Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

-Carl Sagan

Objectified looks great. I hear the film has a segment shot inside the top secret Apple design facility, and even an interview with design ‘Czar’ Jonathan Ive. Exciting stuff. To my knowledge, the only other time Steve allowed a Jonathan Ive interview was back in 2004.

A solid read that attempts to dissect the success of design centric companies like Apple and Ikea. The authors emphasize ‘design as a process not an event‘ and the (somewhat clunky) idea of  ‘customer supply chain management’. The case study on Motorola was interesting. “Motorola doesn’t have a design culture. It has an engineering culture that tries to be a design culture.” I think quite a few companies fall into this category.

The book itself is well designed. Hard backed with large imprinted text on the front, it catches your attention (it caught mine in an airport bookstore while I was trying to catch a flight home). Though the stiff binding makes it difficult to read without both hands.

Fresh off my interviews with Microsoft this book was exactly what I needed to pique my interest in design. It changed the way I look at software development.

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Stephen Jay Gould

New Scientist: Will the Next Einstein come from Africa?

There has been a lot of buzz  (GigaOm, TG Daily, Wired, Fast Company) about Google’s foray into the energy market. Working with GE and other energy companies Google hopes to bring networked meters into the home.

By having accessible/real time metrics for household power consumption consumers can make real attempts at saving power. Much like the MPG meters in newer vehicle:

Trying to use as little fuel as you can, by driving more smoothly and being a little less heavy on the accelerator, can even become a game of sorts. Nissan, a Japanese carmaker, has calculated that fuel-efficiency gauges can reduce fuel consumption by an average of 10%, so it has decided to put them in all its cars.

Similar effects would be seen in the home.

After you have set up the device you get the first shock: why is the house using so much electricity? Walking around and switching things off soon reveals where savings can be made: lights left on during the day, a television the children are not watching and a surprising number of power supplies keeping themselves warm while the things they are connected to are in “standby” mode.

Economist: Power Plays

Google’s efforts take it one (crucial) step further. By aggregating this data in the cloud and presenting it in a friendly manner, consumer’s can’t help but be curious. Hopefully this curiosity leads to a more energy conscious mentality, even if it is just a game.

This is a huge opportunity for Google. I’m curious how they plan to incorporate/monetize this data.