I have long been interested in the work of entrepreneur Dennis Crowley. He is perhaps best known as the co-founder of Foursquare, which popularized location "check-ins." But he's created a bunch of other stuff too. The common theme is that his products exist at the intersection of tech and cities (the physical world), which is probably why I've been so interested over the years.

Check-ins, for example, allowed you to say to all your friends, "hey everyone, I'm at this bar." It was a way of checking if anyone you knew was there too, or close by, and also a way of inviting your friends to come join you if they were so inclined.

This was extremely popular for a period of time, but then kind of fizzled out, and Foursquare was forced to pivot and try a bunch of other things. And in the end, this "problem" of augmenting the physical world with our social graph (and other information) never really got solved. I mean, this is broadly the promise of augmented reality.

Thankfully, Dennis has a new company (Hopscotch Labs) and a new tech/city product called Beebop (which is currently in private beta). Here's how it works (excerpt from this Crazy Stupid Tech interview):

It's an iPhone app. There's not much to do in the app, there aren't a lot of buttons to press. Once it's installed and you set the permissions, every time you put on your headphones — your AirPods or any other headphones, it doesn't matter—it chimes and says, "Beebop's been activated." (Beebop is the first project from the company, Hopscotch Labs.)

Then as you walk around the city, it will tell you things about certain places. Eventually, if I walk by a place where my friend was, it tells me that Alex was here two days ago. If I walk by a place and someone's inside, it tells me that Max is inside that place. A lot of it is still under development. Eventually, people leave a comment at a place. Imagine Twitter. It is as if you leave a tweet and you stick it in the ground. When you walk over it, you hear it.

So like before, it's about experiencing cities:

It's been a long time since I built something. What's different now? AI is what's different. You know what's different? Everyone's on their phones all the time. Back in my day, we made stuff for the streets. You would use your phone, you'd put it away, and stuff would happen. Where are the people making that stuff anymore? All we make is stuff that makes you look at the screen. Let's make stuff that gets you out in the world, where you're not glued to the devices. You're out there doing stuff. Big companies out there aren't going to make stuff like this.

The key idea here is that augmented reality doesn't have to just be visual. Visual also requires somebody to figure out a cool set of glasses that people will actually wear out in public. Who knows when this happens, though I do think it will eventually.

So what Dennis is doing is making something that works today -- with audio. This has been called the poor person's augmented reality, but I think that's selling it short. This is really clever. And once again, it's fundamentally connected to how people live in and interact with our cities.

This is a longstanding joke / criticism among nerds:

Namely, it is the fact that the charging port for Apple's Magic Mouse is on its bottom, meaning, when it's being charged, you can't use it. This would be annoying if you ignored the low battery warnings and let it die in the middle of working on something critically important. And so lots of people think it's a ridiculous design. But is it? Here's an excerpt from a recent post by John Gruber of Daring Fireball:

Yes, with the charging port on the mouse’s belly, you cannot use it while it charges. There are obvious downsides to that. But those positing the Magic Mouse as absurd act as though Apple doesn’t know this. Of course Apple knows this. Apple obviously just sees this as a trade-off worth making. Apple wants the mouse to be visually symmetric, and they want the top surface to slope all the way down to the desk or table top it rests upon. You can’t achieve that with an exposed port.

This is an argument that feels right. Apple is not the kind of company that makes arbitrary design decisions. And the deliberate decision they have made is that a more perfect design is more important than solving for the few instances where a user was negligent and forgot to charge their mouse. Gruber goes on to say, the "charging port placement is an opinionated design, not an absurd design."

But this then raises another question: Is opinionated design the right approach?

For well over a century, one of the maxims of good design has been that form should follow function. In other words, the shape and design of an object should relate to its intended use. And so, in this instance, if "function" involves using the mouse while it's being charged then maybe, by this criteria, it isn't a good design. Then again, it is a wireless mouse. Maybe Apple doesn't want you to use it while it's charging.

Let's consider another design object that you touch with your hand: Walter Gropius' famous door handle.

Originally designed in 1922, the simple design consisted of a square bar and a cylinder. And its job was to communicate to you that, in order to use it, you should grab the cylindrical part, and not anywhere else. So on this level, the design was responding to its intended use, to our hands. Grab here. But is this truly an example of form following function? It's debatable.

Architect and professor Witold Rybczynski, who I would say generally isn't a fan of modernism, has argued that it's not. His critique of the overall Bauhaus movement -- of which Gropius was the founder -- was that it was actually a design school dedicated to "form follows predetermined aesthetics rather than form follows function."

In some ways, he's right. You can tell when something came out of the Bauhaus, just as you can tell when something is from Apple. There's a particular aesthetic and stubbornness to maintaining it. That's why the Magic Mouse can't be charged while in use and why Apple, equally famously, clung to the simplicity of a single-button mouse. Two just didn't look as nice.

But I see this as an honorable quality. Having an opinion is better than not having one. And there are lots of objects out there without one.

By some measurements, cement production alone is responsible for about 8% of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions every year. And so there is an imperative to find suitable low-carbon alternatives. Here is what is currently happening in the US (via Grist):

On Tuesday, Terra CO2 Technology was picked to receive a $52.6 million federal grant to build a new manufacturing plant just west of Salt Lake City. The company has devised a method that turns common minerals into additives that can help replace Portland cement — a key component in concrete, and one of the most carbon-intensive materials in the world.

In addition to this new facility, the company is set to start construction on its first plant in the Dallas-Fort Worth area:

The project is expected to break ground in January 2025 and begin shipping out materials by late summer 2026, Yearsley said. The facility will be capable of producing up to 240,000 metric tons of SCM [supplementary cementitious materials] per year when completed, or enough to serve roughly half of the local metropolitan market.

And all of this is part of a broader initiative by the US Department of Energy:

The Utah facility is one of 14 projects provisionally selected this week to receive $428 million in total awards from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. The initiative, which is funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, aims to accelerate clean energy manufacturing in U.S. communities with decommissioned coal facilities. Officials said the projects are expected to create over 1,900 high-quality jobs across a dozen states.

For the rest of the article, click here.