UMaine NMDNet

I’m all for designing with simplicity in mind. But when I was shown this sign by a Bangor ER triage nurse after breaking a crown off my molar, I couldn’t help noticing that the picture had a couple of names in the “credits.” Which left me with two questions: 1) Did both scientists get tenure as a result of creating this innovative “pain scale”? And 2) did this clever pair go on to create the US government’s color-coded Terror Threat Levels?

Do RFID tags in clothes for preschoolers make them more or less safe? Check out the ACLU’s timeline of cracked RFID schemes.

Are you getting subliminal messages from your spam-blocker? Check out these examples of captchas gone crazy. (And no, I don’t want to enable images, thank you very much!)

So in the 1950s you could buy real products (air rifles) advertised alongside imaginary entertainments (comic book stories). But now you can buy imaginary entertainments (Farmville credits) advertised alongside real products (at Target). My brain hurts!

Given his McCarthy-esqe methods, it’s easy to dismiss Wertham as a power-hungry quack. Some of his observations about air rifles and knives being advertised alongside violent comics, however, suggest layers of influence that go beyond even what we expect from videogames Wertham would have freaked to see Grand Theft Auto, but might have been consoled by the rarity of in-game advertisements.

Facebook owns the “book”, media mogul Rupert Murdoch owns the “sky”. George Orwell was right that our language would shrink with time, except that it’s thanks to corporate trademarks rather than totalitarian government. Then again, we have the government to blame for the legally imposed monopoly that is copyright…

Blogs, wikis, videoconferencing? “No thanks,” say most professors; “PeopleSoft and PowerPoint will do.”

When the rich get richer in the digital sphere, there’s no real consequences… right?

Stop landfill odor with your own perfume-spraying truck. Kudos to New Jersey for thinking up this “innovation.”

Terry Gilliam is kicking himself for deleting this scene from the movie Brazil.

Is David Pogue setting the bar too high for easy-to-use programming tools, or too low for nonprogrammers?

Another item for your checklist of what to do after graduation: change your name.

From the XKCD school of Web design. [Link]

Thoreau’s simple economic calculus shows we sometimes get less out of technology than we put in.

Discouraging smoking by creating an irritating package is a great idea, but the problem is that good designers just can’t bring themselves to make something look uncool. Now, if you only had a Microsoft design team take over…

Why you still should master Photoshop even if you’re planning a life of crime.

Why you still should master Photoshop even if you’re planning a life of crime.

Is there anyone besides Rupert surprised by these results?

Is there anyone besides Rupert surprised by these results?

This would have been a great eco-tech capstone.

This would have been a great eco-tech capstone.