Best burgers in NYC
A list of excellent hamburgers to be found in NYC. For more on NYC burgers, check out A Hamburger Today. I still maintain that NYC isn’t a burger town, although with all the recent activity, it may be one soon.
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kottke.org posts about lists
Esquire jumps the gun on the whole
Esquire jumps the gun on the whole end of the year best-of lists thing and names their favorite new restaurants of 2005, with Danny Meyer’s The Modern taking the top spot. Worth reading if only for the sidebar item on “wired and tired” dining trends.
Forbes has a list of 10 chef “tastemakers”,
Forbes has a list of 10 chef “tastemakers”, including Thomas Keller, Alain Ducasse, and Grant Achatz.
7 Habits of Highly Successful People. I think
7 Habits of Highly Successful People. I think this may be one of my favorite McSweeney’s lists ever. (Crap, the McSweeney’s RSS feed doesn’t seem to be working properly…gotta check into that later.)
Epicurious lists ten hated restaurant trends. “To
Epicurious lists ten hated restaurant trends. “To enjoy the brioche bread pudding, it’s really not necessary to know the name of the farm that supplied the eggs.” (via tmn)
The list of the 100 greatest theorems in
The list of the 100 greatest theorems in mathematics is topped by The Irrationality of the Square Root of 2 from that nutball Pythagoras. Jesus, who does Godel have to sleep with to get higher on this list…I mean, all the man did was destroy math! (I know, I know, oversimplification, please don’t send me any email….) (via cyn-c)
Stefan Sagmeister
I quite enjoyed Sagmeister’s presentation on happiness…where else but a design conference would you find a talk on that topic?[1] Early in, he suggested that visualizing happiness with design is easy (photos of someone laughing or a smiley face will do it) but that creating design that provokes happiness in the viewer is something else entirely. He then shared three designs that have made him happy recently:
- Emma Gasson made a day-planner with room for 82 years, the current life expectancy of a British citizen. It looked to be about a foot thick.
- Omnivisu. Richard The and Willy Sengewald constructed a kiosk in Berlin with video cameras inside. When you look into the kiosk through the viewfinder (very much like peering into a pair of binoculars), the cameras record your eyes and beam the video to a nearby location where the images are projected onto a building which rather looks like it’s got a head. When you blink into the kiosk, the building’s head blinks also.
- Ji Lee pastes empty speech bubbles over advertisements on the streets of Manhattan, people often fill them in, and Lee returns to photograph the results.
Sagmeister wrapped up his talk with a list of things he has learned and how he’s used that list in a recent series of projects:
- “everything i do always comes back to me”
- “trying to look good limits my life”
- “everybody thinks they are right”
- “money does not make me happy”
- “thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. i have to live now”
- “complaining is silly. act or forget.”
- “having guts always works out for me”
“Complaining is silly…” is my favorite, both as advice and his implementation of the design. A few of these are in this video shot by Hillman Curtis.
[1] Ok, maybe at a clown conference, but still.
20 courses I didn’t take in design school
As part of the conference within a conference for students, Michael Bierut listed 20 courses he did not take in design school (I think I got all of them):
Semiotics
Contemporary Performance Art
Traffic Engineering
The Changing Global Financial Marketplace
Urban planning
Sex Education
Early Childhood Development
Economics of Commerical Aviation
Biography as History
Introduction to Horticulture
Sports Marketing in Modern Media
Modern Architecture
The 1960s: Culture and Conflict
20th Century American Theater
Philanthropy and Social Progress
Fashion Merchandising
Studies in Popular Culture
Building Systems Engineering
Geopolitics, Military Conflict, and the Cultural Divide
Political Science: Electoral Politics and the Crisis of Democracy
His point was that design is just one part of the job. In order to do great work, you need to know what your client does. How do you design for new moms if you don’t know anything about raising children? Not very well, that’s how. When I was a designer, my approach was to treat the client’s knowledge of their business as my biggest asset…the more I could get them to tell me about what their product or service did and the people it served (and then talk to those people, etc.), the better it was for the finished product. Clients who didn’t have time to talk, weren’t genuinely engaged in their company’s business, or who I couldn’t get to open up usually didn’t get my best work.
