thinksketch

Yes, but you wouldn't have to use tilt scrolling in those conditions. Tilt-scrolling would be disabled by default. When the conditions were appropriate, you could opt to enable it simply by holding your finger on the screen for two seconds. (Touch scrolling would always be enabled.) Maybe a quick tap on the screen might turn off tilt-scrolling so that if your conditions changed, you could disable it before you lost your place.

If you were in a train that was accelerating, you could choose not to use the feature, or you could just use it while the ride was smooth and quickly switch to touch-only mode when necessary. For slight accelerations, you could also adjust for your environment's movement intuitively much like you naturally tilt a cup of coffee slightly as you move.

I'm always glad to see developments in energy monitoring, but every time I see a tool that monitors a home's power meter it just leaves me wanting to see more.

It seems that what we really need is a cheap electrical socket monitoring device so that we can get real-time data about each appliance in our house read out to a central web-app. It doesn't seem very useful to know your overall electricity usage - your energy bill tells you that. If we're going to do something about using too much power, we need to understand what the culprits are.

I know that there are socket monitors on the market, but why do they all have expensive screens and buttons and stuff? It seems that they should be 10 times cheaper and feed their data straight to a web-app. http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2009/02/11/design/green-des...

Yeah for sure. I've noticed this technique before in some great comedians - for example Andy Kaufman and Will Ferrell. In fact - that was what really got me about Kaufman's bits - the utter lack of blinking. I love how it makes the character seem possessed by some personality outside their own self.

I also think that when we are in conversation with other people, we innately calculate when to blink based on when they blink. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/5925932/Huma...

So of course when that character doesn't blink it genuinely f*cks with out sense of balance in our communication - In the case of comedy, it's hilarious. Maybe in the case of a physical confrontation, it would be threatening instead..

So true. The bane of every creative thinker is the crack of the precious idea. To keep my thinking loose, I keep a blog where I purge all my ideas both great and stupid in order to get them out of my head. The more ideas I get out onto the blog, the more new ones I have.

If working on real projects is exercise for your creative mind, then think of a 'sketch' blog as stretching; it makes your mind limber so you don't get stuck in a brain rut.

Check out my blog to see what I mean - Let my stupid ideas serve as entertainment and inspiration that you have better ones you're still hesitating to share for one reason or another. Let my good ideas serve as brain fodder that you can steal and improve upon.

http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/ "Because Today’s Great Ideas start with Yesterday’s Foolish Thinking"

I agree that the title is misleading. But I think his view is really important. Or maybe better said, it's really important that a great man like Penrose comes out and unequivocally makes this statement to generations who have too often been told to "shut up and just learn the theories".

In college it drove me mad that I could not find any resources to question the "absolute validity" of paradoxes that arose in modern physics. To me, a paradox could not represent a universal truth - it must be seen as an opportunity to understand why our tools are insufficient to fully understand the universe. But the response to my questioning was always "who are you to question 100 years of experts?"

Finally I found one physics professor who confided in me that he too had been trying to start a fertile dialogue about these things, but other professors would just scoff. He felt it was futile at best or career damaging at worst.

So I learned that, truly the 'old experts' took modern theories with a grain of salt - it was only today that we took them so literally. But none of my classmates believed it and they thought I was brash and stupid for bothering to think about it.

For a while, I met with that professor once a month or so to try to steer my knowledge in a direction that wasn't jaded by a blind acceptance of theories that were inconsistent with one another. I hated the feeling that it had to be some half-valid historical truth. It made me feel half-way delusional. It made me lose trust that the academic system would prepare me to really truly think.

I wanted to learn about the paradoxes, the holes in our thinking, how we were wrong, because those are the exciting areas that need development. If you spend your whole education learning fundamentals while detached from the burden of these kinds of questions, how can you be prepared to tackle them once you raise your nose up out of the textbooks?

So yes, it's misleading to make the title, "String Theory and Quantum Mechanics are wrong." But I hope his important point doesn't get lost, that it is also wrong to say that String Theory and Quantum Mechanics are completely right - end of story - no questions." Thank you Roger Penrose for taking this stance loud and clear.

I too developed really bad wrist pain - mine was from too much autocad and solidworks.

My secrets were to: 1. Use a good chair and keyboard tray. always. 2. train my left hand to mouse and switch off 3. use an upright mouse. http://www.evoluent.com/ It's a little expensive, but it's a good product. I now have one for each hand so i can switch off everyone once in a while. 4. Also - wean yourself off the little mouse scroll wheel. Use window zooming for cad and hold down the middle button to scroll on web pages.

This is very cool thank you. I posted earlier today about the need for a better rating system than the five star system. I'm really glad to see you working on a great solution. Thanks!

akamaka, I can understand how my blog might come across as self-important - I know I can be over the top, but that's part of the idea (see the tag line of my blog).

