Life & Research Notes

Just saw this very cool project presented at eComm by Stefan Agamanolis from Distance Lab.

“People lost track of time, they called for 5 minutes and thought they were chatting for 30 minutes. The nature of conversations was more creative, callers visited a lot of topics. They also gestured more, even with their legs.”

Stefan presents this project in a larger design initiative he’s dubbed slow communication – communication technologies explicitly designed to harmonize with natural human pace and sensitivities. It’s similar in spirit to some of the slow computing ideas I was tossing around a few years back.

Luis Blackaller and Kyle Buza just released the E15:oGFX site, with software downloads, tutorials, and documentation. They’ve made it incredibly easy to get up and running. Nice work dudes.

My friend and Taco Lab accomplice David Merrill gave a fantastic talk at TED last week on the Siftables project that he and Jeevan have been pursuing. The video went up today. Congrats Dave!

We quietly opened up our new Taco Lab Blog a few weeks ago, along with a small refresh of the main TL site.

It’s a little ridiculous it’s taken us this long to get our blog started. But now that we’re coming up on our one year LLCification anniversary (March something!), we’re noticing that we’re a lot more comfortable and efficient with the basics, and we have enough interesting projects and initiatives going to warrant some regular updates.

So please check it out, and check back when you think of it. The shiny new blog has me rethinking this one too. Lately I’ve slipped into the habit of simply recycling content from other places rather than creating my own. So I may make some changes in my approach here to try to start actually writing again. If so, yay.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo. Via FlowingData.

The Taco Lab, LLC is pleased to announce a radical new collaboration with world famous bitwise biologist and curiosity curator Prof. Engd. For the first time ever, Engd’s massive collection of fine miniature creatures will be published in its entirety, one each day for all of 2009:

View these mini monsters online: Professor Engd’s Étagère of Hypnopompic Hexadecimal Miniature Monsters.

This week Andy Volk and I put the finishing touches on the first version of isitsafetovisit.com, a simple tool that lets people check safety ratings and advisories for any country in the world.

From our about page: “Every night our trusty scripts head out and find data about the safety rating of each country from the U.S. Department of State, Canadian Foreign Affairs Department, Australia Smart Traveler, and New Zealand Safe Travel. We then compare the ratings and average them together to give our best estimate as to the current safety rating for that country. We’re also tracking the data over time to enable some exciting new features in the future.”

Always dreamed of the beaches in Thailand? Thinking about moving down to Mexico? Or maybe you prefer the safety of Ireland? A big part of what’s interesting about this service is seeing how the various advisories offer alerts and warnings differently. Andy and I are both passionate travelers. We don’t want these advisories to necessarily prevent people from traveling; we’re just trying to make the government recommendations more available and understandable.

Anyway, check out some random countries, and if you have any feedback, leave a comment here or in our forum on GetSatisfaction. Thanks!