Three ways observed recently to delivery food, in some sort of service stack hierarchy. Which got me thinking about food futures, generally. First, a sample of present food service and presentation protocols as depicted above.

I’m feeling somewhat vindicated by the NYT opinion piece “End the University as We Know It” — a call for restructuring the old, creeky ways of the graduate university. The trajectory from graduate school to teaching positions is serpentine, at best. Specialization creates smaller and smaller communities of practice…

..when we are confronted with an apparently clear choice, sometimes the correct thing to do is choose the worst option, so that the thing may redeem itself, shedding its old skin and emerging in a new unexpected shape.

The Near Future Laboratory’s Overseas Bureau of Avuncular Insights and Apropos Turns of Phrase found this clattering off the network’s teletypes — a wonderful short dispatch from Bruce Sterling referring in high-style to the challenges confronting our forward-facing resources for imagining new, near future worlds. S…

Here a curious corner in a typical urban strip mall. First, the ubiquitous nail salon, this one in a roughly hewn, bumpy corner of Los Angeles. Immediately adjacent, not quite recto & verso, is the Live Scan “salon”, or shop of some sort for obtaining fingerprints. One side, the finger’s nails. The other side, the f…

I don’t regularly read Wired, but I will occasionally flip to the “Found” back page which, according to words on the networks, is moving to the inevitable user-supplied content/contest model. In the meantime, our avuncular net BFF bruces found a collation of them, which are actually quite nice to look at all in one…

No one should be allowed to do what they’re diploma (or whatever..) says, especially if they have three of those diplomas — e.g. BS, MS, Ph.D. all in Computer Science or whatever. Should be a law. The other law? Switch what you do every 3-5 years..really. Versatility & variety & polymathic approaches to doing things…

Not directly in conversation, but in the topics that happen between people, especially when they share the same studio space (as well as the same city), Mr. Chipchase’s posting about his ACM CHI keynote had me dig this dispatch out of the “pending drafts” depot of the blog (where it’s been sitting since last year, p…

Further to augmented reality and its discontents, I wonder if this sort of augmented experience might not suffice in many situations. Human-to-human interaction of some sort, high-fi, low-tech, or material that makes rough use of digital interfaces and technologies without fetishizing the technology and its inevitab…