Here’s an interesting video clip (18:15) of Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer for The New Yorker and best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink, giving a talk at the 2004 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference. He talks about the nature of happiness with an entertaining tale about psychophysicist Dr. Howard Moskowitz, who revolutionized the food business by realizing there’s no such thing as the ‘perfect food’, just ‘perfect foods.’ Gladwell covers Moskowitz’s search for the ’sweet spot’ in a new formula of Diet Pepsi, redefining Prego spaghetti sauce for Campbell’s, people’s differing coffee preferences and the advent of designer mustard. Gladwell also wrote about Moskowitz in The Ketchup Conundrum.

Topic: Simplicity
In this chat, the participants discuss John’s new book The Laws of Simplicity, teaching, TiVo, iPods, cars, Japan, and more.

Sample quotes
John: “I find that MIT students are a bit too smart. In my courses I try to make them ‘dumber’ in a sense.”

Diego: “I don’t think individual human beings are as actualized in complex, mystifying systems as they are in simple, intelligible systems.”

John: “Companies selling less simply need to market more.”

Diego: “I think businesses tend to put too much value on intellectual property and patents and not enough on operating systems and tacit knowledge.”

John: “The problem with Japanese design today is that it’s too perfect. Look at the success of Samsung over Sony. Sony design is perfect; Samsung design is fun. You do the math.”

Diego: “Not all complexity is bad. Especially in a business/venture context: complex systems that work well can be very hard to imitate. You can live off of those for a long time.” Read more

The New York Times Magazine has a lengthy profile of Michel Gondry, director of numerous music videos, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the upcoming Science of Sleep:

As a director, Gondry creates highly imaginative worlds that seem to exist somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious; again and again, states of waking and dreaming clash and collide and, finally, create a new sort of reality. All of this is a little chaotic, but Gondry understands the appeal of disorientation, of the audience’s not immediately understanding what it is seeing. He gets impatient when the events unfolding in a narrative are too organized, too emotionally tidy. But despite his taste for the whimsical and the fantastical — in “The Science of Sleep,” for instance, the sets are deliberately jumbled and the handmade props that populate Stephane’s dreams look like a summer-camp crafts project gone brilliantly extreme — the stories he tells are grounded in the timeless questions and yearnings of human relationships. Read more (via Kottke)

The garments, which are intended for demonstration purposes only, demonstrate how electronics can be incorporated into fabrics and garments in order to express the emotions and personality of the wearer.

The marvelously intricate wearable prototypes include ‘Bubelle’, a dress surrounded by a delicate ‘bubble’ illuminated by patterns that changed dependent on skin contact- and ‘Frison’, a body suit that reacts to being blown on by igniting a private constellation of tiny LEDs. Read More (via WMMNA)

Bruce Schneier, security and technology expert and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World and Secrets and Lies:Digital Security in a Networked World, muses:

A hacker is someone who thinks outside the box. It’s someone who discards conventional wisdom, and does something else instead. It’s someone who looks at the edge and wonders what’s beyond. It’s someone who sees a set of rules and wonders what happens if you don’t follow them. A hacker is someone who experiments with the limitations of systems for intellectual curiosity. […] Computers are the perfect playground for hackers. Computers, and computer networks, are vast treasure troves of secret knowledge. The Internet is an immense landscape of undiscovered information. The more you know, the more you can do. […] Hacking is cheating, and it’s how we get better at security. It’s only after someone invents a new attack that the rest of us can figure out how to defend against it. Link