Bierut’s other main point is, wow, look at all this cool stuff you get to learn about as a designer. If you’re a curious person, you could do worse than to choose design as a profession.
A list of twenty-eight design aphorisms to
A list of twenty-eight design aphorisms to consider before attending the AIGA conference.
Five things I’d ask every Supreme Court
Five things I’d ask every Supreme Court nominee if I sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee: “If you knew to an absolute moral certainty that you could capture and consume a live infant without being caught, how many do you suppose you could eat in a weekend?”
You’ve got to love an article called
You’ve got to love an article called The Ten Stupidest Utopias. In regard to the Internet, he says “utopia is never more than what we are; the people in them will always be just like us”.
Top 10 cheap marketing ploys to increase sales
Top 10 cheap marketing ploys to increase sales of comic books, but as noted in the comments, a sufficiently generalized version of this list would work in many instances.
A list of cliches in advertising, including “
A list of cliches in advertising, including “tortilla chips are the most exciting experience any group of young people can experience”. The list is UK-centric, but still pretty good.
10 good reasons to eat local food. Having
10 good reasons to eat local food. Having eaten local food for the better part of the last week, I can personally attest to some of these benefits. (via afb)
Near the end of his article entitled
Near the end of his article entitled A War to Be Proud Of, Christopher Hitchens offers 10 reasons why the war in Iraq was successful. (via 3qd)
Plastic recently considered the question of perfect
Plastic recently considered the question of perfect albums, those where every song is great and you never want to skip over them. Philip compiled a list of the responses; Radiohead’s OK Computer and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue came out on top.
Totalitarian Institutions That Would Have Been More
Totalitarian Institutions That Would Have Been More Fitting for George Orwell’s 1984, Considering How That Year Turned Out. “The Ministry of the Beef, and Where It Currently Is”.
Art experts choose 10 of the worst paintings hanging in Britain.
Art experts choose 10 of the worst paintings hanging in Britain.
This list of ten steps to building
This list of ten steps to building a successful Web 2.0 company is really quite insightful. #3 is a favorite: “Launch. Now. Tomorrow. Everyday.”
Ten things created in the last ten
Ten things created in the last ten years that Ian could do without.
Klingon fairy tales, including “The Hare Foolishly
Klingon fairy tales, including “The Hare Foolishly Lowers His Guard and Is Devastated by the Tortoise, Whose Prowess in Battle Attracts Many Desirable Mates” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb. It Was Delicious”. These are best when you think of them as spoken by Worf from ST:TNG.
Ten ways in which MMORPGs will change
Ten ways in which MMORPGs will change the future. “For now let’s just say it’s the most instantly gripping, involving and demanding entertainment technology ever invented. The addiction rate appears to be about twice that of crack Cocaine.”
A table of gas prices from around
A table of gas prices from around the world. A gallon of gas in Amsterdam is $6.48 while it’s only $0.12 in Venezuela. It’s always so weird to see these types of lists where the US has more in common with Third World and non-democratic countries than with Europe, Japan, etc. (via rw)
Ten precepts from The Art of War
Ten precepts from The Art of War that never made it past Sun Tzu’s editor. Ex: “When you sally forth to meet the enemy, show your contempt for him by the haughtiness of your prance”.
Among Roger Ebert’s most hated films are
Among Roger Ebert’s most hated films are Catwoman, Baby Geniuses, Battlefield Earth, and The Usual Suspects(?!?). About North, he says: “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie.”
A list of the NBA’s most overrated
A list of the NBA’s most overrated players, including Karl Malone, David Robinson, Charles Barkley, and Patrick Ewing. (via truehoop)
Billboard is now tracking the top-selling ringtones.
Billboard is now tracking the top-selling ringtones. The list seems to track pretty close to the top singles list. Well, except for the Super Mario Bros theme song ringtone. (via rw)
An annotated synopsis of 100 People Who Are
An annotated synopsis of 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, a book by Bernard Goldberg. Latrell Sprewell is #30?
Tim (via email): Jon Stewart interviewed Goldberg on The Daily Show.
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