Great Ideas: Part 1

Start of a series on the most underrated great ideas of all time. Idea One: The Slider Hamburger pinoeered by the man of Harold and Kumar Fame, Billy "White Castle" Ingram. The slider was decades before its time. The miniaturization of things will move into food. In america where bigger is better has dominated the food industry to the auto industry, with the rise of childhood obesity, and people more health conscious, we are gonna see a shrinking of the standard sizes, and portions at restaurants. It's not about all you can eat, it's about all you can eat without feeling guilty. A trip to PF Changs told me this was forreal. After eating the main course you feel full, but usually want something sweet to make you feel complete. PF Changs figured this out, and offered mini sizes of their most popular deserts. Very nice move. I digress a bit. This post is really about how awesome the slider is. It's just a small hamburger. But really its about the method of how its cooked. It's steamed in a bed of onions. along with the bun a pickle, and somemore onions. The slider is an art. Not just any bloke can put together a slider, and make it taste good. It's innovation at it's finest, it's simple and elegant, it's a small hamburger. It's also a damn fine idea. Make something you enjoy smaller, make it snack sized. That goes for anything, from sliders, to information. It's how our world operates now, we gotta get things in bite size pieces, cause we got Wii's , Digg's, and texting to distract us.






Well that was a mish mash of thoughts.

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What a Small Universe

I find these two images interesting. The casts are ridiculously huge. It's a beautiful thing. It's funny, looking at these images, it reminds me of how complex the world really is.

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Improved Lives, a blog that I stumbled upon recently, has a great post about 112 quick and easy exercises that we can all do that will help us stay positive, and live a more fulfilling life. It's the simple things in life that we always fail to do, and it's those same simple things that can make a tremendous difference in our perceptions and attitudes.


I can't say it enough, it's these simple acts when deliberately acted upon that make life easier to live.

So for the next month or so, I will take several of the exercises from ImprovedLives and try them out and see what kind of results I get, and every week, I will record the the results, and the stories that come from them in this blog. Excite bike.

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Addict(ed)-O-Matic

Addict-O-Matic


Interesting way to search the web. Aggregates search onto one page allowing you to search not only all engines, but also video, images, and blogs. Very cool robot mascot design.



Wish I had a robot.

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Recycle, Reuse, Reduce, and Rethink

Here is an interesting article from Wired Magazine. It's about Rethinking how green, our environmental practices are. This article reminds me of how I view Vitamin Water. You see Vitamin Water has vitamins and minerals right? So when you drink Vitamin Water, you think that you are doing your body a favor by filling it up with B12, Vitamin A, Vitamin C and the like. Actually the drink itself is basically sugar water, no better for you than a regular can of cook. Might as well wash down a multivitamin with a can of Coke. But Vitamin Water is neither here nor there. This is about rethinking green living and changing the way we approach thinking about the green lifestyle.

Here is one inconvient truth that changed the way I thought about green living.



Used cars, even a used hummer, are a better purchase than a new hybrid. The basic gist is that by the time a hybrid hits the road, due to the amount of energy required to produce it, when converting that energy into road miles, the hybrid is already 100,000 miles in debt. With a modest 10,000 miles per year, it would take almost a whole decade to repay that debt. It's this kind of thinking that helps us come to a better understanding and evaluation of our practices, and how we can make better choices in the way we approach our attempts to green.

In response to this article there is also a counterpoint for those who didn't notice it, it is also on the same link, but here is a direct link to it.

It's not just carbon, Stupid.

Enjoy!

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Connecting (to) the Internet

Facebook and Myspace have recently announced open data availability initiatives. These initiatives will allow for the data uploaded to either your myspace, or facebook, to be shared across the many social networks that you are part of.



For example if you are part of photobucket and upload pictures onto your myspace the myspace platform will allow you to share that content you just uploaded with photobucket. Essentially it makes myspace and facebook a dashboard for your online identity.

I think this is a great move, as it has become such a hassle to maintain multiple social networks. This is creating an internet that is more and more connected. I think we are going to see more sites allowing for this kind of sharing of data. Social media has made the world a smaller place, these open data initiatives will make it even smaller.

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Seeing is believing

With the ridiculous amount of data and information at our hands, the use of our senses to understand things becomes more and more important as time goes on and technology grows exponentially. Currently in order to understand data we have 2 ways, we could analyze the numbers in a spreadsheet and compare them to other statistics, or we could visualize them in linear and boring graphs and charts. But artists, scientist, and designers are working towards creatively visualizing our datasets in order create a more intuitive snapshot of what the numbers are telling us. With this, we are seeing more sophisticated methods of visualizing our datasets, and general information becoming more visual.



Here is an amazing website that is dedicated the information visualization Infothetics it's just a nice browse to see how data is becoming more and more visual. In the future I think data and information will be smelt, tasted, and felt. It'll be amazing once things like that become more viable.

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