gedankentank.com

Hi, I'm Matthias. I love music, nonsense and people that don't take life seriously. I enjoy tinkering with web stuff and craft interfaces with passion. This tank is full of random things I stumble across and enjoy. Stay hungry, stay foolish - never settle.

28.01.2012

“The Che Guevara of the 21st century is the network. … The 21st century is a lousy time to be a control freak.”

Alex J. Ross (Senior Adviser at the US Department of State)

27.01.2012

“How do you know the direction to head with products? It boils down to taste. Emerge yourself with the best ideas from the humanities. And integrate them. Pull interests from diverse areas.”

– Steve Jobs (via LukeW)

25.01.2012

“Technological progress—in particular, improvements in computer hardware, software, and networks—has been so rapid and so surprising that many present-day organizations, institutions, policies, and mindsets are not keeping up.”

– Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee(Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy)

15.01.2012

kateheffernan:

Dave taught me where the phrase “razzle dazzle” came from the other day. This is my new favorite fact. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dazzle_camouflage

kateheffernan:

Dave taught me where the phrase “razzle dazzle” came from the other day. This is my new favorite fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dazzle_camouflage

(via juliaheffernan)

31.12.2011

“I’m glad mushrooms are against the law, because I took them one time, and you know what happened to me? I laid in a field of green grass for four hours going, “My God! I love everything.” Yeah. Now, if that isn’t a hazard to our country…”

– Bill Hicks (via sirmitchell)

20.12.2011

Badass JavaScript: Introducing ALAC.js: An Apple Lossless Audio Decoder in JavaScript

badassjs:

Recently, Apple open sourced the original encoder and decoder for the Apple Lossless audio codec which is written in C/C++. ALAC is, as its name implies, a lossless codec, which means that it is compressed but does not lose any quality. When decoded, ALAC audio files are bit-for-bit identical…

(via johnallsopp)

20.12.2011

“Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user interfaces (via @manusporny)”

Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user interfaces (via johnallsopp)

(via johnallsopp)

08.12.2011

Colin Tudge’s Do-Lecture How we can get good food for everyone. “We need to learn from nature not ignore it. It has all the answers. We think the answer to our food problems is to have bigger farms. But the opposite is true.”

Colin provides us with some great design principles for ecosystems provied by mother nature:

  • Be diverse
  • Run on low input
  • Integrate with others

06.12.2011

“Let’s be clear on the cause of these problems. It’s not really about wealthy people or executives. Our problems are not caused by evil masterminds who want to hurt us. Big companies are full of good people. People like us. Businesspeople just work hard to achieve whatever goals are defined by the system. Many CEOs may want to do good, but they can only do what the system allows. Blaming people distracts us from the big picture. Focus on the system. I believe our economic system is afflicted by a design flaw, and I believe we can fix it. … Collectively, we have a ridiculously large amount of money. If we organize our spending as a group, then our money becomes the biggest and most powerful carrot you could ever imagine, big enough to move even the most stubborn donkey.”

An Open Letter to Occupy by @carrotmob (via @timoreilly)

04.12.2011

Tape 200: Götterdämmerung

25.11.2011

nevver:

Tips from Grandma

nevver:

Tips from Grandma

19.11.2011

Malcolm Gladwell: The strange tale of the Norden bombsight

“So why do we talk about the Norden bombsight? Well because we live in an age where there are lots and lots of Norden bombsights. We live in a time where there are all kinds of really, really smart people running around, saying that they’ve invented gadgets that will forever change our world. They’ve invented websites that will allow people to be free. They’ve invented some kind of this thing, or this thing, or this thing that will make our world forever better.

And this is the problem with our infatuation with the things we make. We think the things we make can solve our problems, but our problems are much more complex than that. The issue isn’t the accuracy of the bombs you have, it’s how you use the bombs you have, and more importantly, whether you ought to use bombs at all.”

Great storytelling, great message.

16.11.2011

“There is no such hand in touchscreen computer devices. The touchscreen has no texture variation, has no physical surface information, is dead flat, reflects ambient light noise, and features oily fingerprint debris when seen at a raking angle”

– Tufte on touch http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003qM&topic_id=1

11.11.2011

Tape 199: Gorillas im Nebel

08.11.2011

The future of touch

A nice collection of gems that give a glimpse into the future of touch interactions by Patric (via interactionblog.com)

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