April 2009
44 posts
Rules for Hyphens →
grammarbook.com
The Grammar Nazi is fast becoming my favorite tumblelog. You rock!
What’s the difference between “college” and “university”?
There is a difference. A college offers various degrees but is a self-contained institution. A university is a collection of colleges, each of which offers a degree in its specific field.
Example:
Tufts University includes The College of Arts and Sciences, The Engineering School, The Veterinary School, and The Medical School. When referring to the university, you are talking about all of the schools.
[via grammarnazi]
I always knew there was a difference, but it was never clearly explained in my head. Good to know now.
Why Being Smart Won’t Get You Laid →
alternet.org
In fact, the smarter you are, the more clueless you will be, and the more problems you’re going to have in your dating life.
[via givemesomethingtoread]
Honda Insight ad ‘Let It Shine’ →
vimeo.com
Hyper-creative advertisement setup and deployment. I avoided embedding the video because you would miss out on the incredibly beautiful spectacle that is the entire page. Without giving too much away, this advertisement is similar in execution to Nintendo’s Wario Land Shake It! on YouTube—but seeing as it’s Vimeo and not YouTube, you can expect far greater things.
Don’t miss the making-of video. Fascinating.
Vimeo, you guys rock.
The extreme Google brain →
blog.fawny.org
Bowman’s experience shows there actually is something worse than having epic bad taste (as Microsoft has eternally displayed) or none at all (my experience the rest of the time with Microsoft). This worse thing is an active denial of taste. The extreme male brain, housed by the thousand in Google meatbags, cannot discern patterns or distinctive features that constitute good design according to the consensus of informed, educated people.
Beautifully articulated opinion piece in defense of Doug Bowman’s reasons behind his recent departure from Google as Visual Design Lead, whose design impact I’ve touched upon before. Google notoriously values rigidly scientific data-driven design choices above tried-and-true professional and emotionally-driven creativity.
This is the same company that once forced a design team to test 41 shades of blue and let the data do the design-making. But unlike many other companies which also have bad design taste (read: Microsoft), Google is especially bad because of its engineer-friendly approach to recruitment which drives its core design philosophy: vast data models over artistic creativity.
To me, this article does far more than just berate Google for its comically poor design taste—it reads as a missive in defense of human creativity borne from organic and emotional sources, instead of the logic-based, data-driven ‘Google brain’ that runs many a corporate culture. And as a huge supporter and avid enthusiast of Apple and its pure, emotionally and artistically driven design language, I read this article as the words I could not find to explain that intangible difference between Apple products and ‘similar’ competitors. It even defends another love of mine, typography, which also draws heavily from intangible design ‘skill’ and not science or data.
[via df]
How I Met Your Mother
- Barney: I mean… all right, fine, the stripper at Stuart’s bachelor party was a 15.
- Ted: She was FIFTEEN?
- Barney: No, a 15. Like in blackjack.
- Ted: As in… not sure whether you’d hit it?
- Barney: Exactly.
“Ted, the only reason to wait a month for sex is if the girl is seventeen years, eleven months old.”
—Barney Stinson
How I Met Your Mother doesn’t fully live up to my impossibly high expectations—yes, I’m looking at you guys, Arrested Development, Dexter, Mad Men, Flight of the Conchords… yeah, you get the idea—but Barney gets some hilarious lines.
