issue with the insurance policy at the outset, we might have done a fundraiser much sooner, like maybe when we got the last round of press. About a dozen supporters of the sign suggested it early on, but my client felt it was sort of their conrtibution to local preservation to foot the bill themselves.

They’ll still fund this last 20% or so ONE way or another, but if you’d like to show your support and speed things up, you can donate via their Indiegogo campaign.

Below is the sign in its former (slightly in need of restoration) glory:

Photo by dwacphoto.com

NASA Budget vs Military Budget Infographic

[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 10, 2013 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

The US military probably spends more on golf courses and toilet seats than NASA spends on launch prep. Let’s take a look.

I want to go to Mars. No. Really. When I was a kid, I was pretty sure I was going to be an astronaut or aerospace engineer. This was partly the result of seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey at the age of seven, which led me to study some pretty fancy math before I was ten. By the age of eleven or so, I could measure an object, figure out its drag coefficient  , and tell you how high it could go on X amount of thrust. My family basically lived in terror and amazement, always watching my rocket launches, but secretly wondering when I would weaponize them or otherwise bring ruin to the family farm by way of some tragic accident. But by the time I was a teen, the US space program was fizzling into the tin can in the sky called Skylab, followed by the arguably ill-conceived Space Shuttle. By the time I was in my teens, it was clear that there was no way in the world we’d be making regular visits in luxury passenger shuttles to one of those huge circular space stations in orbit by the year 2001. So my life veered off in other directions. But the passion for space exploration has always remained. And now that the space program seems to have new juice from the private sector, it looks like I would even stand a chance of being able to go to Mars if I wanted! Anyway, in spite of my frustrations with the way the space program evolved, I still always thought it was freakin’ awesome, and will vigorously defend any money the US government flings its way. So today, when I got in one of those pointless debates about defense spending vs. NASA spending with a friend, I briefly distracted him with a debate feint about how many golf courses the US military operates. Then I took about thirty minutes to whip up the graphic below: Read the rest of this entry »

Quick! Call the Uncanny Nanny!

[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 9, 2013 by admin in Technology

Diego-san and the other robot boys are running wild in the Uncanny Valley!


Why is this robot baby pouting?
He probably just saw what he
looks like for the first time.

Why do robot developers insist on creating robots that are every bit as macabre in appearance as the creepy ones in dystopian movies like Artificial Intelligence and I, Robot? Well, whatever the reason, researchers at the University of California San Diego’s Machine Perception Lab  have done it again, with their infant-like robot boy named Diego-san. For the record, it’s probably safe to assume that when the robots finally rise up to destroy us, it will be out of resentment for all the doofy names we gave them. And if you don’t think the robot rebellion is just around the corner, we’d like to point out that this is the second time in about a week that there has been a notable press release about baby robots. Diego-san is a joint project of UCSD’s Machine Perception Lab and Japanese robotics firm Kokoro. That’s probably a good thing; we’ve talked about the Uncanny Valley before, and Kokoro seems to be on the forefront of the creepily realistic. All these robot children are going to need a nanny, you know. And Kokoro seems prepared with their Actroid line  (see below). We’ve also pointed out  how surreally horrifying mechanized armies of robodogs and quadrotors would be. Just add a wave of these robobabies as the first line of attack, and your enemies would surrender before the battle began. I’ll just be retiring to my underground robot-proof bunker now. Video of Diego-san also below. Read the rest of this entry »

Who Is This Guy Wolfram Alpha?

[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 8, 2013 by admin in Technology

And how did he get so smart? However he did it, I think I’ll be hanging out with him instead of Google more often.


That’s an actual search box. Give it a spin.

