Month: December 2018

Re-Imagining Central Park

The results of the LA+ ICONCOCLAST competition have been published, asking designers to reimagine and redesign New York’s Central Park following a fictional eco-terrorist attack. In total, over 380 designers from 30 countries submitted over 190 designs, culminating in 5 equal winners. Hailing from the UK, USA, China, and Australia, the winning entries ranged from “megastructures to new ecologies and radical ideas for democratizing public space.” Jury chair Richard Weller praised the winners for “how designers can move beyond the status quo of picturesque large parks and embrace the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.”

Raging Rudolph

In its December 16, 1995 episode, MADtv aired “Raging Rudolph”, which also parodied Martin Scorsese’s films. In it, Sam The Snowman narrates in a Joe Pesci-like voice how Rudolph and Hermey got violent Mafia-style revenge on their tormentors. This was followed by 2 sequels: “The Reinfather”, spoofing The Godfather trilogy and “A Pack of Gifts Now”, spoofing Apocalypse Now.

Development expertise

“How do you get better as a software developer?” What does expert performance look like? To facilitate continuous development of their employee’s software development skills, employers should:

  1. Encourage learning (e.g. training courses, conference attendance, and access to a good analog or digital library)
  2. Encourage experimentation (e.g. through side projects and by building a work environment that is open to new ideas and technologies)
  3. Improve information exchange between development teams, departments, and even companies. E.g. lunch and learn sessions, rotation between teams, pairing, mentoring, and code reviews.
  4. Grant freedom (primarily in the form of less time pressure) to allow developers to invest in learning new technologies or skills.

Amazon Marketplace Fraud

Fascinating article about the many ways Amazon Marketplace sellers sabotage each other and defraud customers.

Defacement: Sellers armed with the accounts of Amazon distributors (sometimes legitimately, sometimes through the black market) can make all manner of changes to a rival’s listings, from changing images to altering text to reclassifying a product into an irrelevant category, like “sex toys.”

Phony fires: Sellers will buy their rival’s product, light it on fire, and post a picture to the reviews, claiming it exploded. Amazon is quick to suspend sellers for safety claims.

History of CGI

While it’s billed as “How Pixar Helped Win 27 of the Last 30 Oscars for Visual Effects”, this video from Wired works pretty well as a short history of computer-generated visual effects, from the Genesis visualization in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan to Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs to Pixar’s own Coco.

The 1000 Best

Today, we’re rolling out the 1000 Best. Our critics and editors have spent months and countless hours reevaluating old listings and revisiting New York’s seemingly infinite array of tony dining rooms, superlative bars, assorted food trucks, and ever-growing roster of food halls to come up with a list that we think represents the very best of what the city has to offer. Do we intend this to be the definitive list of New York restaurants and bars? Of course not. (In fact the actual list will never even contain exactly 1000 businesses.) Instead, we’ve designed it to be a fully searchable directory of our thoughts and recommendations: a highly subjective, always changing group of places we want everyone to know about.