“ Kevin Hulsey illustration, inc. Specializing in technical cutaway illustrations and infographics for automotive and industrial applications. We provide Digital 4 color and line art illustration for print advertising, web marketing, and collateral. Over 25 years of experience as a technical illustrator. ”

KEVIN HULSEY ILLUSTRATION, INC

“ The work “Digital Edition of the Complete Work of Galileo Galilei” here introduced represents the first footstep of a project that will offer the whole tools to the researchers for the analysis, the study and the collaborative search on the texts. ”

Digital Edition of the Complete Work of Galileo Galilei

“ This summer, Glacier Park Magazine editor Chris Peterson undertook a photographic project to take photos of Montana's Glacier National Park over 100 consecutive days, starting on May 1, 2009, for a traveling photo show in 2010 to commemorate Glacier's Centennial. He used a mix of film and digital cameras, including an 8 by 10 field camera, a Kodak Pocket Vest camera, circa 1909, and a Speed Graphic, among others. His idea was to use the cameras that would have been used over the course of the Park's 100 years. ”

100 days in Glacier National Park on The Big Picture, only 24 pictures

100 days in Glacier National Park on the Park's Magazine, all the pictures but smaller

“ I acquired Vivian's negatives while at a furniture and antique auction. From what I know, the auction house acquired her belongings from her storage locker that was sold off due to delinquent payments. I purchased her negatives and rolls of film from this auction. I didn't know what “street photography” was then. ”

Vivian Maier - Her Discovered Work

“ To a geologist, glaciers are among the most exciting features on Earth. Though they seem to creep along at impossibly slow speeds, in geologic time glaciers are relatively fast, powerful landscape artists that can carve out valleys and fjords in just a few thousand years. Glaciers also provide an environmental record by trapping air bubbles in ice that reveal atmospheric conditions in the past. And because they are very sensitive to climate, growing and advancing when it's cold and shrinking and retreating when its warm, they can be used as proxies for regional temperatures. ”

Stunning Views of Glaciers From Space

“ Fractal folding keeps DNA organized in a cell's nucleus, despite the tight pack. Unlike a ball of yarn, regions of DNA (shown in different colors) are clustered together. ”

How DNA fits into cell<

Graffiti tags

Another interesting graffiti project:

“ Graffiti Archaeology is a project devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The core of the project is a timelapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. The photos were taken in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other cities, over a timespan from the late 1990's to the present. ”

Graffiti Archaeology

“ In a nutshell, Typedia is a community website to classify typefaces and educate people about them. Think of it like a mix between IMDb and Wikipedia, but just for type. Anyone can join, add, and edit pages for typefaces or for the people behind the type. ”

Typedia

“ Once a day, a young man mops the floor of a dilapidated palazzo in Venice. With his head down and his two hands gripping a long handle, he pushes a damp lump of soiled rags from room to room. The rags have been soaked in the blood and filth of crime scenes in Mexico, dried, transported to Italy, and are then plunged into buckets of water and sloshed back and forth in half-moon patterns across the floor. ”

Death in Venice

“ A lost world populated by fanged frogs, grunting fish and tiny bear-like creatures has been discovered in a remote volcanic crater on the Pacific island of Papua New Guinea. ”

Lost world of fanged frogs and giant rats

In pictures: Lost land of the volcano

“ Kanchev, Stefan Kirov - applied graphic artist, honored with the Bulgarian State title “National artist” in 1971. He was born on 06 August 1915, in Kalofer, Bulgaria. His father was an iconographer. He studied mural painting in the National Art Academy (1940-1945) in the class of prof. Dechko Uzunov. Kanchev worked in all the areas of applied arts. He was an author of numerous covers of books with folklore fairytales, posters, trade marks, postcards, advertisements, forms and envelopes, post stamps, labels, packages and more. ”

Logos by Stefan Kanchev via Aisle One

“ While the exact nature of the initial formation of lightning remains a subject of debate, what is known is that lightning strikes are caused by electrical imbalances present in the clouds. Those imbalances correct themselves suddenly, with an often spectacular light show - which I've tried to show here, with a handful of recent photographs of lightning from around the world. ”

Lightning

“ The puzzling instrument is a clockwork computer from ancient Greece that used a fiendishly complex assembly of meshed cogs to simulate the movement of the planets, predict lunar eclipses and indicate the dates of major sporting events. The Antikythera mechanism was discovered by sponge divers in 1901 who chanced upon the wreck of a Roman vessel off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. The ship was filled with bronze statues, pottery and glassware - booty that had been plundered from across the ancient Greek world. ”

Antikythera clockwork computer may be even older than thought

“ Paleoanthropologists know more about Neandertals than any other extinct human. But their demise remains a mystery, one that gets curiouser and curiouser ”

The Mysterious Downfall of the Neandertals

“ MIKE BRODIE IS A 22-YEAR OLD SELF-TAUGHT PHOTOGRAPHER, who lives his life riding the rails and photographing the sub-culture of people he knows or comes in contact with. He's been doing this since 2003, and calls himself “The Polaroid Kidd”. Brodie is at home with his tribe of train hopping wanderers. ”

Itinerant photographer Mike Brodie

• Where Will Hunger Strike?
• Deforestation and Malaria: A Shared History

“ This article is an edifice, a mockery of the freedom needed to create it. It is rigid, it is linear. Its sentences end only to lead onwards to the next, pulling the reader's eye through a series of limited, and limiting pathways. And yet, reading does not have to be this way. In the process of writing this article little time was spent laying out the path of words you now follow to their conclusion. The process of writing is non-linear, perhaps more like a network of ideas spanning out from nodes of texts, cultural accumulations and historical anecdotes. Why can't reading be more like writing? Why can't the eye of the reader tend its own route through the web of the article? ”

Desire Paths: Reading, Memory and Inscription

Collection of vintage logos from a mid-70's edition of the book World of Logotypes via this post

On BibliOdyssey scans from “The Treasury of Ornament” by Heinrich Dolmetsch, first published as “Der Ornamentenschatz” by Verlag von Julius Hoffman in Stuttgart in 1887 :

• The Treasury of Ornament 1
• The Treasury of Ornament 2
• The Treasury of Ornament 3

And there is going to be a fourth post with more scans.

“ In April, one hundred St Louisians stepped up to the line and threw their dart at the giant map of St Louis City. They then had a month to visit the block where their dart landed and make a photograph. Now the results are in. ”

dArt St Louis The Gallery

“ WRITING is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Perhaps the greatest, since it made history possible. Without writing, there could be no accumulation of knowledge, no historical record, no science - and of course no books, newspapers or internet. The first true writing we know of is Sumerian cuneiform - consisting mainly of wedge-shaped impressions on clay tablets - which was used more than 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Soon afterwards writing appeared in Egypt, and much later in Europe, China and Central America. Civilisations have invented hundreds of different writing systems. Some, such as the one you are reading now, have remained in use, but most have fallen into disuse. ”

Decoding antiquity: Eight scripts that still can't be read

“ Photographer Jason Hawkes returns to The Big Picture once more, this time venturing away from London. Recently, Hawkes has been carrying his Nikon D3 aboard helicopters around the world, hanging out the doorway and capturing landscapes - most somehow affected by humans - below. Today, he has shared with us 26 more of his favorite photos from above France, Las Vegas, Hong Kong, the UK and more - with links to Google maps where available.”

• Human landscapes from above
• Jason Hawkes

“ The thing that truly sets Wolfram|Alpha apart is that it is able to do sophisticated computations for you, both pure computations involving numbers or formulas you enter, and computations applied automatically to data called up from its repositories. ”

Wolfram|Alpha

“ Kitagawa Nebsuyoshi [Utamaro] was a prolific Japanese artist who painted all traditional subjects, portraits, landscapes, and court paintings. His paintings were superior in the detail and design of the figures and their appropriate representation of the elegance and prestige of his clients. Utamaro's color prints were also very famous, and upon introducing these works to the Dutch community in Nagasaki, they developed a reputation throughout Europe. ”

The nature of Utamaro

“ It's said that when launching a new ship, it's bad luck if the ceremonial bottle of champagne doesn't break. Well, if the ship in question is Typographica's long-awaited redesign, then there is no need to worry, because this list - the site's fifth annual accounting of the best in new typeface design - represents the proverbial bottle being blasted into oblivion, showering all onlookers with a selection of amazing typefaces. ”

Favorite typefaces of 2008

“ Very little of the world's land can now be thought of as inaccessible, according to a new map of connectedness. The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks. It also considers how factors like altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel. ”

Where is the remotest place on Earth?

“ Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis. ”

Edward Burtynsky

Probability densities for the first few hydrogen atom orbitals, seen in cross-section. The energy level of a bound electron determines the orbital it occupies, and the color shows the probability that the electron will be seen near a position.

Hydrogen Wave function Simulation

“ An electron can be bound to the nucleus of an atom by the attractive coulomb force. The wave-like behavior of a bound electron is described by a function called an atomic orbital. An orbital consists of a set of quantum states that have a particular energy, and only a discrete set of these orbitals exist around the nucleus. Electrons can transfer between different orbitals by the emission or absorption of photons with an energy that matches the difference in potential. ”

Atoms main Wikipedia article: Atom

“ The Blascka glass flower collection at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, over 3,000 models were created by glass artisans Leopold Blaschka and his son, Rudolph began in 1886, continuing for five decades. The collection represents more than 830 plant species. ”

Glass Flowers at the HMNH via this post on Curious Expeditions: Fragile Flora

“ The Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads. The Free Music Archive is being directed by WFMU, the most renowned freeform radio station in America. Radio has always offered the public free access to new music. The Free Music Archive is a continuation of that purpose, designed for the age of the internet. ”

Free Music Archive

“ Pablo Picasso's monochrome painting of the 1937 bombing of the town of Guernica remains one of his more famous works. The tapestry version just unveiled at London's Whitechapel Gallery usually sits at the UN, acting as a powerful visual statement against the horrors of war. But there is much meaning beneath this famous work, writes Picasso expert Gijs van Hensbergen. ”

Piecing together Guernica

“ ERNEST HAECKEL (1834 - 1919) was a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist. With all of these professions, he left something for for all of us. His famous book, “Kunstformer der Natur” is the source for these incredible engravings. ”

The art of Ernest Haeckel

Facts about the Blue Whale: length, weight, anatomy, behavior and threats:

Kingdom of the Blue Whale

“ Hi and welcome to my homepage showcasing my banknote collection from around the globe as well as providing other useful resources to both the interested and the keen collector. I have a fairly large paper money collection which will take sometime to scan and make available for public viewing also it is a constantly expanding collection. ”

World paper money gallery

Welcome to the Artificial Owl, a site dedicated to provide on a daily basis a selection of the most fascinating abandoned man-made creations.

