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By Erich Vieth on December 05th, 2009
How to make a puzzle
Scott Kim, a guru of puzzle-making, gave this delightful talk at TED on how to design a puzzle. Also check out some of Kim’s work at Shufflebrain.com.
Tag: "design"
By Tony Coyle on May 04th, 2009
Humans are so well designed!
I saw this snippet on my New Scientist RSS feed. Some researchers, investigating methods to improve IVF success rates, have discovered that contrary to popular belief, chromosomal abnormalities, and hence miscarriages, are not abnormal occurrences, but are in fact the norm.
As women age, their eggs are more likely to have the wrong number of chromosomes, which can lead to miscarriages. But when Joris Vermeersch from the Centre for Human Genetics in Leuven, Belgium, and colleagues examined 23 embryos from nine young, fertile couples who were undergoing IVF for screening purposes, they found that 21 had chromosomal abnormalities, suggesting these are in fact the norm (Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/nm.1924).
I can only presume god was just being mean when he said ‘go forth and multiply’ - since he must have known that our ability to multiply was broken.
By Erich Vieth on February 10th, 2009
You too can be part of the Web 2.0 (if you’re willing to invest time and money on technology).
I was born in 1956, when ordinary people had far fewer opportunities to communicate their ideas to mass markets. For most of my adult life, there were only a few choices to get the word out. You could send out mass mailings or you could hit the telephones, dialing number after number. You could hang paper flyers on telephone poles and fences. You could knock on doors and talk to the folks house by house. Or you could stand on a soapbox and shout your ideas.
These traditional “techniques” are still available and they are still sometimes quite effective, at least to those with hordes of volunteers at their service. The Internet, however, has opened up many additional possibilities for spreading your ideas far and wide. With that great power, however, comes serious responsibility to spend the time to obtain a working knowledge of the underlying technology. How many bloggers are out there now? At least 100 million.
Being a proficient user of a word processor is only the first step. Putting your written work on your own website also requires you to understand at least the basic tools of blogging software. With those two steps, you might already be on a big slippery slope.
Many people are perfectly happy blogging on a free site such as LiveJournal MSN’s Spaces or Google’s Blogger, or one of the many sites with low fees as long as your traffic is modest (e.g., Typepad). Choosing to place your blog with one of these simple on-line sites keeps things really easy. You needn’t ever load any software or maintain the “backend” of your blog.
In 2006, I suspected that I would want to take advantage of many modern day multi-media tools. That’s why I chose to base my blog on WordPress. Going with WordPress allowed me to take advantage of numerous constantly evolving add-ons. I chose it because it kept my site flexible for using multimedia technology that, in return for its flexibility, can require a substantial investment in time. If you’re like me, you will thus develop a love/hate relationship to the flexible do-it-yourself blogging software and the many multi-media tools that allow you to feed your blog in sophisticated ways. You’ll become enthralled with the power these things give you to package your ideas. But you might also become frustrated when you see how much time it takes to learn to make proficient use of these tools.
Here’s an ironic twist: Since 2006, the free online sites now allow you to easily incorporate many kinds of images, sounds and video on blogs. Therefore, if you aren’t exceedingly greedy for technology or traffic, you can now have it all. Yet you’ll still need to decide how much multi-media to incorporate into your blog, even if it’s free and simple. Therefore, much of this post applies to all of us who have decided to jump into the world of blogging.
Featured • Media • Software • Technology • photography
By Erich Vieth on January 23rd, 2009
Dangerous Intersection is under construction - and a note about Gravatar
As you can tell, there have been quite a few changes to the site design of Dangerous Intersection. There are many more changes to come.
Therefore, if you see something that looks not quite right for the next couple of weeks, we’re probably working on it. It’s taken many hours of work–I now know ten times as much about WordPress as I did one month ago. But it’s also been fun and educational. WordPress is a most impressive system, with perhaps too many choices. Too many choices, did I say?
Sign up for Gravatar!
You can personalize your comments with your own image. Truly, it’s EASY. It will take 5 minutes at most, assuming you have an image of yourself ready. It’s totally free.
With Gravatar, you have total control over the image you’d like to use as author of comments (your photo will be displayed next to each comment you make). You can change it any time you want, Total control. Ownership society!
Just visit Gravatar
- Set up an account with the email address you normally use when you leave comments and choose a password
By Erich Vieth on January 07th, 2009
We’re going to evolve
We’re all evolving in many ways, but I’m specifically referring to the design of this website.
In the near future we will start implementing a new “magazine” design that allows us to feature some of our articles and to more easily integrate images and text. It will also provide new navigation tools. I’m also looking for [...]
By Erich Vieth on December 19th, 2008
Daniel Dennett puts Rick Warren’s brand of religion under the microscope
In this 2006 lecture at TED, philosopher Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell) takes on the “brilliant” contemporary redesign of religion by Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life. After acknowledging that Warren’s book is, indeed, “brilliant” (it has sold 30 million copies and motivated comparable numbers of people), Dennett pointedly criticizes some of the [...]
