[This is an actual email sent to my Transportation Design classmates and teachers]

I may have found the ultimate tool for creating the “bubble” or “memo” maps Shook introduced us to in Trans 4 this week; and what’s best, sharing them for active feedback: Bubbl.us That is, hands-on editing by those you choose. The obvious advantages of making the bubble map on this website/program are several:

Z. Automatic arranging and coloring of bubbles by levels.
Y. Manual rearranging of bubbles at any time, both in placement and hierarchy.
X. Shows primary and secondary connections between bubbles distinctively.
W. Shows direction of connections.
V. Option for exporting to high resolution JPEG, perfect for printing any size.

The less obvious but with most potential feature is the ability to share bubble maps with coleagues, and give either read-only or full edit access. The latter, in my opinion, can be especially useful throughout the semester in Trans 4 and I encourage all of you to try it out. Registration is easy through the invitation email I am sending you right after this one. (And no, I don’t get commission or anything from this :))

[Via Download Squad]

Presentation Zen is a long-posts blog packed with tips for PowerPoint presentations in general. While I find it all extremely interesting, the more humorous bits may be more of your liking. Below and inside is a hilarious chart and the Demetri Martin stand-up video where it came from. And a couple other things.

[Presentation Zen found via Colblindor]

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With the excuse of this spectacular multiphotograph of a solar eclipse [via Neatorama], I repost a thought on the phenomena from 2003 (below).

There’s something more fascinating in sun eclipses than the eclipse itself

Sun eclipses occur because and only because the combination of the diameter of the moon, the diameter of the sun, and the distance between the sun and the moon and between the moon and us is perfect. If just one of these values were different, sun eclipses simply wouldn’t exist on Earth. It looks like it has been calculated to the milimeter by… coincidence? No comment.

“Mathematics have demonstrated that (…) if we have a sample of severall million people —and free time—, we will certainly be able to find a relation between the hair color and anxiety, or the hip perimeter and interest in movies, for example.”

Two extracts of “El alma está en el cerebro” (The soul is in the brain) by Eduardo Punset [wiki]

“Let’s suppose we have two groups of population, A and B in which a statistical analisys on height is going to be made. Both groups, A and B are very similar in this matter, but the average height of A is 1,70 meters, slightly above that of B, which is 1,72 meters. This average could be due, for example, to the occasional presence of nine basketball players in group B, whose height is more than 2,15 meters, while in group A there is only one person who surpasses that height. A news headline could read: “90% of the people who surpass 2,15 meters belong to group B”. The headline is perfectly correct, but if we came down to the details, we would observe that the gross of both groups measure the same. If we only focused on that detail, we would extract a wrong idea of the situation. Change the height for the annual income or other scales and we see how advantage can be taken from statistics in order to justify or fight economical decisions or of social politics.”

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That’s what I’ve got for you, in case someone still doesn’t have a Gmail account yet

Are they planning to open registrations to the public? Are they going to stop giving it for free? The whole Gmail invitation thing lost its sense quite a while ago when everyone noticed it’s tiring to find 6 new friends every week. But today Google went even more absurd by giving away up to 50 Gmail invitations to almost every user. And here they are. If you want one for you or for your mom or for your pet, just leave a comment below and I’ll send it away. No need to put your email in the comments field, just fill in the email field and say hello. What if their plans were to expect massive giveaways like this?

This is a little story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.

Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.

Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job.

Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it.

It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done .

Writers are an intriguing race. They seem to have a special interest in helping each other work better, more efficiently. They’d be happy to know they may be actually helping everybody

Myself, I love writing; I really enjoy essay-writing tasks in my english classes. But when it comes to writing for myself, I’m all lazy. Some months ago I bought a book with a very appealing title and more interesting content: Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life (in Spanish, The Pleasure and Right to Write); an easy-reading bunch of advices and strategies that encourage the shy writer start a career or just a vital hobby. Here’s the exciting part of it: I’m all lazy for EVERY SINGLE aspect of life and I found out that I could mentally change the books’ sentences by swapping words like “write”, “writer”, “writing” into things like “draw”, “designer”, “do the washing”, “work”, “be nice to your girl”, etc., and the advices/strategies still kept the meaning/usefulness!!!. This other list of 50 Strategies For Making Yourself Work â€â€�also targeted to writersâ€â€� [via Jenneth] also works as an insightful source of help no matter if you are an idle writer, business advisor, industrial designer, artist or tennis female player (…oops).