“ During January, Guardian readers posted hundreds of brilliant photos of garden birds on our Flickr group to coincide with the RSPB's annual Big Garden Birdwatch. After whittling them down to a shortlist of 10, Johnmullin's superb shot of greenfinches in flight was voted for by you as the winner. ”

Top 10 photos from the 2009 Big Garden Birdwatch

“ The consequences of interacting with the array of sharp spines on a sea urchin or porcupine are pretty obvious to any creature passing by...Form has meaning; it can touch us at such a primal level that our mind is left scrambling to rationalize our emotional reactions. ”

A periodic table of form

“ Bartolomeo Scappi (?1500 - ??1577) was perhaps the most famous chef of the 16th century. The banquets he prepared during appointments with Cardinals in the north of Italy brought Scappi to the attention of the Pope. He would cook for six Popes in total and was employed as private chef to two of them. Lasting fame accompanied the publication in 1570 of the 6-book series known as “Opera” [The Work(s)]. It was more a culinary treatise than a mere cookbook. Scappi included more than a thousand recipes, demonstrating his familiarity with dishes from a range of European and North African countries as well as his expertise with regional Italian cooking. ”

Renaissance kitchen

“ The web has given us access to data we would never have found before, from specialist datasets to macroeconomic minutiae. But, look for the simplest fact or statistic and Google will present a million contradictory ones. Where's the best place to start? That's how this blog came about. Everyday we work with datasets from around the world. We have had to check this data and make sure it's the best we can get, from the most credible sources. But then it lives for the moment of the paper's publication and afterward disappears into a hard drive, rarely to emerge again before updating a year later. So, together with its companion site, the Data Store - a directory of all the stats we post - we are opening up that data for everyone. ”

• DATA BLOG
• DATA STORE

“ Last Wednesday (March 11th), people in India and other countries with large Hindu populations celebrated Holi, the Festival of Colors. Holi is celebrated as a welcoming of Spring, and a celebration of the triumph of good over evil. What that translates to in action is an enthusiastic dropping of inhibitions, as people chase each other and playfully splash colorful paint, powder and water on each other. ”

Holi - the Festival of Colors

“ The Panoramic Photograph Collection (1851-1991) contains approximately four thousand images featuring American cityscapes, landscapes, and group portraits. These panoramas offer an overview of the nation, its enterprises and its interests, with a focus on the start of the twentieth century when the panoramic photo format was at the height of its popularity. ”

Panoramic Photographs 1851 - 1991

“ The complete set of 50 passenger/pedestrian symbols developed by AIGA is now available on the web, free of charge. Signs are available in EPS and GIF formats. ”

Symbol Signs

An article on the Los Angeles Time about the perception of time:

Science of time: What makes our internal clock tick

“ The Greenhouse, by Joost and others, is an opportunistic temporary insertion into a gap in Federation Square, Melbourne. It's built entirely from recycled and recyclable materials. The exterior is dis-assembled shipping containers and packing crates, filled with straw bale and covered with plants. When I was there, the walls were embedded with strawberry plants and potatoes were planted on top (and used in the potato salad served below), amongst other things. ”

Joost Greenhouse

“ Where fresh and salt waters meet, there is the potential for cheap, perpetual power generation that won't harm the environment. ”

Salt solution: Cheap power from the river's mouth

“ The second most abundant renewable energy source in terms of availability is concentrated solar thermal power. In terms of availability on a global scale it is second only to wind power. ”

Concentrated Solar Thermal Power

“ Greenpeace is an independent campaigning organisation that uses non-violent direct action to expose global environmental problems and to force solutions which are essential to a green and peaceful future. Greenpeace has utilised various forms of visual communication throughout its history. In recognition of the strong role visual communication has played in Greenpeace actions we have established the Greenpeace Design Awards. The aim is to motivate the global creative community to develop visually striking artwork that encourages the public to support Greenpeace and take action on critical environmental issues. ”

GREENPEACE design awards 2009

“ Earth Hour 2009 is set to switch off the globe. Already 538 cities in 75 countries which is double the number of countries that participated in 2008, are committed. With hundreds more cities expected to sign up to switch off in the coming months, Earth Hour 2009 is setting the platform for an unprecedented global mandate for action on climate change. ”

Earth Hour

I think they got the idea from Bali where every year all lights are switched off and no cars or motorbikes are running for 24 hours in occasion of the balinese new year's day (Nyepi) which usually is celebrated in March.

“ Watermarks is a public art project that will use a series of large-scale projections at sites across the centre of the city to explore these questions. Flood level marks will be projected on to the sides of buildings, showing how high water levels could potentially rise as the sea inundates the central, low lying areas of Bristol. By displaying these levels in real space, the project aims to help us to imagine the depth and extent of this potential future flooding - allowing us to measure them against ourselves in familiar environments. ”

The Watermarks Project

A good idea, usually visual reminders are better eye openers then just words.

“ Greenpeace has been investigating the immoral and illegal e-waste dumping in developing countries since 2002. After China, India, Pakistan and Ghana, this is the story of how one very broken TV managed to avoid being tested and recycled according to EU regulations and instead ended up in Nigeria as second hand goods. ”

Following the e-waste trail

“ Archaeologists digging in a ruined pyramid in downtown Mexico City said Tuesday they found a mass grave that may hold the skeletal remains of the Aztec holdouts who fought conquistador Hernan Cortes. The unusual burial holds the carefully arrayed skeletons of at least 49 adult Indians who were buried in the remains of a pyramid razed by the Spaniards during the 1521 conquest of the Aztec capital. ”

Mexico mass grave may be Aztec resistance fighters

Today is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth :

Darwin200

Airside's logo for Greenpeace's campaign against the third runway at Heathrow :

New York: Greenpeace presents Airplot

“ I wanted to think about this topic because it seemed to me to have a number of features not shared by other moral concepts such as murder, cruelty, theft, or promise-breaking. First,while almost all of us would refrain from these acts, most of us lie on a daily basis. Second, if any of us were to act cruelly when this was pointed out to us we would either deny that was an appropriate description of our action or admit we were cruel and, at least, feel guilt or remorse. Whereas many of us are prepared to defend our lies - indeed, to glory in them sometimes. Third, there seem to be contexts in which not only does the fact that something is a lie not count in any way against what we are doing, but seems to count in favor - poker, spying, lying contests, getting someone to a surprise party, lying to the murderer at the door about where his victim is hiding. ”

• Lying Around Part I
• Lying Around Part II

“ Shackled legs, thumbscrews used to crush the fingers of errant female slaves, a six-year-old boy horse-whipped for handing out water in a dirty glass: these sound like scenes from a modern horror story, but all were seen by the young Charles Darwin on his travels with the Beagle around the slave-owning continent of South America. You will find no mention of them in the proudly reasoned, scientific pages of On the Origin of Species. Glance at Darwin's journals, private notebooks and family background, however, and you will find a man immersed in the rhetoric and fervent belief of the anti-slavery movement. ”

Darwin the abolitionist

“ Although there are several good design websites that occasionally have book reviews, there didn't seem to be a single place online where you could get constant updates and reviews of new (and sometimes old) design books. Design books are often expensive and contrary - sometimes the book is worth having for the physical production values alone, sometimes for the images, sometimes for the words and, occasionally, for all three. We wanted to cover those elements in our reviews so that you know whether it's worth owning. ”

The Designer's Review of Books

On I Love Typography :

• On diacritics
• Inconspicuous vertical metrics

“ In the Air is a visualization project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid's air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc), to see how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the city. ”

In the Air

A post on New Zealand birds via BibliOdyssey :

Birds of New Zealand

At the bottom of the page a link to NZTEC - “free online archive of New Zealand and Pacific Islands texts and heritage materials, which offers an ever expanding, fully searchable, set of images and full-text books, manuscripts and journals [..] contains over 2,600 texts (around 65,000 pages)”

“ Viewing a Velasquez or a Rembrandt in a place like Spain's Prado museum is a unique experience. Now you can use Google Earth technology to navigate reproductions of the Prado's masterpieces, delving even deeper into the Prado's collection. In Google Earth, you can get close enough to examine a painter's brushstrokes or the craquelure on the varnish of a painting. The images of these works are about 14,000 million pixels, 1,400 times more detailled than the image a 10 megapixel digital camera would take. In addition, you'll be able to see a spectacular 3D reproduction of the museum. ”

The Prado in Google Earth

A book in PDF format by Massimo Vignelli on understanding typography in graphic design (via AisleOne):

The Vignelli Canon (pdf)

Photography, numbers, environment and nuclear proliferation :

Wildlife Photographer of the Year

The annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition finds the very best wildlife images taken by the world's top professional and amateur photographers.

Inside the mind of an autistic savant

Autistic savant Daniel Tammet shot to fame when he set a European record for the number of digits of pi he recited from memory (22,514). For afters, he learned Icelandic in a week. But unlike many savants, he's able to tell us how he does it.

Greening the Ghetto

Your goal has to be to get the greenest solutions to the poorest people.

