Ive is renowned for having an ‘alchemical’ sense for engineering, and the limits of what one can do with metal. As design expert Stephen Bayley puts it: ‘He thinks and thinks about what a product should be and then worries it into existence.’

Apple CEO Steve Jobs makes a surprise appearance at the launch of the iPad 2

Ive’s lab is Apple’s inner sanctum. Here, touch screens control the glass-sided machines in which new products take form. Desks are bare bar the aluminium sheets that slot together to form the familiar lines of iconic products such as the MacBook Air.

Collectively, the designers obsess over each product, stripping away non-essential parts, reworking tiny details such as LED indicators on the sides of laptops and phones. Ive once spent months working solely on the stand for Apple’s desktop iMac; he was searching for the sort of organic perfection found in sunflower stalks.

That final design used a combination of forged and polished steels and expensive laser welding to create an elegant, beautiful stem that was barely even noticed in the finished product. Ive loathes shape-making for its own sake (Bayley says he’s known to use ‘arbitrary’ as a term of abuse).

His most fevered creations never even make it out of the lab. He works by a process of evolution, and failures simply die on the workbench. One Apple senior executive remembers his first visit there: ‘The creations they were working on were all over the map, crazy stuff. It was always very experimental, material that the world is not quite ready for. Even within Apple, the design team is very secretive.’

via Mail Online.

Most socially networked cities in the US (2011) 1 Washington, DC A+

2 Atlanta, GA A+

3 Denver, CO A+

4 Minneapolis, MN A+

5 Seattle, WA A+

6 San Francisco, CA A

7 Orlando, FL A

8 Austin, TX A

9 Boston, MA A

10 Salt Lake City, UT A-

via mashable.

seriously?

Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami Move the slider to compare satellite images from before and after the disaster.

via NYTimes.com.

brilliant presentation of devastating reality.

Muammar Gaddafi warned the rebel stronghold of Benghazi he would storm the city in the night showing no mercy, while the United Nations moved toward a resolution allowing air strikes to stop him. "We will come zenga, zenga. House by house, room by room," he said in a radio address to the eastern city.

Thousands of residents of Benghazi gathered in a central square, waving anti-Gaddafi tricolour flags and chanting defiance of the man who has ruled the country for four decades.

"It's over. The issue has been decided," Gaddafi said, offering pardon to those who lay down their arms. "We are coming tonight...We will have no mercy and no pity with them."

via Reuters.

When the 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck Japan at 2:46 p.m. local time on March 11, 2011, TIME photographer James Nachtwey was at home in Thailand. Within 48 hours, he traveled to Japan and made his way north of Sendai to Kesennuma, where he began documenting the catastrophe while under threat of possible nuclear contamination. Nachtwey describes what he saw: “The scale of this is beyond belief. Any one town would be a major disaster if it had been just one town that it happened to. It would be unbelievable. This happened to every town, from south of Sendai all the way to the northern end of Honshu. The entire coastline, town after town after town. It’s just apocalyptic. And it all happened between — what? How long did the actual wave [of the tsunami] take to come in and go out? Half an hour? It was just a very brief span of time. The ocean just destroyed — obliterated — a huge coastal area of Japan. Heavily populated. Every town is just wiped out. Flattened.”

via TIME.

You've got to see these pictures.

Angels fell to earth, in augmented reality at least, in a recent campaign for Lynx in London. On March 5, the Unilever-owned brand (known as Axe in the U.S.), put signs in the Victoria railway station telling travelers to look up to a giant video screen. On the screen, they saw an image of themselves plus the angels, who are featured in both the English and U.S. ad campaigns. As this video shows, the reactions ranged from surprised to somewhat lewd.

via mashable.

With just half a dozen close friends online, she has a strict regimen to remain invisible on the web. Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox.  She has no physical hard drive and boots her computer from a microSD card. “I could hide this card anywhere or chew into a million pieces in a few seconds,” she says by e-mail. She keeps her operating system on a USB stick and uses a virtual machine (VM) to carry out her online shenanigans.

via Forbes.