This year, will you: create or consume?

Rands in Repose:

Turn off those notifications, turn your phone over, turn on your favorite music, stare at your blank slate and consider what you might build. In that moment of consideration, you’re making an important decision: create or consume? The things we’re giving to the future are feeling increasingly unintentional and irrelevant. They are half-considered thoughts of others. When you choose to create, you’re bucking the trend because you’re choosing to take the time to build.

The whole essay reminds me of a decision I made recently, I no longer talk about the personal projects I am working on. Talking about them can easily be confused with actually doing them. Now I only talk about them when doing so will enhance the work. 

The Code of Life

In The New York Times, author and book critic Juliet Waters shares what happened once she realized that learning to code could enhance her career:

The first surprise of learning to program? I actually enjoyed it. Yes, programming is challenging, frustrating and often tedious. But it offers satisfactions that are not unlike those of writing. The elegant loops of logic, the attention to detail, the mission of getting the maximum amount of impact from the fewest possible lines, the feeling of making something engaging from a few wispy, abstract ideas — these challenges were familiar to me as a critic. By my third month, I had internalized a new logic, a different way of looking at information. By the time summer came around, I was learning about good web design by constructing web applications, taking them from simple prototypes to something sophisticated enough to test with users. And by the end of the course, I knew the basic structure of computer operating systems.

Now, I was never going to be a career programmer. Though I got into it with the idea of getting myself out of a financial pinch, it turned out to be unnecessary. I managed to transition from a book critic to a features writer.

But my code year changed me. Whenever I meet someone involved in technology — which is pretty much everyone these days — I have a real understanding of what they’re talking about, whether it’s an I.T. consultant working with a bank trying to exploit the possibilities of Big Data or a biomedical engineer who has created software to more precisely visualize an M.R.I. scan. Knowing some code has made me feel more connected to others in our tech-driven society.

Everything is a Remix, Case Study: The iPhone

Kirby Ferguson extends his fantastic series Everything is a Remix with a one-off case stufy of how remixing ideas and designs led to the iPhone. 

Radiolab Live: Apocalyptical

The great Radiolab podcast puts on a show, recorded live on stage in Seattle.

Dinosaurs, death, and destruction -- a thought-provoking and laughter-inducing dance on the grave of our inevitable demise. 

Cataclysmic destruction. Surprising survival. Radiolab turns its gaze to the topic of endings, both blazingly fast and agonizingly slow, in its live show Apocalyptical. With their signature blend of storytelling, science, and music, hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich romp through hundreds of millions of years of history to arrive at the end, again and again. Comedians Reggie Watts and Kurt Braunohler join the party, while musicians On Fillmore and Noveller create a cinematic live score before your eyes. 

The New York Public Library Like You've Never Seen It Before

There has been a lot of talk about drones this week. This is a beautiful use of the technology, a unique look inside nypl’s architecture using ultralight, flying technology.

The New York Public Library is a stunning piece of architecture. Its Rose Reading Room has 51-foot ceilings and measures the length of a football field (that’s more than a Manhattan block), yet it has no columns, making it one of the largest open interiors in the world.

If you’re Nate Bolt--Facebook design researcher, amateur filmmaker, and friend of the NYPL’s skunkworks team--you get invited to fly a drone through the space. Bolt shot the video you see here using an ultralight setup--a DJI Phantom quadcopter drone loaded with a GoPro and an iPhone. That’s roughly $1,500 in equipment weighing just a bit over two pounds. It allowed Bolt to film with a god-like perspective as the camera floats over shoulders and through doorways to explore the nuance of such grand architecture.