A chain reaction of proliferation

The interlocking web of influence and espionage behind the proliferation of nuclear technology

“ Cement, a vast source of planet-warming carbon dioxide, could be transformed into a means of stripping the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, thanks to an innovation from British engineers. The new environmentally friendly formulation means the cement industry could change from being a “significant emitter to a significant absorber of CO2”, says Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, chief scientist at London-based Novacem, whose invention has garnered support and funding from industry and environmentalists. The new cement, which uses a different raw material, certainly has a vast potential market. Making the 2bn tonnes of cement used globally every year pumps out 5% of the world's CO2 emissions - more than the entire aviation industry. And the long-term trends are upwards: a recent report by the French bank Credit Agricole estimated that, by 2020, demand for cement will increase by 50% compared to today. ”

The cement that eats carbon dioxide

“ From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: there are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace. ”

No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in Passive Houses

A series of articles on Dive Into Mark on video encoding:

A gentle introduction to video encoding, part 1

“ A typographic news explorer by Brendan Dawes. DoodleBuzz is a new way to read the news through an experimental interface that allows you to create typographic maps of current news stories. ”

DoodleBuzz via infosthetics

A couple of days late (unfortunately) :

“ December 10th is the 60th Anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Adopted by the member states of the United Nations in 1948, the UDHR consists of 30 articles, which set out human rights fundamental to the dignity and development of every human being. Sixty years later, we live in a world where these basic rights are still neither universally respected nor legally mandated in many countries. We still have hunger, slavery and persecution. The rights to education, work, voting and religion are still abused. This day should give us pause. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights deserves not only celebration, but our respect and our best efforts. In this vein, we are honored to present the work of designer Woody Pirtle. ”

Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Beautiful work for a very important cause.

Welcome to the Museum of Online Museums :

MoOM

30 inspiring type treatments

“ Invisibility cloaks that are able to steer light around two dimensional objects have become reality in the last few years. But the first real-world application of the theories that made them possible could be in hiding vulnerable coastlines and offshore platforms from destructive tsunamis. ”

Invisibility cloaks could take sting out of tsunamis
via Clive Thompson

“ An image of how the gene FOXP2 differs in humans versus chimps. The gene is believed to be one of the primary differences between our species, as it has been linked to language acquisition. All ~75,000 letters of the gene are shown, however only nine letters (shown with red dots) comprise the only significant (coding) changes in the gene.”

Humans vs. Chimps

“ This site intends to survey all of the signs in New York City from 14th Street to 42nd Street. Of course, this is not possible, since there would be tens of thousands of signs within this area. The 29 crosstown streets are each 10 to 11 blocks long (1st Ave. to 11th or 12th Aves.). This gives some 300 blocks, each containing, say, 100 signs of one type or another. This would total 30,000. Even if we eliminated the repetitive traffic signs (actually, each one is different, in setting if not otherwise), the remainder would probably be over 20,000 ... ”

I'm Italian so I couldn't resist..I don't know any of the foods written on the sign...maybe Frank is not Italian? Just kidding, I actually like this web site quite a lot.

NEW YORK CITY SIGNS -- 14TH TO 42ND STREET

“ The final test for running text is legibility, so failing to notice would mean the style was not imposing on the text. The texture was good. When they occur, stylistic interruptions provide me with food for thought. If the punctuation interrupts the meaning, it demands fresh scrutiny. Double quotation marks seemed to interrupt by emphasizing too heavily. ”

Quotation Marks & Texture

TYPE IS ART, use parts of characters to create new forms:

Type is Art

On designflavr:

Beautiful High Speed Water Photography

“ Small World is regarded as the leading forum for showcasing the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope. ”

Small World

“ Hit pause for a moment and consider how greatly we - people in the digital age - are indebted to typographers. Almost all of our visual communication is delivered using the products of their craft: newspapers, SMSes, instant messages, emails, web pages, signs, posters, billboards; the list of purposes is endless. In these days where looping strokes have been replaced by keyboard clickety-clack, typographers define the style and tone of our missives. Would you like to be elegant, modern, childish or ... disturbed? Then you can choose between Garamond, Montag, Comic Sans, Zebraflesh, and a thousand more. There's great power in a typeface, but what's always interested me more than the typeface is the designer behind it - why did they create the typeface? Where did their inspiration come from? How did they start? ”

Handwritten typographers

“ In Melbourne I developed a way-finding-system for the Eureka Tower Carpark while working for Emery Studio. The distorted letters on the wall can be read perfectly when standing at the right position. ”

Eureka Tower Carpark

On designfeedr :

Stunning illustrated typography on dark backgrounds

A post on The Ministry of Type:

Guilloches

On SCP :

Design Inspiration: typography posters

The library and the blog of Jos Buivenga (LJB) where you can find his (8) free fonts:

• exljbris Font Foundry
• exljbris - Free Quality Font Foundry (the blog)

On infosthetics:

John Lennon interview infographic movie

Very interesting.

Outline of lectures in Graphic Design History for students at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia - Fall Semester 2008 :

History Of Graphic Design

On davidthedesigner a series of articles on:

52 fonts you could use instead of helvetica

A beautiful post on BibliOdyssey:

Calligraphy Exhibition

Beautiful calligraphy images. Links to the artists' pages are provided.

One more article on the history of type on I Love Typography :

A Brief History of Type - Part 5
Slab Serif / Egyptian

“ Stored in a sky-lit reading room on the top floor of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples are the charred remains of the only library to survive from classical antiquity. The ancient world's other great book collections - at Athens, Alexandria and Rome - all perished in the chaos of the centuries. But the library of the Villa of the Papyri was conserved, paradoxically, by an act of destruction. Lying to the northwest of ancient Herculaneum, this sumptuous seaside mansion was buried beneath 30m of petrified volcanic mud during the catastrophic eruption of Mt Vesuvius on August 24, AD79. Antiquities hunters in the mid-18th century sunk shafts and dug tunnels around Herculaneum and found the villa, surfacing with a magnificent booty of bronzes and marbles. Most of these, including a svelte seated Hermes modelled in the manner of Lyssipus, now grace the National Archeological Museum in Naples.”

In search of Western civilisation's lost classics

“ In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine.”

Solar revolution

“ The images ... were taken at the turn of the Millennium, when NASA's scientists had a brilliant idea: to scan through 400,000 images taken by the Landsat 7 satellite and display only the most the most beautiful. A handful of the best were painstakingly chosen and then displayed at the Library of Congress in 2000.”

30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth

The first part of the first article on Practical Evolution by John Hawks:

Weed species (part 1)

“ Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”

WORDLE via information aesthetics

In his 2-volume work, 'Décorations Polychromes', artist Ernst Ewald assembles what amounts to a grand tour through some of the most important elements from the decorative arts output of the Renaissance, found in buildings from Europe (and North Africa).

Décorations Polychromes

On The Nonist:

Hsueh Shao-Tang, Stamp Connector

Beautiful.

“ I'm going to start a series of articles about the common sense aspect of evolutionary theory. What about evolution is actually practical knowledge? How can it help people understand things relevant to their own work or lives? This goes beyond the gee-whiz, “Where do we come from”, National Geographic-kind of interesting question. That's nothing more than a framework for idle curiosity: it presents evolution as a kind of adjunct or substitute for religious inquiry. I want to convey something more important. It matters that we evolved. The process of evolution allows scientific predictions that we can use to make things happen, to make them work. Evolutionary biology illustrates and informs us about decisions that society will have to make in the next 20 years; decisions that I want my students to be informed about. When I teach evolution, I emphasize a common sense perspective. Understanding a science means knowing the boundaries of the possible.”

Notes in practical evolution

John Hawks will publish on his blog an essay every Friday on evolution with a common sense perspective. Very interesting.

“ In early 1858, on Ternate in Malaysia, a young specimen collector was tracking the island's elusive birds of paradise when he was struck by malaria...Then the fever subsided - and inspiration struck. Fittest variations will survive longest and will eventually evolve into new species, he realised. Thus the theory of natural selection appeared, fever-like, in the mind of one of our greatest naturalists. Wallace wrote up his ideas and sent them to Charles Darwin, already a naturalist of some reputation. His paper arrived on 18 June, 1858 - 150 years ago last week - at Darwin's estate in Downe, in Kent.”

How Darwin won the evolution race

Four beautiful articles on type history:

• Type Terminology: Humanist
• Type Terminology: Old Style
• Type Terms: Transitional Type
• A Brief History of Type

One week of the Guardian takes the news from one week of the Guardian newspaper and visually represents it as a series of static images.

One week of the Guardian

'skine art:

moleskine art

“ To an observer in space, humanity's footprints on the surface of the Earth are large and varied. They include the regular patterns of irrigated cropland, straight lines of roads and railways running across continents, reservoirs on river systems, and the cement rectangles of ports and seawalls along coastlines. But what about humanity's signature footprint - cities? By day, cities viewed from space can blend into the countryside, or appear as gray smudges, depending on the style of development and size of the urban area.”

Cities at night: the view from space

“ Welcome to CarType. A comprehensive study and collection of reviews and typographical applications of emblems, car company logos and car logos with images, comments, links, car company information and general interest.”

cartype

“ Compared with Stonehenge, they [the stone circles of Gobekli Tepe] are humble affairs. None of the circles excavated (four out of an estimated 20) are more than 30 metres across. T-shaped pillars like the rest, two five-metre stones tower at least a metre above their peers. What makes them remarkable are their carved reliefs of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, and their age. Dated at around 9,500 BC, these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge.”

7,000 years older than Stonehenge

Via Veerle's blog:

“ The term ampersand, as Geoffrey Glaister writes in his “Glossary of the Book”, is a corruption of and (&) per se and, which literally means “(the character) & by itself (is the word) and”. The symbol & is derived from the ligature of ET or et, which is the Latin word for “and”.”

The ampersand

“ Archaeologists carrying out an excavation at Stonehenge say they have broken through to a layer that may finally explain why the site was built. The team has reached sockets that once held bluestones - smaller stones, most now missing or uprooted, which formed the site's original structure. The researchers believe that the bluestones could reveal that Stonehenge was once a place of healing. The dig is the first to take place at Stonehenge for more than 40 years.”