Why haven’t I been checking Gearbits.com more? Entries like this one about the great decision about either consuming or producing information justify adding this blog to my regular visits

It’s okay if you don’t bother to do the same but at least do read The Great Decision: Consume or Produce, a story with which I feel very much identified.

The latest kind of blog-attacking spam just revived passions in my heart against/for this industry

I’m sure the automatic notification email sent to AVTG’s suscribers will go directly to the spam folder due to the awkward repetition of the word spam in this post about spam. You are free to stop reading if you feel spammed at this point. Gearbits.com (Craig Froehle) is the first blog I’ve heard of receiving trackback spam attacks (just after myself). This happens when bloggers around the world seemed to have eradicated comment spam attacks. I’m experiencing all this drama too but apart from the obvious I’m-highly-annoyed rant, I have to say that I feel the same morbid interest for the people/strategy/technology behind the spam industry as I have always felt for the virus/antivirus industry. I mean, it keeps freaking me out that they are actual industries with big money involved. There’s nothing I’d love to see more than Michael Moore’s approach to the topic :). Seriously!

In case you didn’t know, Orbital music duo name comes from London’s orbital highway. Or maybe you just know the highway but not the music.

I found this edition of Ian Sinclair’s London Orbital book (said a bestseller) with a nicer looking cover using the big “O” symbol some Orbital albums had on their covers. To round off this entry, here’s a link to a live Orbital concert beginning with a song called the most popular sign in London: Way Out.

A must-have extra for your fridge with way more interactivity than a magnet chess game

I first saw a fridge full of tiny magnets with one word each at a party this weekend, but it seems it’s an invention from a Swedish company that’s being sold since 1998 and received the “Gift of the year” award in 2000. The 510 magnets contain all kinds of verbs, nouns, pronouns, etc., and many spare letters, suffixes and prefixes that you combine to build and rebuild sentences every time you need cold milk (all in standard Times New Roman). Visit the spanish website (Frigopoesía) or google fridge poetry.

Another opportunity for this weblog

Not updated since April, Avantglance’com â€â€�a site born in early 2003â€â€�, was a wannabee cool magazine… with a much-loved by-me interface and updated through static HTML XD. Now with all this blog mania I have finally decided to modernize my publishing methods and therefore standarize the design. Thanks to WordPress this site is now more enjoyable to blog into. Fernando and I will try again to tell things worth whoever-wants-to-read-us’ precious time. Big welcome to you all!

By the way, all the entries from the past are still here, but as you will see most are a bit outdated or oldfashioned. Here’s a list of some (still) interesting ones:

The T.N.K. beat: John Lennon’s rare “Tomorrow Never Knows� beat in four flavours
Radio3: Listen to this radio station, watch MTV, and you get the whole idea of 21st century music
War by kids: Children are supposed to have a special ability to see things with an amazingly naive yet quite enlightening point of view
Guggenheim in Rio: Jean Nouvel has designed an incredible building for the new Guggenheim Museum in Rio
Megalomania: I always find quite satisfying to find something I can beat a world record with
Incomprehensible: There’s something more fascinating in sun eclipses than the eclipse itself

(A quick thought)

More important than advantages or disadvantages, people’s approach to globalisation and the other symtoms of present and past history progresses is what really counts.

Where else could you find a store with no name than in SOHO?

After a lot of money and time hours Rem Koolhaas opened some years ago a huge Prada store there. I’m not sure if it really works as a shop because you only see tourists making photos… but that’s not the point. (more…)