With apologies to James Niehues

Principles of cartography
[via TomC]
Pretty much a one-stop shop for links to useful information on mapping. The outline format might turn off some visitors—the page seems to have been made to support lectures in a mapping class at Rutgers—but there’s plenty of good stuff here.

Case in point: this map of the Breckenridge Ski Resort [PDF!] has adopted the Tube map’s use of colored lines and circles instead of relying on decades of ski resort mapping tradition. Unlike these old, bird’s-eye views of airbrushed slopes, the new Breckenridge map gives skiers and snowboarders what they need when they’re actually on the mountain itself: relative positions for all the lifts and trails.

I expect network maps like this one will continue to show up in unexpected places as map users become more comfortable with the style. Take Mondrian: after the world warmed to his brand of minimalism, they put it on tubes of styling gel.

Richard Serra sculptures on Google Maps
[via blackbeltjones]
Richard Serra’s massive sheet metal sculptures are easily seen from the Google planes. Are there any artists consciously collaborating with our new abilities to drag and click from on high?

Cake Wrecks: when professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong
[via jbushnell]
A collection of funny cake mistakes from Cake Wrecks.

Homogenizing the internet, criminalizing ornamentation, writing to learn & two blogs

We start with two rants, a hundred years apart. The first is concerned that internet search results increasingly favor a more homogenous bunch of information sources; the second argues that it’s criminal to add ornamentation to useful things.

All hail the information triumvirate!

[via migurski]
For the third consecutive year, Nick Carr reproduces ten Google searches of ten general topics. In 2006 Wikipedia held the top spot in two of the ten searches; in 2007 Wikipedia held the top spot in eight of the ten searches; this year Wikipedia held the top spot in all ten. Carr worries about the homogenization of the internet:

in a blink of history’s eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine.

I agree with Michal:  ”Google is the only one that’s an actual problem: its methods are secret, its data is proprietary, and its goals explicitly commercial.”

Ornament and crime

[via rodcorp]
Written in 1908, this essay by Austrian architect Adolf Loos argues that “[t]he evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects” and that because ornamentation often forces objects to go out of style it is a crime to waste resources adding ornamentation. The first few pages of the essay are available via Google Books.

Becoming writing, becoming writers

 [via mathemagenic]
I’ve recently finished reading a stack of articles about writing, particularly about writing literature reviews. They’ve helped immensely. The article linked here offers an idea of writing “as a learning tool which enables what researchers know about themselves and their topics” and suggests “that writing should be included more intentionally in our research methods courses” (from abstract).

Designculture in brief

[via anne]
A new tumblelog, centering on “the cultures of design and the designs of culture.”

Sunday is for sounds

[via mtchl]
An mp3 blog. His top five albums of 2008:

1. Fleet Foxes - Sun Giant EP/Fleet Foxes
2. Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III
3. Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
4. Flying Lotus - Los Angeles
5. The Walkmen - You & Me