Breakthrough at Stonehenge dig

“ The idea that marriage is under attack and needs defending is a central tenet of the so-called “culture wars”. The meaning and importance of marriage is central not only to efforts to ban same-sex marriage, but to pro-life politics, father's rights advocacy, abstinence-only sex education, the “mommy wars”, and pretty much the entirety of contemporary conservative politics. The (wholly imaginary) good old days that conservatives want to conserve is essentially a time when (straight, lifelong, twin-bedded) marriage was the fount of all that is good in society. And everything that is bad about today's society - teen pregnancy, street violence, welfare dependency, the spread of STDs, sexual predators roaming the Internet, even terrorism, is traced by said conservatives, directly or indirectly, to the decline and degradation of the institution of marriage. Now, to anthropologists, the way marriage is discussed and deployed in these debates is laughable. We know that marriage as conceptualized by the American religious right at the dawn of the 21st century is neither the only - or even a particularly common - form of marriage in the world, nor the way marriage has always been in our own society. The Biblical marriage that religious conservatives hold up as their example and guiding principle would be (and is) almost universally condemned by today's Christians. ”

The End of Marriage

Found through this more recent post.

I like to read articles written using common sense and perspective instead of just taking a moral stance and then finding justifications for it.

“ In this article I will attempt to illustrate my design process - from typeface concept to a marketable font. Not many folks are willing to write about this. Perhaps they find it boring, irrelevant or just a little bit personal. I suspect it is a mix of all the above.”

Newzald: From Moleskine to Market

Very interesting article. Thanks Kris.

Via AceJet170:

“ Numerals (or figures) can take various forms. The figure style you choose ought to be appropriate to the project you are working on. Readability is key. But which style is best for which purpose?”

Oldstyle/Lining/Tabular figures explained

“ Like most punctuation, the paragraph mark (or pilcrow) has an exotic history. It's tempting to recognize the symbol as a “P for paragraph” though the resemblance is incidental: in its original form, the mark was an open C crossed by a vertical line or two, a scribal abbreviation for capitulum, the Latin word for chapter.”

Pilcrow & Capitulum

..just found out about it..

This is the post that started it:

It became a competition:

The entries on Flickr:

And the winners are:

Winners of the What is Graphic design poster competition

Very nice initiative

Fragile Earth, views of a changing world:

Fragile Earth

City blog guide on the Guardian:

Blog by blog guide to ...

“ Welcome to the Earth as Art Gallery! Here you can view our planet through the beautiful images taken by the Landsat-7 satellite - and most recently, the Terra Satellite's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER). This gallery of images uses the visceral avenue of art to convey the thrilling perspective of the Earth that satellites provide to the viewer.”

Our Earth as Art

Two posts on The Nonist:

• On the Scales
• Histoire Naturelle des Indes

“..People don't generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification...”

“..Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things...”

The Moral Instinct

“ Fishing, climate change and pollution have left an indelible mark on virtually all of the world's oceans, according to a huge study that has mapped the total human impact on the seas for the first time. Scientists found that almost no areas have been left pristine and that more than 40% of the world's oceans have been heavily affected.”

Total human impact on oceans mapped for the first time

“ 150 years ago, Charles Darwin unveiled his theory of natural selection. To mark this anniversary we bring you the definitive guide to the naturalist's great book, with extracts from key chapters and essays from leading scientists and thinkers.”

On the Origin of Species

“ This website attempts to walk you through the long and diverse history of a particular aspect of human endeavour: the translation of ideas, stories and concepts that are largely textual and/or word based into a visual format, i.e. visual communication”

The History of Visual Communication

Blank printable world maps :

Maps

“ Complexity in living things is a product of the lack of direction in evolutionary processes, of the accumulation of fortuitous accidents, rather than the product of design.”

Algorithmic Inelegance

Via City of Sound:

The windy city

I have seen these pictures before somewhere, maybe on the BBC:

Pieter Hugo Photography

“ I'm always uneasy about the concept of “speaking truth”, as if we somehow know the truth and only have to enlighten others who have not risen to our elevated level. The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavour. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.”

NOAM CHOMSKY - THE RESPONSIBILITY OF INTELLECTUALS

Via The Nonist:

“ This site is dedicated to presenting and and preserving Plains Indian “Ledger” art, drawings on paper, from the late 19th century for research and enjoyment.”

Plains Indian Ledger Art

“ Hundreds of letters and photographs found stuffed inside in a long-forgotten suitcase have thrown a tragic new light on the secret life of the great Italian composer Giacomo Puccini - and may also reveal a lost operatic composition. The personal life of the creator of Madama Butterfly and La Boheme was dogged by scandal and tragedy which deeply affected his output as a musician. In 1909, Italian society was gripped by the shocking revelation that Puccini's wife, Elvira, had accused him publicly of having had an affair with the family's servant.”

The identity of Puccini's secret lover

“The Guardian and Observer's unique series of the best interviews of the last century. For two weeks, each day's paper came with a free booklet containing some of the most famous encounters in journalism history, from David Frost's conversations about Watergate with Richard Nixon to Marilyn Monroe's last interview, Princess Diana's confessions to Martin Bashir and Bill Grundy's disastrous grilling of the Sex Pistols on live television.”

Great interviews of the 20th century

“ Where do moral rules come from? From reason, some philosophers say. From God, say believers. Seldom considered is a source now being advocated by some biologists, that of evolution. At first glance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. Could the behaviors evolved by social animals to make societies work be the foundation from which human morality evolved?”

Is “Do Unto Others” Written Into Our Genes?

“ Power generation is not a one way street: the more power it produced the more it cost the environment. This realisation has changed our view of almost everything that consumes power, but not so much computers. Only recently have they become numerous enough to make an energy difference to our world, and more recently still, their power consumption has rocketed. ”

The push for greener PCs

“ A revolutionary new environmental biotechnology - the Microbial Fuel Cell - turns the treatment of organic wastes into a source of electricity. Fuel cell technology, despite its recent popularity as a possible solution for a fossil-fuel free future, is actually quite old. The principle of the fuel cell was discovered by German scientist Christian Friedrich Schónbein in 1838 and published in 1839. Based on this work, the first fuel cell was developed by Welsh scientist Sir William Robert Grove in 1843.”

From waste to power in one step

“ Most of us would love to run our homes on solar power - if only it wasn't so unreliable, cumbersome and expensive. But thanks to a pioneering factory in Wales, those objections may not apply for much longer.”

Solar power

“ Ask someone to name a website and it's a virtual certainly they will say something ending with dot com: Amazon.com, eBay.com, Facebook.com, it doesn't matter what, it's the same suffix. Dotcom is the internet for most people. But that may all change next year when the top level of the net - the part after the dot - is liberalised. From 2008, anyone wanting their own piece of the internet is welcome to apply for it. It won't be cheap (there will an application fee of around $100,000) and it won't be simple (you have to prove you are capable of running a complex piece of the net's infrastructure) - but it could mean a change in the way the online world works.”

After the dot: the latest net revolution

“ Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite's sense of realpolitik but also with the American public's own sense of American values. Because at their core, those values are sound. That is why, even in places where you'll find virulent anti-Americanism, you'll also find enormous affection for things American.”

Why Do They Hate Us?

“ I saw her nearly every time I went to dinner in the chow hall at my base in Iraq. She wore an unrecognizable tan uniform, so I couldn't really tell whether she was a soldier or a civilian contractor. The thing that stood out about her, though, wasn't her strange uniform but the fact that nearly half her face was severely scarred. Or, rather, it had more or less melted, along with all the hair on that side of her head. She was always alone, and I never saw her talk to anyone. Members of my platoon had seen her before but had never really acknowledged her. Then, on one especially crowded day in the chow hall, she sat down next to us.”

Shock Troops

Design Online is electronic library containing a digitised record of Design journal for the years 1965 to 1974:

DESIGN online

A selection of the best images from the first four years of the Travel Photographer of the Year competition:

Travel photographer of the year

Two works by Jonathan Harris:

“ Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone's path through Universe is different, just as everyone's path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world's contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world - a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place - and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.”

UNIVERSE

“ 10x10 (“ten by ten”) is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10x10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10x10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.”

10 x 10

more works here

“ Symptoms of mental retardation and autism have been reversed for the first time in laboratory mice.US scientists created mice that showed symptoms of Fragile X Syndrome - a leading cause of mental retardation and autism in humans. They then reversed symptoms of the condition by inhibiting the action of an enzyme in the brain.”

Autism symptoms reversed in lab

“ Drifting icebergs are ecological hotspots that enable the surrounding waters to absorb an increased volume of carbon dioxide, a study suggests. US scientists found that minerals released from the melting ice triggered blooms of CO2-absorbing phytoplankton. ”

Icebergs are ecological hotspot

“ Scientists believe they have discovered the biggest migration of wild animals on Earth, with an aerial survey revealing vast herds of gazelle and antelope on the move in southern Sudan in a region which had been assumed to have been denuded of its wildlife by years of civil war.”

Sudan's breathtaking migration

“ Krulwich is a journalist working across numerous arenas...much of his talk concerned framing, and the way the media handles inclusion and exclusion, and how it creates spaces of framing. Also political campaigns uses and abuse spatially, in order to portray a different sense of space. For example, Krulwich showed some great footage from the early 90s, of Bush the Elder's campaign of the time, and the various tactics involved in building a crowd i.e. hire a 354-person band; hand out tickets to locals, imploring them to come by calling them VIPs. And then, most interestingly, creating a smaller space downtown by fencing off areas - as the rally organiser says it makes the crowd bigger.”

On CITY OF SOUND:

Postopolis!: Robert Krulwich

Flags by Colours

“ Experts are lost for words to have found that a medieval prayer book has yielded yet another key ancient text buried within its parchment. Works by mathematician Archimedes and the politician Hyperides had already been found buried within the book, known as the Archimedes Palimpsest. But now advanced imaging technology has revealed a third text - a commentary on the philosopher Aristotle.”

