Category Archives for Reviews

No Fill Marks?

This short video (3.5 minutes) is for people who own French press coffee makers AS WELL AS designers and anyone interested in innovation and creativity. It also uses a mind map you can explore while learning some proximity thinking at the same time!

I’m trying an iPhone app called TimeGolden. So far, so good.

I’m trying this iPhone app called TimeGolden. It’s for figuring out how you spend your time, among other things. Pretty interesting so far. If you can deal with all the Help info written by a non-native English speaker, you can learn it with a little playing around. So far I like it.

Here’s what the developer says about it on the app store: “Quantified Self Time Tracking — TimeGolden is a new generation of time management tool which adopts TimeStamp tracing mode, and has virtues of to-do list and mind mapping etc.”

I really like this iPhone journaling app called Everyday.me.

I really like this iPhone journaling app called Everyday.me. It’s visually appealing and well-organized. It’s intuitive. And the best part is the tags. You can tag every journal entry with multiple tags. So then you can also later filter your posts by tags. I’m using it for journaling and also to keep track of things that I’ve done, thought or felt by tagging them.

“How much does your building weigh, Mr. Foster?” is freaking brilliant

If you love creativity, if you love culture, if you love intelligence, if you love life, you will probably love this documentary. Oh, and the architecture is exquisite too. Thank you Norman Foster.

Later, on 2/12/2013 …

I’ve watched this three times now. For me, it’s an astonishing, beautiful film.

It’s well-crafted, well-written, well-edited, well-photographed and well-narrated. You get a sense of Norman, and the arc of his career. But it’s more than just about an architect. It’s about being a human being. And it’s about humans working together.

The icing on the cake is the music. This wonderful original score, written by Joan Valent, is integrated throughout the film. But his music near the end, that carries through the credits, had me in tears.

I’m Watching Guns, Germs and Steel on Netflix

Jared Diamond wants to know what created such massive differences in power between civilizations.

So far, it seems to be a pretty persuasive argument, that geography helped create compelling competitive advantages for some groups of people, that continued to compound. Well, I guess geography plus germs.

But I’m afraid it’s not going to ask what I think is a more interesting question: Why don’t people treat each other better? Or perhaps more productively, under what conditions do people treat each other better?

I’ll probably write a bit more after I finish watching the series.

Finished it. I would recommend this series.

Diamond repeatedly says he began this work over 30 years ago. That strikes a chord with me. I began work on proximity thinking over 35 years ago.

The difference of course is, that no one understands my work yet. And no one supports my work. And no one believes in me.

That’s why I’ve been working on ways to put the ideas into action. Pretty much all my projects, and my art, relate to proximity thinking in one way or another.