The thing is, I'm writing for a general audience from the point of a general audience. I'm a designer not a programmer. And though I've read lots of articles in wired and on tech blogs about the netflix algorithm, I haven't heard much discussion about viable alternatives to the five star system. Yes, there are articles talking about how the rating system is faulty, and they talk about how to best "work around" the faults of the five star system. But I'm trying to brainstorm alternatives - scrap the system entirely and build an algorithm on something else. I'm sure the ideas are out there, I'm just indignant that as a general audience, we haven't heard about them yet. I'm getting great feedback already. Thanks greatly appreciated.

For such a little UI pattern, the five star system plays an enormous influence on how we see the internet, and the effects of it have a tangible impact offline as well - for example, restaurant traffic influenced by yelp reviews. I've heard a lot of people question how five star reviews influence the range of products that we're exposed to. It seems like an important question to ask. Look and now we've got a good brainstorm going.. Maybe think of my post as a challenge and request for a detailed article from someone who knows their stuff about rating systems and how they effect our everyday life. Cheers -

I like this idea a lot. I also think that once you have some tags, you could extrapolate which movies are likely to fall into those tag categories by seeing which movies people browsed on the site at the same time. You can get this information if you offer one additional step beyond flipping through thumbnails - such as watch a preview. Then with each browsing session you collect data you can use to map genres.

Twitter is the “Atari Pong” of real-time messaging services?

I remember how exciting it was back in February when I started realizing what it meant to have a real-time messaging protocol. http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2009/02/25/design/algorithm...

How magical! Imagine all the strange and wonderful things we could do with it - like water our plants automatically! But I'm going to have to guess that twitter has seen its heyday. Twitter has been fueled by the exciting idea of a real-time protocol - and that idea will truly shape the next generation of the internet. But that idea is here now and it's going to outgrow twitter in a hurry. The idea of a real-time protocol is going to be the backbone of the next internet-merged-with-mobile-cellular-satellite-and-wireless-mesh-network revolution. Every device will talk directly to any other device. The ISPs will be the next media giants of this year - scrambling to hold onto their market models as the internet as we know it dissolves into the fabric of the technological landscape powered by open source network communication software and ad-hoc device-to-device mesh networks. Twitter has been a real inspiration, but I just don't see them growing and adapting to be the driving force to carry this revolution. Thanks, twitter, but I'm looking to google wave now as a protocol that has real potential to be the backbone structure for the next-gen internet. Or hey - prove me wrong. It definitely seems like a good move to reach out for fresh ideas at ycombinator.

More on google wave - and annotated video clips that summarize the google wave demo video: http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2009/06/09/web/media/google...

That's true, but their entire model is still built on a database built up of 5-discrete-value ratings. True, it does seem that they place an emphasis on reviewers' similar tastes, but they are still crippled by the poor resolution of their data.

They're spending so much energy tweaking their 5-star algorithm by tiny amounts, but it seems like they'd be much better off investing in a richer database medium - like attention spent browsing various genres on their website while looking for their next movie...

I don't know, it just seems like the five star system is so crude for a company willing to spend millions to improve their recommendation system by even a tiny amount.

"So you like this movie? Like, would you say, "4 stars" like it, or "5 stars" like it?" really? That's what your database is made of? - know what i mean?

The funny thing about the 5 star rating system is that it's completely the wrong model for many situations in which it's used. It originated from sites like slashdot where, because everyone had to read the same front page of content, it made sense to pick the content democratically using a five star system.

But, systems like netflix that use the five star rating system have it all backwards! Their goal should be to establish the niche genres that attract each user. This goal has nothing to do with brute popularity. Sure you want to assess how much someone likes a movie in order to steer them into the correct genre, but it doesn't make sense to attach an overall popularity rating to the movie.

Given a hugely diverse database such as the netflix movie library, it's ridiculous to assume that individuals will like things in proportion to the average popularity. That's not how taste works. And the weird thing is, there is no reason for these databases to constrain themselves to an averaged popularity index - they're just accustomed to the five star model is all. They should be using a micro-genre mapping scheme that steers you towards clusters of movies that have received attention from users with similar taste.

Meanwhile, by constraining your rating to a discrete number of stars (1,2,3,4, or 5) they are killing the quality of their sample. (See the jellybean guessing experiment in the link below..)

These algorithms should ditch their discrete-value database of how much users say they like something, and instead use some continuous measure of how much attention is spent on each item. Hell, some people love to watch crappy movies and write bad reviews for them. Anyway, for more on this rant, see the link below.. cheers-

http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2008/05/03/design/algorithm...

Ahh, yes, I see. I found an article about the guy who the images give credit to - Isamu Sanada: Famous predictor of mac products before they come out- I guess while not a "leak" this could be the appearance of the new iPhone after all judging from Sanada's track record.

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2002/0...

To give one answer, I wrote a blog post that I think is interesting about Twitter as a protocol. This is ringing more and more true as new apps are created that use Twitter's tagging structure as a backbone for their app's data structure and communication.

http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2009/02/25/design/algorithm...