Text reveals more ancient secrets

“ The Web, in particular in its version 2.0, is an implementation of the strategies of control in the field of writing. The image, at the opposite, is interpretable with more difficulty by the machine and remains a not very accessible territory. Pattern recognition is a field in full expansion. It constitutes a key technology in the domains of safety, of the management of the rights, of marketing.. Logo.Hallucination proposes to use technologies of recognition of images in order to detect subliminal forms of logos or emblems, hidden (generally involuntarily) in the visual environment or in the whole of the images of the Internet. The found images will be accessible in a weblog, proposing a comparison between the original on the one hand and, on the other hand, the brand and its logo.”

Logo.Hallucination

“ Today, if you wanted eco-friendly illumination, you would have solar panels generate power during the day to run your T8 fluorescent bulbs at night. But what if you could just store daylight itself and save it 'till later?”

Things That Should Exist: Light Storage

“ If the canard that Adolf Hitler was a superb art director is meant to glorify the art directorial profession, think again. Although historians say he was the art dictator of Germany because he spent an inordinate amount of time overseeing the art and design of the Third Reich, he nonetheless had thousands of willing executioners, like Hugo Boss, designer and manufacturer of Wehrmacht and SS uniforms, doing the everyday work. Yet like art directors today, as Führer (leader) he received credit for everything under his domain, even those things he knew nothing about and had no hand in creating.”

The Nazi Triangle

“ Humans are generally believed to be more highly “evolved” than our chimpanzee cousins. But in at least one sense that isn't true, say geneticists who have hunted for the hallmarks of natural selection in our respective genomes - and found more of them in chimps.”

Chimps lead evolutionary race

Via The Guardian's Internet Guide :

“ Yann Arthus-Bertrand is not a man for small ideas. After circumnavigating the globe taking aerial pictures for Earth From Above, his next ambitious project was to create a time capsule of the world today by interviewing people in every corner of the planet. Started in 2003, the results so far are put together on this slick site. Testimonials picks out snippets from the 6,000 video interviews with incredible people and incredibly normal people, all answering a similar set of questions about their lives and dreams. Dig deeper and you'll find full-length films and road diaries of the team's travels.”

6 billion Others

“ Sheets of plastic that fold into tiny pyramids, boxes and spheres when water is added have been created by French researchers. They think the technique could one day be used to mass-produce the microscopic 3D components used in found inside many different devices from printers to medical sensors.”

Plastic sheets perform auto-origami

“ Scientists have at last uncovered the closest living relative of the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex, the most feared and famous of all the dinosaurs. For the first time, researchers have managed to sequence proteins from the long-extinct creature, leading them to the discovery that many of the molecules show a remarkable similarity to those of the humble chicken.”

Who are you calling chicken?

I have had young roosters and they hunt as a pack, more similar to Velociraptors as shown on Jurassic Park then T. Rexes, chasing my dog away to get at his food.

A photoblog by Ryan Keberly:

The Snowsuit Effort

Faces of Metropolitan Detroit.

On Coudal Partners :

Whose Fish?, a brainteaser by Einstein (maybe).

The Guardian brand advertising campaign (via AceJet170):

• New-look marketing for Guardian
• new Guardian campaign

“ Moore's Law states that the number of components that can be packed onto a given silicon chip doubles every eighteen months, but the end is in sight for this steady progress. In contrast, biological systems manage to store and manipulate information more compactly than any silicon-based device can achieve. In particular, DNA holds information in digital form, just like a computer, and uses fewer than fifty atoms to store one bit.”

How to make biology on your computer

“ The mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs and other life 65 million years ago apparently did not, contrary to conventional wisdom, immediately clear the way for the rise of today's mammals.”

Mammals Took Sweet Time to Flourish

Via mmm,pretty...:

Jen Stark

Beautiful..

“ The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar...”

from A Descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe

Force of nature

On the BBC:

Sea floor records ancient Earth

On the New York Times :

Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior

Read also an interview to De Waal by Der Spiegel:
Hippy Sex Fiends and Brutal Machiavellians

“ Mystery over knowledge, I love that. The process of creation depends on flashes of inspiration, moments where you manage to leap out of your usual groove and see things from a new perspective. Whatever knowledge and expertise you may bring to your craft, it's these moments of fleeting mystery that actually manage to kiss your work with an instant of virtuosity.”

Magic Boxes, Canned Chaos and Creative Totems

Two articles on Nature:

“ Most people tend to think of the tropics as the hottest scene on the planet when it comes to spawning new life. But Canadian zoologists have found that it is actually the world's temperate zones where new species evolve and become extinct the fastest.”

Life is faster in the temperate zone

“ A three-dimensional model of our planet's plate tectonics could help to explain why the Andes mountain range is taller than geologists would predict: it could all be down to the long length of the South American continent.”

Why are the Andes so tall?

“ The long-term mental anguish caused by psychological torture and humiliating treatment is comparable to that caused by physical torture, a new study indicates. The results, say the study's authors, support the prohibition of psychological torture by international law.”

Psychological attacks

“ The idea of gaining light from pedal power is not exactly new - kids have been riding bikes with dynamo-powered lights for years, and you can buy watches that never stop working as long as you remember to move your arm. But the Hong Kong scheme is one of a new wave of energy recapture ideas aimed at harnessing the surplus power of casual activities.”

Turning sweat into light

“ Carbon dioxide emissions from shipping are double those of aviation and increasing at an alarming rate which will have a serious impact on global warming, according to research by the industry and European academics.”

And you thought air travel was bad for the climate . . .

“ The seas around the Antarctic peninsula are among the most mysterious places on Earth - what life there is has remained largely a mystery, thanks to a thick cover of ice for the past few millennia. But the collapse of some of these ice sheets has given scientists a rare opportunity for access, and yesterday they revealed that they had found a thriving underwater world that is being transformed by climate change.”

The Antarctic's secrets revealed by melting ice

“ The complex geometrical designs used centuries ago in Islamic art and architecture were planned with a tiling system that was not discovered in the West until five centuries later, two physicists have claimed.”

Islamic tiles reveal sophisticated maths

“ If you saw Bernie Krause, a sotto voce man with heavy, nearsighted eyes, seated amid the baffling array of high-tech sound-engineering gear in his Glen Ellen, Calif., studio, you might never guess that he was once flung down a Rwandan mountainside by a mountain gorilla. Or that he forced himself to sit coolly still in the stultifying blackness of an Amazon jungle night while a prowling jaguar mouthed a microphone he had set up only 30 feet down the trail. As Krause tells these tales of peril, his voice resonates with a certain fearlessness developed during his worldwide, nearly 40-year quest to record the earth's rapidly disappearing biophony - a term he coined to describe that portion of the soundscape contributed by nonhuman creatures. Biophony, Krause has theorized, is unique to each place; nowhere in nature sounds exactly like anywhere else. ”

The Noises of Nature

“ The viability of harnessing waves as a lucrative renewable energy source received a boost last week following the announcement that the world's first commercial wave energy project will begin delivering wave-generated energy to the north of Portugal later this month.”

New Wave Energy Project

This piece of news dates October 2006, I just found out about it via 3 Quarks Daily. I think that it should have had a much bigger news coverage.

“ Giant blisters containing water that rapidly expand and contract have been mapped beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Fed by a complex network of rivers, the subglacial reservoirs force the overlying ice to rise and fall. ”

Antarctic water world uncovered

“ Human-generated carbon dioxide has sunk down to a great depth in the North Atlantic Ocean, a new study has shown. The work, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that the oceans store CO2 for longer than expected - good news for reducing the risk of climate change, but bad news for marine life in the deep sea.”

Carbon goes deep

“ In the West African rainforest, archaeologists have found ancient chimpanzee stone tools thousands of years older than the previous oldest finds in the same area. The discovery suggests that chimps may have passed cultural information down the generations for more than 4,000 years.”

Oldest chimp tools

“ An annual contest for the best microphotographs of living (or once living) things.”

Microphotographs of Living Things

“ The new Spitzer Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City opened to the public on February 10. Visitors to its elaborate displays can explore the fossil and genomic findings that f orm the basis for the current thinking on how we became human.”

The Hominids Take Manhattan

Via Ace Jet 170:

NY City Transit Authority Graphics Standards

A post on NoisyDecentGraphics has become this:

The Design Disease

Simple and nice.

“ Macro shots of various insects or bugs. All the shots are taken in my garden. ”

Insects macros

Two great posts on 3quarksdaily:

• The Future of Science is Open, Part 3
• Lunar Refractions a post about Piranesi

“ Psychologists are learning more about how colour builds language and language builds colour.”

How grue is your valley?

“ Gerontologists consider the maximum lifespan for humans to be about 120 years. But with rising evidence for a genetic “death programme” which in principle could be amended, some researchers are starting to believe the limit could be extended.”

Can ageing be stopped?

“ From this place, and from this day forth begins a new era in the history of the world, and you can all say that you were present at its birth.”

Savage Wars of Peace

“ Dark energy does more than hurry along the expansion of the universe. It also has a stranglehold on the shape and spacing of galaxies”

The Universe's Invisible Hand

Airlines set to net billions

“ Scientists have discovered the key to the ability of spicy foods to kill cancer cells. They found capsaicin, an ingredient of jalapeño peppers, triggers cancer cell death by attacking mitochondria - the cells' energy-generating boiler rooms. ”

How spicy foods can kill cancers

Two articles on online communities and their de-humanization:

• Digital Maoism
• The “Dumbness of Crowds”

Via Kottke.org:

“ The remarkable thing is that the 7 lanes of freeway in each direction have zero extra capacity at that bandwidth, while the single track of rail rapid transit has, theoretically, at least another 66% to spare.”

15 thousand per hour

On Collision Detection:

“ The Five-Year Forecast
Unseasonably warm, with freakish snowfalls and chance of cyclone. This winter will be weird, and the weather will keep getting weirder.”
by Clive Thompson

A feature on the future of New York's weather:

The five-year weather forecast

Science's 2006 Breakthrough of the year and runners up:

Special Online Collection: Breakthrough of the Year 2006

Via Kottke.org:

The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006

“ The largest lizards in the world are capable of virgin births. Scientists report of two cases where female Komodo dragons have produced offspring without male contact. ”

Virgin births for giant lizards

“ Coached by breast milk and good bacteria, the immune system strives to learn the difference between food and pathogens before the first morsel crosses our lips.”

