Clark puts human faces on the bodies of animals to create some of the most haunting sculptures I’ve ever seen. These are powerful and terrifying and the memory of seeing even these photos is likely to instill existential dread in me whenever it’s recalled. But all this fear on my part is probably just a subconscious recognition that we humans are animals, often wild, and yet seldom betray these qualities with our faces.
Untitled (Black Bear)
Not only does this post include two great (and chilling) maps of how Robert Moses’ New York City might have looked, but it warns us against our impulse to accept online base maps as apolitical representations.
I present my Google Maps version of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway and Mid Manhattan Expressways … Now there have been maps showing these proposed highways before … but the point of doing it up to look like a Google Map was to put these highways in a modern context … We have become so accustomed to viewing the world through Google Maps (or some other online mapping software) that I feel like these maps are starting to shape our view point of the city.
I’m reminded of the introduction to Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps, in which he says maps “enable the past to become part of our living . . . now . . . here.”
Links to a post from ThatsSoYummy about the profit-maximizing design strategies used by restaurants on their menus.
Missing dollar signs
The dollar symbol is missing next to the proces for a reason: That one little character ($) reminds you that you’re spending money. When Restaurants in one 2008 Cornell University study left dollar signs off the menu, the average check went up $5.55.
“You’re a museum, right? You’re not an outreach summercamp. You’re not an Imax theatre lobby. You’re not a social networking iPhone app. Be a museum. And try harder not to suck at it.”
The intro post to this blog was bookmarked by migurski who found it via straup.
Information aesthetics asks its readers for the names of some good infographics-related academic programs.
In a post dense with ideas about the future of television, Noah Brier wonders if television will eventually deliver two different forms of content: the traditional “live” form and a new “time shifted” form enabled by DVR and related technologies.
There’s also a thought-provoking quote from Jared of the Naked NYC blog: “Technology and music reward early adoption, but television does not.”
Agreed. I just finished watching Arrested Development for the first time. About halfway through the first disc, I was glad I hadn’t seen the show when it was on TV; I would have been too heartbroken upon hearing of its cancellation.
A split-screen map, with the Ordnance Survey map on one side and your choice of Google map on the other.
It might be interesting to try two types of Google map on either side of the screen, or four types in each corner. Overlay maps—and I’m thinking specifically of Google’s hybrid version—obscure some of the visual data. With side-by-side you don’t get this; it just takes up more space—a forgivable sin if you’re building a map for monitors only.
Migurski found this via Tom Taylor.
Jennifer Trausch
[via hawktrainer]
Trausch uses a 235 lb. polaroid camera to capture her amazingly clear images. Hawktrainer recommends the Skateland series; so do I. Especially the shot named Larry. There’s an interview with her from 2007 on The Daily F’log (along with a picture of her using the camera).
The Sky in Motion
[via migurski]
It’s a particularly striking example of a timelapse capture of the night sky, taken on Eagle Island, Maine.
Supersize mind
[via blackbeltjones]
the Extended Mind Thesis . . . fits my life intuitively. I feel that both technology and media extend my mind, and mingle it with other minds. This is why I do what I do; I like that promiscuity, that cultural reproduction.
Magic Paper
[via rodcorp]
“. . . because this is honestly the most exciting thing in the world.”
Thelonious Monk’s advice to saxophonist Steve Lacy (1960)
[via TomC]
My favorite line: “What you don’t play can be more important than what you do play” (italics substituted for underlines). For some reason, everybody keeps lopping off play at the end of the sentence; but it’s right there in Monk’s handwriting, just below the last syllable of important.
If you’d like to swim upstream on this link: Swiss Miss got it from Eric Alba who got it from Neven Mrgan who doesn’t tell us where he found it.
It’s been floating around the web for a while, though. Do The Math did a little legwork on this and discovered that the original document is mentioned or used in Steve Lacy’s introduction to Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music.
Comics grammar and tradition
[via TomC]
A style guide for comics letterers. I’m intrigued by all the traditions—”[a balloon] tail should terminate at roughly 50-60% of the distance between the balloon and the character’s head”—and recent trends:
Thought balloons have fallen out of fashion in recent years in preference for narrative captions. Text in a thought balloon can be italicized. The tail on a thought balloon is made up of smaller bubbles and should point towards a character’s head (not mouth, as in a standard balloon tails). Generally you should have at least three little bubbles of decreasing size that reach toward the character. Two seems insufficient and more than four or five seems excessive.
GOP.gov Anywhere API
[via migurski]
Innovative. Slick. Beige.
Kansas rethinks its prison policies
[via bfunk]
Among other initiatives, there’s been a major push to soften the traditional, cop-like approach used by parole officers when dealing with parolees.
The new strategy seems to be working: five years ago around 203 parolees returned to Kansas prisons each month but by 2007, the number reduced by 100 per month and the number of new crimes—felony convictions that people pick up while they are on parole supervision—also nearly halved.
BBC to put every publicly owned oil painting in the UK online
[via rodcorp]
The BBC is going to put all 200,000 publicly-owned oil paintings in the UK online.
A partnership with the Public Catalogue Foundation charity will see all the UK’s publicly owned oil paintings – 80% of which are not on public display – placed on the internet by 2012.
Mapping a connected world
[via migurski]
To understand how the world really works, we need maps, not just of infrastructure, but of flow. We need maps not just of the internet and shipping lanes, but maps that help us understand who and what we pay attention to, how we get information, what we know and what we don’t know.
A partnership with the Public Catalogue Foundation charity will see all the UK’s publicly owned oil paintings – 80% of which are not on public display – placed on the internet by 2012.
A Newspaper? On a PC? That’s Crazy Talk
[via nautical2k]
A post from the New York Times’ Bits blog links to this video from 1981:
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Every weekday, I use this space to share the best links from a select group of 21 people in my network on delicious.com. The membership of this select group (listed in the right-hand column above) is subject to change. That's where you come in.
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