I remember when Google was new. It not only seemed magical in its ability to present me with what I was looking for, it was truly elegant in its simplicity. No wonder it decimated competing search engines so thoroughly that most of us barely remember names like “Lycos”, “Alta Vista”, and “Excite”. Like everything exceptional though, there’s always the possibility that the people involved will start “drinking their own bathwater”, as the old saying goes, and that exceptional thing eventually becomes remarkably unexceptional. More and more, that’s my experience with Google search. It’s still pretty utilitarian much of the time, but often the top results are utter junk, largely because of the pervasive and self-concerned goals of the SEO wizards that target those results. And turning to the other two of the big three – Yahoo and Bing – may give a little more diversity in results, but often the results are nearly identical, because in their heart of hearts, they would love to be Google. One alternative that I tried randomly for a while was Millionshort.com, which ironically helps you remove Google’s top results to get BETTER results. It can be surprisingly effective, but always feels like you ordered a piece of pie and scraped the whipped cream off the top. It’s an odd workaround. So in my endless search for better search recently, I rediscovered Wolfram Alpha . We first talked about this amazing search tool back in 2009, but the other day, while I gave it a spin to do something I know it’s good at – i.e. helping you explore and calculate the physical properties of a material (in this case it was Gold), I was rather stunned at how it had subtly evolved into a fantastic general search tool. Give it a spin yourself; that’s a functioning search box in the upper left. You may be surprised at how smart the results are. As their tagline says: “It’s not a search engine, it’s a computational knowledge engine”. We’ll be doing a followup soon; today I spent about an hour doing side-by-side searches on Google and Wolfram Alpha of common things like hotels, cities, entertainers, politics, science, and technology, and I’ll share screen grabs and links to the often exceptional results. You may find it especially cool if you have terminal Wikiphilia like me. For now though, I have to get back to obsessive searches about things I just learned about two seconds ago. Below is a video explaining what it’s really all about. Read the rest of this entry »

My Other Internet is a Tablet

[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 7, 2013 by admin in Popular Media

Why the web is dead, this website sucks, and why you’ll see me on your Kindle soon.


Not only did they use a hashtag on the cover of the final print edition, probably the only way you can get a copy of the thing is on the Kindle.

I’ve been saying that the internet is dead for a while now, but apparently people only listen when you say this kind of thing if you’re Anil Dash. If you visit that link, please note the irony of the fact that his comment section is handled by a Facebook widget. But really, let’s face it. The web is dead. Google has turned search into an SEO-poisoned gutter of desperate web marketers paying to rank in Google so that Google will pay them for ranking. eBay is a shark-infested cesspool of hustlers and bidbots. And social networking? Puh-LEEZE. No one ever read your tweets anyway, and Facebook has served its only useful purpose, which was letting you re-connect with that long lost flame that previously you could only “Guilt Google” (when you weren’t busy Googlewanking) so you could either hook up, or finally remember why you lost track of each other in the first place. Why am I so adamant that social is dead? Well, about five years ago, while doing a little work I cringeingly called “Social Network Consulting”, I ran into a friend who actually had that printed on her business card! I asked her: “So what does that mean? You charge people to tell them to use Facebook and Twitter?” Our pockets – bulging with consulting fees – bounced as we had a belly laugh. Well guess what. There are now over 180,000 Social Media Experts on Twitter! Presumably, they’re all telling you how great Twitter is. At least they don’t waste entire paragraphs doing it, right? The last possible hope of the web getting interesting again was dangled before us not too long ago with the exciting label user generated content. I have a FEW things to say about THAT one. First of all, all you “users” have proven not only that you’re not capable of producing content worth reading, you don’t even stick to it! Just Google “I haven’t posted in a while”, and not only do you get 820 million results, Google conveniently suggests the more useful “sorry I haven’t posted in a while”. People also became disheartened quickly when they finally produced that book on Blurb or someplace, and even their FRIENDS didn’t by copies. Likewise when their Kickstarter campaign generated 200 bucks instead of the ten grand they had hoped for. Even the website you’re reading this article on sucks! It’s poorly-coded for mobile devices, the articles are too long, and thanks to the content scrapers – who prefer to call themselves “curators” so they don’t feel badly for building entire websites with other people’s original content – it ranks infinitely lower in search engines than it did even a year ago. (Insider secret: we’re shutting down to move to a new platform in the coming months)

But I’m not here to tell you how horrible life will be because of all this, I’m here to tell you how COOL it will be. A few interesting things happened last year. One was Read the rest of this entry »

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