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Christian Eggers photographed three American Airlines 737s painted with three generations of the AA livery. Seeing them side by side, you can see why the Helvetica livery was a long-lived classic. I don’t mind the new AA logo type and logo—except for the placement of the type which should be above the window line—but that tail still is just not working for me. (via Mike Korte on Facebook)
Why, yes. XOXO is coming back in September. Huzzah. Last year’s XOXO was something super special and I look forward to this next iteration. Assuming, of course, I can get in.
In the last day or so, southerly winds have cleared the air over New Zealand providing amazingly clear conditions. Yesterday, we took advantage of it and headed up to Mt. Eden—known in Māori as Maungawhau—which is an extinct volcano smack dab in the middle of Auckland. The view the edge of the crater rim is pretty spectacular.
While we enjoyed perfect blue skies, this would be an impressive lookout in almost any weather condition. If I were staying in Auckland proper for a week, I’d probably make sure to get to the top for at least a few morning and evening opprotunities. If Kiwi Foo leaves me with more than two brain cells to put together when I do get back to Auckland, I may try to get up there again on Monday morning before I fly back to the states.
In the last day or so, southerly winds have cleared the air over New Zealand providing amazingly clear conditions. Yesterday, we took advantage of it and headed up to Mt. Eden—known in Māori as Maungawhau—which is an extinct volcano smack dab in the middle of Auckland. The view the edge of the crater rim is pretty spectacular.
While we enjoyed perfect blue skies, this would be an impressive lookout in almost any weather condition. If I were staying in Auckland proper for a week, I’d probably make sure to get to the top for at least a few morning and evening opprotunities. If Kiwi Foo leaves me with more than two brain cells to put together when I do get back to Auckland, I may try to get up there again on Monday morning before I fly back to the states.
After a rainy first day in New Zealand, blue sky made an appearance for my second day here. Nat and I bounced around the countryside a bit, finally ending up at Cape Rodney-Okakari Point Marine Reserve, also known as Goat Island Reserve to the locals. Estalbished in 1975, it is New Zealand’s oldest marine reserve.
Not only is this a marine reserve, but this was where an important radio astronomy science experiment took place in 1948. Nat and I ran across a plaque commemerating the Cosmic Noise Expedition during which John Bolton and Grodon Stanley set up an antenna on nearby Pakiri Hill and became the first people to identify radio waves originating from stars outside our solar system by comparing direct radio waves with those reflected off the surface of the sea here using interferometry. Science!
After a rainy first day in New Zealand, blue sky made an appearance for my second day here. Nat and I bounced around the countryside a bit, finally ending up at Cape Rodney-Okakari Point Marine Reserve, also known as Goat Island Reserve to the locals. Estalbished in 1975, it is New Zealand’s oldest marine reserve.
Not only is this a marine reserve, but this was where an important radio astronomy science experiment took place in 1948. Nat and I ran across a plaque commemerating the Cosmic Noise Expedition during which John Bolton and Grodon Stanley set up an antenna on nearby Pakiri Hill and became the first people to identify radio waves originating from stars outside our solar system by comparing direct radio waves with those reflected off the surface of the sea here using interferometry. Science!
TED is leaving California after this year and heading north to Vancouver. TEDActive is heading north as well and will be in Whistler.
Will this be a next chapter for TED? Quite possibly. From 1984 to 2008, TED was based in Monterey, Calif., before moving to Long Beach with TEDActive nearby in Palm Springs. While we have absolutely loved the past five years there, but as TED has crossed major milestones—our billionth video view last fall and our 6,000th TEDx event last month—we feel ready for a new adventure. Our staff is pumped for TED2013, our grand finale year in Long Beach, and are thrilled to be able to go exploring in 2014.
With TEDGlobal having its last year in Edinburgh this year as well and moving on in 2014, this will be a year of both looking back and looking forward for TED. It’s funny, I sometimes still feel like a relative newbie to the TED world, but my first TED was the first one in Long Beach, five years ago.
Saturday found me wrapping up some web design work for a client and then packing my bags for the next trip. I was at the airport at 4:30pm and on a CRJ to Los Angeles an hour later sitting next to a TED fan who wanted to know all about how the photography and videos are done. Two hours later, we landed at LAX and used almost all of my layover getting from Terminal 8 to Terminal 2—I’ll save any commentary on changing terminals in LA for another day—and onto a huge 777-300ER. Thirteen hours later, I was across the international date line and landing on a foggy Monday morning in New Zealand.
Saturday found me wrapping up some web design work for a client and then packing my bags for the next trip. I was at the airport at 4:30pm and on a CRJ to Los Angeles an hour later sitting next to a TED fan who wanted to know all about how the photography and videos are done. Two hours later, we landed at LAX and used almost all of my layover getting from Terminal 8 to Terminal 2—I’ll save any commentary on changing terminals in LA for another day—and onto a huge 777-300ER. Thirteen hours later, I was across the international date line and landing on a foggy Monday morning in New Zealand.
