Machines are digging
This is one of the discoveries of my summer : “about:kate“. It’s a German tv series about a young woman who gets herself in a psychiatric hospital to cure her depression and her only portal to the real world is through the Internet and Facebook. No, wait! Where are you going?! It’s not as bad as it sounds !
Kate Harff
Posted in Discoveries, Machines are digging, Videos
Saturday I made an interesting encounter, I met a nurse. We met at a bachelor party I organized for a very good friend. It was an adventurous race through Paris where I had designed some cool and fun actions to complete for my friend (nothing to do with dirty bachelor parties, it was in the afternoon !!!). So that’s in between actions that I got to talk with the nurse.
But where are the engineers ?!!
While we were racing in the street, she told me she was glad because for once she didn’t have to work on Saturday. “Really ?!!”, I naively said. Then she went on and introduced her job. She explained it and described all the stress she had to go through. I was kind of shocked by what she shared with me. She said that the patients were plugged to a pumping machine that was used to pump their blood, and often this machine would break down and SHE had to fix it as quickly as possible. Her words were “when that happens I need to fix it and nobody knows how to fix it, I mean I’m not an engineer, but I do have to fix the machine, so sometimes I just fix it by intuition thanks to previous experiences, sometimes I just know what I should do, sometimes I don’t and the engineers are not there”. My immediate reaction was “but where are the engineers???!”, “No idea”, she said. Incredible.
Posted in Observations, Discoveries, Stories, Machines are digging, System-Design
This morning our coding best practice guru made us do our first coding dojo. I had no idea what that was, for me “dojo” vaguely referred to a javascript library. But actually, “dojo” is the Japanese word for the place where students practice their martial art. So by extent a coding dojo is a coding exercise where devs practice their code. Aha!
Posted in Discoveries, Devsworld
Guess !
Quiz question : do you know what that is ?
If you were not a software geek during the 70’s, you probably have no idea. As a tip though, you should know that this represents in fact a one line machine instruction. So, have you guessed? No idea? Well, in that case, I’m very happy to introduce you to the punched card ! Ok, as a highly cultured reader you probably knew, but in my case I had no idea until I discovered it during my blogging coma. It’s a big discovery ! When you know what I discovered you’ll gasp and marvel.
Posted in Favourites, Discoveries, Stories, U.I, Future
Sweden’s sky and sun = the origin of Sweden’s flag
So I went to Stockholm for 5 days. I wanted to go there since last year, and recently I realized nothing was stopping me. So I went.
This time I learned from last experience in Cologne and played it old fashioned 20th century style: I bought a travel guide. Also since last time Gmaps upgraded with the offline mode, so I took the opportunity to test it in real life conditions and pre-cached the Stockholm map before leaving. To complete my serious preparation, I also stored a lot of information in the form of pdfs, notes, etc. in my phone to avoid carrying any form of paper (…other than the guide and …passport). Finally, there was nothing particularly technological about my holidays (20th century style) but I’d like to highlight these discoveries: the nobel prize, museums in Stockholm and the “lagom” principle that very much inspired me.
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But first, let’s debrief about how I improved the logistics of my holidays by mentally accepting that there is no such thing as a global knowledge resource available from anywhere and anytime.
Posted in Favourites, Inspiration, Discoveries, Stories, Travels, U.I, U.X
I am so glad I have discovered Biomimicry. I watched a series of 4 documentaries on French tv about it and found it really fascinating. Biomimicry is a field of science that studies the design of natural systems such as caudal fins, the way some insects float on water, etc. to build self sufficient and very efficient systems for human societies. For example, biomimicry can be applied to architecture to build buildings that regulate their energy alone depending on the weather and seasons. I extracted this video from one of the documentary to illustrate how biomimicry also applies to everyday objects :
Continue reading
Posted in Inspiration, Discoveries, Videos
From www.postsecret.com
This blog is one of my favourite, sweet and hilarious, and most of all so very human.
PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard.
I used to admire this blog because it was super successful (>300,000,000 visitors) but was on a postsecret.blogspot.com url, now they changed to .com, I wonder if this was really necessary…
I don’t base my happiness (yet) on the number of my blog’s visitors, but do you? Is it possible that one day technology fulfills our need for attention/care and happiness??
Posted in Discoveries
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