Why We Develop Food Allergies

“ In 1891, Sylvain Dornon walked 1830 miles between Paris and Moscow on stilts at an average of about 30 miles a day (58 days total).”

Stilt Walkers

“ Has any book been recast into English more times than this tale of Aeneas' wanderings and the eventual establishment of the Roman Empire? Probably not, given both the poem's venerability and the relative accessibility of Latin. When you further consider all the partial or complete versions in private manuscript - often the work of old classics teachers, shared with their students - we indeed confront something that looms over us like a cloudburst.”

Wars and a Man

On Laputan Logic:

• the evolution of numbers
• the cult of the Golden Ratio

Historical notes for every decade since 1650:

history by decades

The Smithsonian's online exhibition of satellite imagery:

Earth from space

Via India,Ink.:

“ Penguin's just announced a new series of My Penguin classics with naked front covers - white art-quality paper, blank save for the Penguin logo. It's up to you to clothe them, in illustration or collage or whatever, and if you e-mail it to Penguin they'll post it to their online gallery.”

Draw your own

A nice idea.

The National Sleep Research Project:

forty facts about sleep

On Nature:

Human genome more variable

Two links found via Kottke.org:

• Human motivation
• Malthusian catastrophe

“ Scientists have identified the oldest known bee, a 100 million-year-old specimen preserved in amber. The discovery coincides with the publication of the genetic blueprint of the honeybee, which reveals surprising links with mammals and humans. The ancient insect, trapped in tree sap, is at least 35-45 million years older than any other known bee fossil.”

Bee fossil DNA generate a buzz

“ That Diego de Velazquez is the greatest of painters has never been in doubt. Anyone who has seen Las Meninas, that stupendous vision of the artist at his easel among the children, dogs and courtiers of the Spanish palace, glimmering like a mirror, the size of life and fully as profound, knows it at once. What Velazquez could achieve with the tip of his brush, all the way from literal to philosophical truth, remains astonishing to the mind and eye, even though every one of his marks is laid in plain sight.”

A feast for both mind and eye

“ This site currently contains more than 50,000 searchable text pages and 40,000 images of both publications and handwritten manuscripts. There is also the most comprehensive Darwin bibliography ever published and the largest manuscript catalogue ever assembled. More than 150 ancillary texts are also included, ranging from secondary reference works to contemporary reviews, obituaries, published descriptions of Darwin's Beagle specimens and important related works for understanding Darwin's context.”

The complete work of Charles Darwin online

Another beautiful post on the Nonist:

Typewriter Museum

The link to the actual Typewriter Museum web site:

The Virtual Typewriter Museum

A post On Decent Noisy Graphics asking readers to leave design questions in the comments that will be answered as single posts:

Design Questions

“ Every year we gaze enviously at the lists of the richest people in world. Wondering what it would be like to have that sort of cash. But where would you sit on one of those lists? Here's your chance to find out. ”

Global Rich List

I'm the 814.456.058 richest person in the world, in the top 13.57%. Find out that what you make a year is a lot more then you thought when compared to most of the world's incomes.

“ Breathing Earth displays the carbon dioxide emission levels of every country in the world, as well as they birth and death rates - all in real-time.”

Breathing Earth

“ In 1952, Thomas Eisner, a graduate student at Harvard, drove around North America for two months with a fellow student, Edward O. Wilson, to see the country and its insects. For the past half century, Dr. Eisner, now an emeritus professor at Cornell, continued his travels in the fields of entomology, evolutionary biology, chemical ecology and conservation. Some of his best-known research was on the explosive chemical outburst of the bombardier beetle, which he and his colleagues analyzed and photographed.”

Eye-Catching Images of Nature

“ The Periodic Spiral is the most comprehensive periodic table in its coverage of the elements and their interplay, and most efficient in enabling the user to access myriad informational categories with the click of a mouse.”

Periodic Spiral

“ History Atlas is an open-source application for reading and writing history, has two components, Browser and Scribe. Users may toggle between the two components by single-clicking the words Browser or Scribe at the left side of the application window.”

History Atlas

“ The engines of human history would not have started without dreams - dreams of discovery (what is) and dreams of invention (what if). The circadian theory provides the best explanation of free will. Dreams interrupt the linearity of the previous waking state, converting a when-based record (one damn thing after another) to a what-based record (the gestalt of categories, concepts, and constructs).”

COSMOPOLITICS

“ Norwegian scientists have discovered a “treasure trove” of fossils belonging to giant sea reptiles that roamed the seas at the time of the dinosaurs.”

“Monster” fossil find in Arctic

“ In objects typical of the domestic or personal sphere, such as lamps, refrigerators, mobile phones, energy is often left either to the user's own devices (in the choice, for instance, of a light bulb or brand) or it is an invisible aspect of ongoing product experience that shows up in periodic electricity bills, when power runs out or is shut off. Electricity, as a product, is easily reduced to an abstract, invisible phenomenon whose only concrete representations are two holes in the wall. In a series of design examples, we explore how everyday products might be designed to better express - and thus stimulate reflection on - daily or long-term patterns of energy use.”

Static

A nice idea. In my opinion, anything that helps people to understand how much waste goes on daily is welcome.

“ It was hailed as a harbinger of global warming; it caused a glacial hit-and-run smash; it even terrorized a hapless group of penguins. And now, it has been revealed that the death of the world's most infamous modern-day iceberg was likewise worthy of a Hollywood film - it was broken up by a storm surge that swept the entire length of the Pacific Ocean.”

Demise of the world's most famous iceberg

“ The UCS Satellite Database is a listing of operational satellites currently in orbit around Earth. It is available as both a downloadable Excel file and in a tab-delimited text format, and in a version (tab-delimited text) in which the Name column contains only the official name of the satellite in the case of government and military satellites, and the most commonly used name in the case of commercial and civil satellites. The database is updated roughly quarterly.”

UCS Satellite Database

“ Visitors to the new exhibition - twice the size of the original 1977 exhibition - will view stunning artifacts that portray the splendors of life and death in the 18th Dynasty, the Era in which King Tutankhamun and his family ruled. Called the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, this period produced some of Egypt's most famous rulers and most exquisite works of art.”

Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs

Pictures of amazing Egyptian artifacts on the Field Museum web site for the upcoming exhibition. I have seen them many times but they are still just incredibly beautiful.

It must have been around for a while but I just found it:
Atlas of the Human Journey

“ National Geographic and IBM's Genographic Project explores early human migration routes and describes the highlights along that journey.”

“ A map showing real time emergencies and disasters happening on earth: biological hazards, epidemics, storms, tornados, hails, airplane accidents, active vulcanoes, earthquakes and more.”

AlertMap

Clicking on an icon on the map takes the user to an event description page and a Google Map of the area, if available. Nice work.

“ We have compiled a collection of thousands of the most important photographs of the last 150 years; pictures of our struggles, trials, and triumphs. We can only fully understand our history by gazing into the eyes of the people that made that history.”

Picture History

“ The institution of photography in Ceylon was first established in the mid 1840's and was practiced quite extensively towards the end of the 19th Century. During that period there were dozens of local and foreign artist who took up the challenge to record the daily events which took place in the beautiful and mysterious island of Ceylon in the form of a photographic image.”

Images of Ceylon

“ Conan Doyle and Houdini first met in 1920, during the magician's tour of England. The two of them became good friends, despite their opposing views on the supernatural. Houdini was delighted to learn that there was at least one intelligent person who believed in Spiritualism and found that man in his friend Conan Doyle.”

Conan Doyle & Houdini
via the nonist

“ On 22 September 2006, Science Magazine and the National Science Foundation honor the creators of dazzling scientific images and animated presentations, in the fourth annual Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. This year's winners - in categories including photography, illustration, informational graphics, and multimedia - captured inner details of a child mummy, mathematical surfaces rendered as glass objects, the highest mountain on Earth, air traffic by night, cellular dynamics, and the vasculature of conjoined twins. We invite you to explore the contest's winning entries and honorable mentions in this special online slide show.”

2006 Visualization Challenge: slide show

2006 Visualization Challenge: full text

“ The 3.3-million-year-old fossilised remains of a human-like child have been unearthed in Ethiopia's Dikika region. The female Australopithecus afarensis bones are from the same species as an adult skeleton found in 1974 which was nicknamed Lucy. ”

• “Lucy's baby” found in Ethiopia
• Maurice Taieb

“ Analysis of the human footprint map indicates that 83% of the land's surface is influenced by one or more of the following factors: human population density greater than 1 person per square kilometer, within 15 km of a road or major river, occupied by urban or agricultural land uses, within 2 km of a settlement or a railway, and/or producing enough light to be visible regularly to a satellite at night. 98% of the areas where it is possible to grow rice, wheat or maize (according to FAO estimates) are similarly influenced.”

“ The last of the wild represent the largest, least influenced areas (defined as above) in all the biomes of the world in all the world's regions. They represent a practical starting place for long-term conservation, places where the full range of nature may still exist with a minimum of conflict with existing human structures.”

Wildlife Conservation Society

CIESIN

“ The Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library is a public private partnership launched in 2004 to preserve and provide free public access to the Boston Public Library's historically significant collection of 200,000 maps and 5,000 atlases. Our goal is to maximize the educational potential of these antique and contemporary maps of the World, United States, and New England.”

The Map Center at the Boston Public Library

“ It is the biggest contributor to climate change. Now chemists are hoping to convert carbon dioxide into a useful fuel, with a little help from the sun. If they succeed, it will be possible to recycle the greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels.”

Solar alchemy turns fumes back into fuels

“ Every year, thousands of tourists from around the world take a long flight across the South Pacific to see the famous stone statues of Easter Island. Since 1722, when the first Europeans arrived, these megalithic figures, or moai, have intrigued visitors. Interest in how these artifacts were built and moved led to another puzzling question: what happened to the people who created them?”

