I’m just learning about Dear Photograph which asks you to “take a picture of a picture from the past in the present.”  Pretty cool! This sure does make the past a rich memory! Now I need to find a site that does this with video!

DearPhotograph

2 more images after the jump.

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I’m heading out to SF towards Sebastopol for a new unconference that I have never been to but was incredibly excited to be invited to  FooCamp (Friends of O’Reiley) which is an invitational camp, where 250 awesome people, hackers, designers, creators, makers, and questioners  gather to come up with whatever is on their mind and have great discussions with people from all over the world from different fields to boggle your mind! I’ve had quite a few friends attend and everyone seems to be energized full of ideas and disruptive ones when they return from this 3 day backyard camp gathering. There is not much online about it, but here is a write up from our friends Andrew on his experience a few years ago! I’ll be back next week with lots to write up about, and keep secret at times. Let me know if your in SF. I’m out there right before Foocamp this week.

(picture from laughingsquid)

I’ve been waiting to visit Jay Walkers incredible “Library of Imagination” for several years now and in about 12 hours I’ll be inside pondering, wondering, imagining, and wishing I could take everyone along. I’d write more about it, but the 2008 TED video above or the Wired article will explain it best until after I return, though I’ll have no photos as this is not allowed during my visit. I’ll have to thank TEDmed for arranging this visit, which is also a must go to conference I highly recommend.

According to Wikipedia:
“Before its acquisition by Google, the gmail.com domain name was used by a free e-mail service offered by Garfield.com, online home of the comic strip Garfield.”

Interesting how things work out. I wonder what the alternatives were? goomail, gomail, Omail, etc

A follow up from the TEDxCambridge event I co-organized: Chandler Burr, the New York Times perfume critic from 2006-2010, is the Director and Curator of the Center of Olfactory Art at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. In his TedxCambridge talk he speaks about eating scent and smelling food.

Mesmerizing video!!!

“Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and (seemingly) random motion.

For more details see this link

The period of one complete cycle of the dance is 60 seconds. The length of the longest pendulum has been adjusted so that it executes 51 oscillations in this 60 second period. The length of each successive shorter pendulum is carefully adjusted so that it executes one additional oscillation in this period. Thus, the 15th pendulum (shortest) undergoes 65 oscillations.

Our apparatus was built from a design published by Richard Berg [Am J Phys 59(2), 186-187 (1991)] at the University of Maryland. The particular apparatus shown here was built by our own Nils Sorensen.”

via youtube

Wow! Watch this video to learn how to make use of a tiny 258 square foot apartment though the spacious balcony helps out for sure.

“When Christian Schallert isn’t cooking, dressing, sleeping or eating, his 24 square meter (258 square feet) apartment looks like an empty cube. To use a piece of furniture, he has to build it.

Apartment designed by Barbara Appolloni.
Original story here.
Youtube video.

Located in Barcelona’s hip Born district, the tiny apartment is a remodeled pigeon loft. Christian says its design was inspired by the space-saving furniture aboard boats, as well as the clean lines of a small Japanese home.”

A follow up from the TEDxCambridge event I co-organized:  Chef, writer, and recipe developer Kenji Lopez-Alt explains how he got into the business of questioning conventional cooking wisdom and shares some of the more surprising insights he has discovered.

I thought I’d start this week off with a great short talk from our friend August on design thinking in the 21st century which I highly agree with and wished more designers thought about these points…especially about what is user centered design and is it needed…so here I go in sharing it… boom!

via youtube
mix11 conference

Some great notes taken from designer Amanda Wright.  Read the rest (another 10 pages) on mymodernmet.com. Also tons of other amazing sketches on Amanda’s flickr page.
(thanks MikeM)
(sketch notes mirrored after jump)

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“When film critic Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw to cancer, he lost the ability to eat and speak. But he did not lose his voice. In a moving talk from TED2011, Ebert and his wife, Chaz, with friends Dean Ornish and John Hunter, come together to tell his remarkable story.”

Last year I helped organized TEDxCambridge and starting this week we’ll be releasing a few of the amazing talks held during that event.

“Neuroscientist Don Katz uses experiments with rats to shed light on where taste preferences come from and, when it comes to food, why we like what we like.”
via YouTube