ORDCamp 2013 started with Karaoke and wrapped up with intense discussions as the sun threatened to make an appearance fifty-something hours later. In between those bookends was a mix of things that wouldn’t be directly related by any stretch of the imagination except that they were the interests of the fantastic people that gathered together in one place. Social engineering and political discussions. Art made from data visualizations. Fancy pants chocolate. Helping people craft their future. Potential alternatives to Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity. Copyright social disobedience. Structuring a TED talk. Totally off the record discussions that that freaked everyone’s shit out one way or another. Naps when the brain crashed. Coffee making. Werewolf. Quadcopters. Mindfulness enabling technological campfire simulations. Homemade bitters. Drink making robots.
ORDCamp captures the spirit of the original Foo Camp and infuses it with it’s own unique Chicago personality creating a lovingly unique experience between friends that have known each other for either years or just minutes. One way to look at it is as an unconference. Another way to look at it is as a multi-day geek party where more than half the fun is trading ideas and memes like others trade baseball cards. Or, maybe it’s an instance of the global discussion of how to make huge changes in the world despite the problems at hand and each conversation topic, no matter large or small, is a step in that journey.
I’m sure I don’t speak for myself when I felt like the least intelligent person in the room at times. And that’s a good thing. The firehose of ideas turned my brain to mush and it’s going to take a while to synthesize and contexualize everything I heard. That might be a problem as it’s only the first of many idea firehose events I’ll be at in the next few weeks. By the time I get to TED in Long Beach in late February, I’ll either be warmed up like never before or just warmed over like a stale old meal. We’ll see which soon enough.
ORDCamp is the brainchild of Brian Fitzpatrick (aka Fitz) and Zach Kaplan. I’ve known Fitz for years through a few paths and he’s done a lot of work that I’ve respected, not the least of which is creating and running the Data Liberation Project at Google. But I think that pulling together ORDCamp might be the most valuable thing he’s done, certainly for Chicago. It’s definitely an excellent implementation of Tim O’Reilly’s message to all of us to create more value than we capture. Good thing he doesn’t take it all too seriously.
The Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) site has posted a beautiful video of a moon slowly rising over Mount Victoria in Wellington, New Zealand by Mark Gee who used a camera with a very long lens and lots of careful planning. Beautiful.
Adam King posts a visualization of NASA’s meteorological data that clearly shows the trend line of the rising energy in the atmosphere.
Before leaving for the airport after ORDCamp, I double and triple checked my flight details. It had been sleeting and freezing rain for a few hours and it was just nasty enough that getting out of Chicago O’Hare might be tricky. The schedule, however, remained firm and the plane serving my flight was inbound and on time from PHX, so off I went and despite the weather, all went smoothly. I was off the train at O’Hare at 5:15PM, and at the gate 15 minutes before boarding. Boarding started right on time at 6:08PM and, from seat 21A, FlightTrack still indicated we’d be out on time.
And then we sat. Rain, ice, and snow fell from the sky, and we sat some more.
Two hours later after waiting for the deicing trucks and ground holds, we were finally ready to go. Right before shutting my phone’s connection down, I saw Harper tweet about lightning in the snowstorm. “Interesting...” I thought.
Wheels up at 8:48PM and it was quite the bumpy climb out of O’Hare. The kind of bouncy ride that’s more typical for March or April. As we ascended through the clouds, I was mesmerized by the strobes freezing snowflakes in the air in flashes and thinking about the almost certainty that I was going to miss my connection in San Francisco. And then, the world suddenly turned very bright and the sound of thunder cracked all around the airplane. As my eyes tried to adjust, I saw an arc of electricity wrap around the wing.
Whoa!
As you can imagine, my heart skipped a bit from the raw surprise of the moment. Not of fear, really. More in a “Oh wow, did you see that!” kind of way knowing full well that aircraft are designed to take lightning strikes. Others in the cabin didn’t take it so well. “Are they going to go back? That can’t have been good.” Thankfully, the more experienced travelers explained things to the less and calm prevailed.
It’s not every day you take off in thundersnow and get hit by lightning.
I don’t have a photo of the lightning strike, of course. That would have been lucky indeed. But, a few minutes after we had climbed above the storm, I pulled out my camera, cranked it up to ISO 6400, and made a photo of the cloud deck at night under the moonlight and the wing lit up by the red light on top of the plane.
Four and a half hours later, we landed in San Francisco. Sure enough, my connecting flight was just taxiing out to head north to Portland and every restaurant in the airport had shut down already for the night. A few days from now, however, I won’t remember or care so much about the delay. I’ll just remember the lightening curling around the aircraft on a snowy night.
Photo notes: Top photo was made with my iPhone. Bottom was a 1/5 second exposure wide open at f/2 with the Sony RX1. I’m kinda shocked it came out as well as it did.
Creative Review talks to Vignelli about the redo of the American brand. He wasn’t gentle:
“It seems to me that there was no need for American Airlines to undertake such a change, but many people do not understand the difference between Design and Styling, and believe in change for the sake of change.”
Replacing an iconic brand is rife with danger and nobody is going to like everything about it, but it’s not hard to imagine doing something better than this. The tail, for example, seems to me to be an insistence on keeping the stripes around in some form—any form. And cutting the logotype with the window line, that’s just wrong.
One thing for sure. I don’t think that this iteration of the brand identity will last nearly as long as Vignelli’s. It’s way too attached to 2010.