Rethinking the Fall of Easter Island

“ Gibraltar may have been the last refuge of the Neanderthals, according to the results of a six-year archaeological dig. The findings, which show that Neanderthals lived alongside modern humans for thousands of years, bring fresh evidence to the debate on what happened to our evolutionary cousins, and whether modern humans drove them to extinction.”

Neanderthal's last stand

“ Archaeologists have unearthed a block of stone from the Veracruz region of Mexico that is inscribed with a mysterious and hitherto unknown script. By comparing their find to other fragments of ceramics, clay and stone found in the same place, Ma. del Carmen Rodriguez Martinez at the Central Institute of Anthropology and History in Veracruz, Mexico, and her colleagues dated the slab to 900 BC. That makes it the earliest example of writing ever to be discovered in the Americas.”

Written in stone

The standard cartographic symbols and patterns used on U.S. National Park Service maps available for download
via kottke.org

“ Physicists in Italy are developing a new device for assessing the condition of some of the country's most valuable fresco paintings. The tool can reveal information about the condition of a wall painting without ever touching its surface, making the device a potentially valuable aid to restoration and preservation efforts.”

Tool to diagnose Italian frescoes

Flight waveform of the Common Sheathtail Bat

“ Animals swimming or flying at cruising speed use similar ratios of stroke frequency and amplitude to forward speed. For dolphins, sharks, and bony fish moving at their preferred cruising speed, the ratio of tail frequency and amplitude to forward speed is constrained to a narrow but efficient range of values.”

The Strouhal Number in Cruising Flight

Part of style.org, a series of experimental data graphics.
(published by 13pt)

“ The fact that music is universal across cultures and has been part of human life for a very long time - archeologists have found musical instruments dating from 34,000 BC and some believe that a 50,000-year-old hollowed-out bear bone from a Neanderthal campsite is an early flute - does suggest that it may indeed be an innate human tendency. And yet it's unclear what purpose it serves...The evolutionary benefits of our affinity for food (nutrition) and sex (procreation) are easy enough to explain, but music is trickier. It has become one of the great puzzles in the field of evolutionary psychology, a controversial discipline dedicated to determining the adaptive roots of aspects of modern behavior, from child-rearing to religion.”

Survival of the harmonious

“ Extreme changes in the Earth's climate that happened around 3,000 years ago, during which the Sahara Desert became completely arid and the El Niño cycle strengthened, could have kick-started civilizations in some places on Earth.”

Civilizations born of hard times

Hardship brings out the best part of man? In some ways, probably, but I bet that it got a lot worse before it got any better. It says so at the end of the article:

“ The changes might not have been entirely positive, however, Brooks notes. “Life actually got worse for a lot of people” he says. “Inequality and hierarchy increased and most people had to do more hard labour.” Hunter-gatherer communities, on the other hand, ran on a consensus basis with no set leaders - much closer to today's notions of the democratic ideal.”

I particularly like the last line, today's notions of the democratic ideal, what's that? Sometimes these scientists live in a dream world, I don't see any sign of democracy or anything even remotely similar to it in the world. Might is right, that's what works. Human beings may get together in times of hardship, but that's the exception not the rule.

“ Type genetic testing into a search engine and you'll see an array of paid adverts along the sides of the page, offering screening tests, DNA tests, paternity tests and genealogy tests. It's a thriving business. What's not as clear in the adverts is that the foundations of the business could best be called shallow.”

Genetic medics build high hopes

“ News archive search provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives. Users can search for events, people or ideas and see how they have been described over time. In addition to searching for the most relevant articles for their query, users can get a historical overview of the results by browsing an automatically created timeline. We provide two ways of searching: search articles, which presents articles in order of relevance to the query and show timeline, which presents a timeline of events and articles associated with the query. The timeline is dynamically generated in response to each query.”

News Archive Search

“ Eight times humans came to try to live in Britain and on at least seven occasions they failed - beaten back by freezing conditions. Scientists think they can now write a reasonably comprehensive history of the occupation of these isles.”

Britain's human history revealed

A few days ago I was browsing the web looking for books-related articles. I came across The Nonist post on libraries' photos
( me and another million people, apparently ), found it beautiful and interesting and posted about it. Then I went back to The Nonist site and started looking around. There are MANY interesting posts. Actually, too many...So I decided to link to some of the articles I found through The Nonist' posts here, mostly as reminders for myself:

• The nature of human beings
• The Paleo-Camera Theory
• Himalayan art
• Smithsonian Photography Initiative
• The Secret Life of Ants
• Ferocious ants bite like a bullet

“ Early in the 19th century, the need for speed, simplicity, and economy in book production led to the introduction of cloth as a binding material and casing as a binding process. This exhibit chronicles the growth of English and American publishers' binding from its infancy in the 1830s to its decline in the early 20th century.”

Publishers' Bindings 1830 - 1910
via India,Ink.

“ The very thing that makes plastic items useful to consumers, their durability and stability, also makes them a problem in marine environments. Around 100 million tonnes of plastic are produced each year of which about 10 percent ends up in the sea. About 20 percent of this is from ships and platforms, the rest from land.”

• Trashing the Oceans
• North Pacific Gyre
• The trash vortex
• Trashed

“ For the past two years, researchers have been hotly debating (and coming dangerously close to fighting over) whether the fossils of a diminutive hominin found in Indonesia are those of a previously unknown species. The publication this week of some long-standing doubts over the “hobbit” fossils show the debate is far from over.”

Homo floresiensis

Beautiful pictures of Libraries:

Libraries are the keepers of human history, the shape of men efforts to understand and remember, they bring perspective to human history and enable anyone to learn and keep learning.

Library Smut

Nothomyrmecia macrops - Dinosaur Ant - South Australia

Beautiful pictures of insects on myrmecos (and also links to other similar web sites).

Scientists measure Earth's history

“ I do think a lot about how inconsequential humans are in the big scheme of things. We have not yet even proved we're a viable species compared to dinosaurs, for example. Dinosaurs were around from 230 million years ago to 66 million years ago. That's a long time. They were very successful. Humans have been around for maybe a million years. It doesn't look like we're going to have that long of a legacy but we'll see.”
Samuel A. Bowring
(professor of geology at MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences)

I have been thinking and saying that for years but this is the first time I see it written by somebody else, by a MIT's professor of Geology not some other opinionated dude like me. I also always use dinosaurs as a comparison..

“ EARTHTIME is an organized, community-based international scientific initiative aimed at sequencing Earth history through the integration of high-precision geochronology and quantitative chronostratigraphy. Our main goal is the development of the geochronological techniques necessary to produce temporal constraints with uncertainties approaching 0.1 percent of the radioisotopic ages.”

EARTHTIME

“ Amazon used to be a large river in South America - but that was before the world wide web. This month the web is 15 years old and in that short time it has revolutionised the way we live, from shopping to booking flights, writing blogs to listening to music.”

Websites that changed the world

“ The low-frequency, seismic rumblings of volcanoes are being transformed into delicate musical scores in an effort to predict when they will erupt.”

“ Researchers in Italy have already created a concerto from the underground movements of Mount Etna on Sicily.”

Volcanic eruptions score melodies

“ Fine and rare Audemars Piguet Grand Complication perpetual calendar minute repeater split second chronograph with register antique pocket watch circa 1910. White enamel dial (hairlines and crack) with red and black markings, subsidiary dials for month with elapsed time, day of the week, day of the month, and running seconds with aperture for moon age. Heavy plain polish case with chronograph button and recessed repeat slide in the band. The dust cover signed Golay Fills & Stahl, Geneva. First quality 34 jewel movement jeweled to the center and the hammers, marked Adjusted and with precision regulator. When activated this watch chimes the exact time using different chime tones to designate the hours, quarter hours, and minutes. Loud, clear tone.”

Audemars Piguet Grand Complication

“ An online visualization of a user-chosen website through a graphical DNA-like data mapping approach. The brightness of the lines is determined by the importance of the tags in terms of structure, so that a semantically rich site will appear brighter than one with messy old-style code. A site that focuses on (text) content is one where the DNA patterns are large (filling many containers), but contains a lot of empty spaces between the lines (empty space is the individual words).” via infosthetics

web2dna

The Net Art Open 2006: talking-walls
Talking-Walls is a dynamic website exploring the visual language of wall and street markings

“ Mark Fischer, an engineer by training, uses wavelets - a technique for processing digital signals - to transform the haunting calls of ocean mammals and birds into movies that visually represent the songs and still images that look like electronic mandalas.”

Subtle math turns songs of whales into kaleidoscopic images

AGUASONIC

“ Rooftop Films is a non-profit film festival and production collective that supports, creates, promotes, and shows daring short films worldwide and in a weekly summer rooftop film festival.”

ROOFTOP FILMS

The dustiest place on Earth

“ Dust clouds can cool the Earth and halt hurricanes. But the world's biggest dust source was until recently a war zone: the Bodélé depression, a low-lying region on the eastern fringe of the Sahara.”

Posters and promotion art from Kubrick's movies
via kottke.org

Patience, attention, skills:

A watch story by Ron DeCorte

ILLUSTRATED GLOSSARY OF WATCH PARTS

Making a watch by hand by Don Corson

Time Zone watch information resource

“ Phylotaxis (Phyllos - leaf, Taxis - order) is an exploration of the space where science meets culture. Its structure, derived from the Fibonacci Sequence and closely related to the Golden Ratio, is one of nature's most elegant. The Fibonacci Sequence is the set of numbers where each number is the sum of the previous two numbers. This simple sequence governs phenomena as diverse as the petal arrangement of roses, the breeding patterns of rabbits, and the shape of our galaxy.”

