Interfacing with the Future....every now and then I wish I lived in the future ---it's a malaise I've faced since I was a kid. As people get older they often reminisce about yesteryear....not me....I yearn for tomorrow today.
Tomorrow/Today when Time Flies....
My colleague Bill Cameron forwarded Yugo Nakamura's yugop.com INDUSTORIOUS CLOCK ||| MONO*CRAFTS to me tonight....I may have seen it before but somehow tonight it struck truer than ever before. 
click on thumbnail to see static version of Yugo Nakamura's Industrious Clock III or go to Cached to see it live.
Regarded as one of the world's most innovative web designers, YUGO NAKAMURA is renowned for the wit and complexity of the interactive animations he creates ...see more of his work at Cached the Design Museum website or head to the FLASH IN THE CAN conference FITC 2005 and discover his latest presentations and other amazing masters of flash.
INTERFACE --- ongoing conflict between machine and human centered design....see what Jared Lanier has to say in the current issue of AMERICAN SCIENTIST don't know who Lanier is -- you should --he's an icon of our time too: Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist best known for his work in virtual reality, is also a composer, visual artist and author. He is currently a visiting scientist at Silicon Graphics and an external fellow at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.
EXCERPT FROM LANIER'S REVIEW OF What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. John Markoff. xxvi + 310 pp. Viking, 2005. $25.95 REVIEW BY JARED LANIER (link here for full review) Early Computing's Long, Strange Trip
HEDGING COMPLACENCY
The book also captures an important early conflict between two cultures of computing that seemed compatible on the surface but actually had opposing aims. On the one side was the human-centered design work of Engelbart, based initially at the Stanford Research Institute, and on the other was artificial intelligence culture, centered on the Stanford AI lab. Engelbart once told me a story that illustrates the conflict succinctly. He met Marvin Minsky—one of the founders of the field of AI—and Minsky told him how the AI lab would create intelligent machines. Engelbart replied, "You're going to do all that for the machines? What are you going to do for the people?" This conflict between machine- and human-centered design continues to this day.
What might all this mean to young engineering students? At the very least, this book will probably serve as a hedge against complacency. How can they read these stories without wanting to prove that they can be more vital, revolutionary and inventive than a charming gang of hippies?
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