Phylotaxis

“ The voyage of HMS Endeavour (1768-1771) was the first devoted exclusively to scientific discovery. The Botany Library at the Natural History Museum holds all of the surviving botanical artwork from Captain James Cook's first Pacific voyage. Represented are works of the artists Sydney Parkinson (1745-1771), John Frederick Miller and Frederick Polydore Nodder, among others. These artists' works feature in the finished watercolours made during and after the voyage, between 1773 and 1784. Of the three, only Parkinson sailed on the ship and it was he who made the first sketches of the plants which were encountered and collected.”

The Endeavour Botanical Illustrations

Rembrandt was born in 1606, four hundred years ago

Powering Up, One Step at a Time

“ British engineers are converting street vibrations into electricity and predict a working prototype by Christmas capable of powering facility lights in the busiest areas of a city. “We can harvest between 5 to 7 watts of energy per footstep that is currently being wasted into the ground” says Claire Price, director of The Facility Architects, the British firm heading up the Pacesetters Project. “And a passing train can generate very useful energy to run signaling or to power lights.” Like solar and wind proponents, vibration harvesters argue that abundant, clean energy is all around us and goes to waste. The challenge is how to store the power efficiently so it provides a continual output even if the vibrations from footsteps or passing trains temporarily taper off.”

I don't really know how feasible vibration harvesting is but I agree with any research for alternative forms of energy.

Welcome to an editable collection of beautiful descriptions

Darwin Correspondence Project

“ Nothing in recent history of science quite tops the achievement of the volumes of Darwin correspondence. It is our own Human Genome Project.”

The Darwin Digital Library of Evolution

The goal of this undertaking is to make the full literature of evolution available online within a historically and topically coherent structure. The work of Charles Robert Darwin is our pivot, but our framework includes the 17th century to the present and encompasses the history of evolution as a scientific theory with deep roots and broad cultural consequences.

Places & Spaces

Cartography of the physical and the abstract. An exhibition created to demonstrate the power of maps to understand, navigate and manage not only physical places but also abstract information spaces.

Israel/Lebanon situation maps

Kept up with events on both sides of the border..There are also very recent overlays of Getty Images showing Beirut airport and Jiyeh after the air attacks.

Osher Map Library

Smith center for cartographic education - University of Southern Maine

Also on maps:

Cartography

Singing dunes

“ Ever since Marco Polo, explorers have told stories about strange sounds they have heard in the desert. It is known that these sounds are produced by sand dunes when they avalanche, but the exact mechanism behind the phenomenon has remained a mystery.”

Stéphane Douady 's web site and his article:
the song of the dunes as a self-synchronized instrument

“ My heart feels heavy as I present these portraits of the poorest of the poor of India. My father documented these portraits, not for the Internet, not for the money or artistic effort, but with a sense of history in his mind. “In a few years, it will be hard for us to believe that we lived amongst people like these” he once wrote to me. The subjects in this series are mostly uneducated, poor, and never been in front of a camera.”

Never been photographed

This is the way a bullfight should be:

Valencia(Spain) Feria de Julio 2006

Crete(Greece) about 1650 BC

“ East Art Map Online is a tool that will lead you through the last 50 years of the history of visual arts in Eastern Europe. You will get to know 250 artists/events/projects that are considered of major importance by the 24 art critics, curators and artists from the different ex-socialist Central, Eastern and South-Eastern countries invited to make an initial selection for the EAM.”

East Art Map

Albert Einstein and meandering rivers

“ I begin with a little experiment which anybody can easily repeat. Imagine a flat-bottomed cup full of tea. At the bottom there are some tea leaves, which stay there because they are rather heavier than the liquid they have replaced. If the liquid is made to rotate by a spoon, the leaves will soon collect in the center of the bottom of the cup. The explanation of this phenomenon is as follows: the rotation of the liquid causes a centrifugal force to act on it.”

On Information Aesthetics:

hydrogen atom pixel model

simple information graphic depicting the distance between an electron and a proton of a hydrogen atom

world population one

simple information graphic depicting the world population as pixels

On Nature:

You're only as old as your genes

genetic fingerprint could pinpoint fittest organ donors

Neanderthal genome in two years

we have the modern human genome. Now researchers are set to sequence the DNA of our extinct cousins: Neanderthal man

On the BBC: are cities the new countries?

“ Greater Shanghai has a population that has passed 20 million. The sprawl of Mexico City is estimated to house another 20 million. And Mumbai too. These cities are bigger than many industrialised nations. And they are growing at a dizzying rate, sucking in workers from rural areas.”

Stunned Net Art Open 2006

“ The Net Art Open takes a different approach to the curation of Net Art online. Rather then present a single event based exhibition selected by a curator or panel of selectors the Net Art Open is an ongoing blog based process delivered by RSS feed. Curatorial bias has been removed by accepting all work which meets the criteria The result is a true reflection of the state of Net Art now.”

Food for thought:

The Missing Peace

“ Peace starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us. When our community is in a state of peace, it can share that peace with neighboring communities.”
His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, 1989 Nobel Laureate for Peace

Plato as Software Designer
Plato's Ideal Types helps explain not only how our minds work, but perhaps also how computer software should work.

The Big Here and Long Now
an essay by Brian Eno

Underwater Image Competition 2006
link to a shortlist of ten entries per each of the five categories

SERPENT's permanent gallery of images split into regions: image gallery

On Nature: Sun helps clean the sky

“ The cleaning agent responsible is the hydroxyl radical (denoted OH), which is created when ultraviolet radiation splits apart a molecule of ozone to produce oxygen atoms that subsequently react with water. The resulting hydroxyl radicals are highly active and quickly react with trace atmospheric gases, such as the pollutant carbon monoxide, which is rapidly turned into carbon dioxide.”

The sudoku of the 17th century: Sangaku

“ Perhaps it's not surprising that sudoku - the number puzzles that everyone seems to be working on these days - first became popular in Japan before spreading across the ocean. The fad is reminiscent of a math craze that swept the islands centuries ago, when ardent enthusiasts went so far as to turn the most beautiful geometrical solutions into finely illustrated wooden tablets, called sangaku, that adorned the walls of local temples and shrines.”

first read on Collision Detection

Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It can be used with zero software installation, server-side or client-side and you can populate it with data by pointing it to an XML file.

Today is Nikola Tesla's 150th birthday.

An Interactive Text Messaging Enabled Public Performance: TXTual healing

“ TXTual healing uses a cell phone a computer and a projector to create a mobile public performance by posting a person's text messages into speech bubbles that are strategically placed on the facades of buildings ”

Via typographic trivia on India,Ink. :

Lost Things in the Garden of Type

A list of the top 50 science blogs written by scientists:

• top 50 written by scientists

A list of the top 5 science blogs written by non-scientists:

• top 5 written by non-scientists

According to the Technorati rankings blogs written by scientists and non-scientists have the same range. As Kottke says “it's clear that the blog reading public doesn't care that much for science”.

On the New York Times: when Venice shook the world

On Nature: Hawking and Hertog rewrite history

"To understand the Universe we must start from the here and now"

Via Kottke.org: carbon dioxide glass

"..the work could even lead to new, less environmentally harmful ways to dispose of CO2"

The BBC's web site has a section dedicated to the human body and mind. Interesting tests and interactive articles.

A nice optical illusion: spanish castle
and a tutorial explaining how to do it

Encrypt text files: LockNote

A Java applet: websites as graphs

David Byrne's journal

On the BBC:
ancient fig clue to first farming

On the BBC: Arctic's tropical past

On the BBC: Brazilian Stonehenge discovered

On ILoveJackDaniels:
internet jargon explained

The World Heritage List includes 812 properties forming part of the cultural and natural heritage which the World Heritage Committee considers as having outstanding universal value.

On Collision Detection: "The Fib"

Very nice fractal recursions

Useful Oxford dictionary faq

On UX Magazine: this is Media 2.0

On the Guardian: invisible city

On Lifehacker: install motherboard and CPU

Via kottke.org: ships locations

On the BBC: Pompeii of the East

Beautiful Earth images:

• Blue Marble explained
• Blue Marble, next generation
• Visible Earth
• Earth Observatory

On BBC: Pharaonic tomb find (in pictures).

Update 2003/02/13 : Greek tomb find.

Metroblogging is the largest and fastest growing network of city-specific blogs on the Web.

Joel on Software:

"Over the next weeks and months, if all goes well, I'm going to write a series of articles right here, on this website, on UI design for the modern age. The whole series will be, tentatively, named Great Design."

A web site dedicated to clouds:

From The British Library :

" Digitised Renaissance festival books (selected from over 2,000 in the British Library's collection) that describe the magnificent festivals and ceremonies that took place in Europe between 1475 and 1700 "

Renaissance festival books

Agreeing with the interpretations or not is irrelevant, what I like is the idea:

World flags

On the Guardian an article about cultural richness in the UK today:

All together now

Del.icio.us Popular list of highly-linked websites:

Vox Delicii

A clock made with images from Flickr that show single digits..

Read more about it.

From Web-graphics:

• Best of 2005 continued

previous Best of 2005.

On web-graphics:

• top 20 of 2005 by Alessandro
• Building a Query String

On A List Apart:

• Thinking Outside the Grid

A couple of search engine related links:

• 10 alternative SE
• google search tip

Using Flash animations to illustrate physics is something I tried a while ago. I find it most interesting but, unfortunately, my knowledge of physics is limited.

Flash animations for physics

Internet glossary

"While by no means definitive, this glossary does have more than a hundred words, phrases, and jargon related to the the Internet as a whole, with a particular bent toward the Web and and the new-media industry"

A couple of interesting links:

• Google search tips
• Send emails in the future

An urban, itinerant and adaptive art exhibit:

container art

“ Installations, sculptures, and paintings of the most innovative talents of the local and global artscape in 20 containers spread around town. A different work of contemporary art in each container, a different mix of artists in each city.”

Codefetch :

“ Codefetch's code excerpts connect users of open source software with great books about those software products”

Basically it lets you search for a piece of code and brings it back with an excerpt of the book is in, a shot of the book itself and where to buy it. An interesting idea. It could be used to look for books starting from a phrase in a online Library, for example.

Interesting post: Desire lines