The Complete Manual of Things That Might Kill You, from the folks who brought you the deeply-troubling How to Traumatize Your Children.
June 26th, 2008
Nicholas Felton and Matt Masons’s collaboration for Penguin Books “Hard Times” is simply gorgeous.
My team recently had to put together a lengthy research document, which meant tons and tons of charts and graphs. Every time the team got stuck, I pulled out Felton’s 2007 Annual Report as a reminder that even relatively boring data can be presented in compelling ways.
Updated: Thanks to Jeremy Ettinghausen for pointing out my Penguin/Pentagram swap.
June 25th, 2008
Paul Collin asks if modern life has killed the semicolon:
The semicolon has spent the last century as a fussbudget mark. Somerset Maugham and George Orwell disdained it; Kurt Vonnegut once informed a Tufts University crowd that “All [semicolons] do is show that you’ve been to college.”
William Deresiewicz on the disadvantages of an ivy league education:
Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.
The Cost of War is an illustrative video which helps you visualize just how much we’re spending every day in Iraq.
Peter Lovenheim decided he wanted to get to know his neighbors and figured the best way to do that was to sleep over at their houses for a night:
Why is it that in an age of cheap long-distance rates, discount airlines and the Internet, when we can create community anywhere, we often don’t know the people who live next door?
Quick: Name two people living within twenty feet of your home.
Fifty Designer’s Current Favorite Typefaces, a fantastic little book with proceeds going to UNICEF.
Steve Albini’s famous missive on The Problem with Music from Maximum Rock n’ Roll in the 90’s:
Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.
Sadly, still 100% relevant.
Allison Radcliffe from birth to age 32: a photographic essay by her father.
Glenn Greenwald over at Salon noticed something peculiar in a recently-released Fox News poll: The Democratic Congress is more popular amongst republicans than amongst democrats.
Aeron Alfrey has drawn 1,000 beasts.
McSweeney’s delivers again; Lit. 101 class in three lines or less:
1984
WINSTON: Don’t tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism.
EVERYONE: Surprise! We’re the Party.
WINSTON: Oh, rats.
How Google’s MapReduce works, or How They Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Threw Lots of Hardware at The Problem.
Bill Gates attempts to download MovieMaker, fails, and writes a glorious email:
So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.
Here’s what I don’t get. I’m fairly certain that if Steve Jobs went to download iTunes, and couldn’t, the entire Apple web team would be replaced in about two days.
Bill Gates, the richest man on earth, a guy who founded arguably the most powerful technology company we’ve yet seen, can’t figure out how to download his own company’s software and this is what happens:
When we were concluding our interview last week, I showed Gates a printout of the e-mail and asked if he ever got Movie Maker to work. Gates noted that Microsoft plans to include Movie Maker as part of Windows Live, so people will get the program when they download that online package.
Bill Gates gets the same answer we all get; “It’ll be fixed in the next version.”
June 24th, 2008
There are moments when I’m nothing but impressed with the Bush Administration’s ability to skirt the law:
The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.
To quote a Senior Administration Official:
LALALALALA I can’t hear you!
Well, Mr. Second-Grade mentality, we voters would like to call you a doo-doo head:
A group going by the regal-sounding name of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is planning to ask voters here to change the name of a prize-winning water treatment plant on the shoreline to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.
June 23rd, 2008
Returning to the web, seemingly out of nowhere, Matthew Harding has posted a new video of himself dancing around the world:
14 months in the making, 42 countries, and a cast of thousands. Thanks to everyone who danced with me.
Oddly amazing. See the original here.
Ira Glass on getting better at creative work:
The most important thing you can do is just do alot of work.
Watch four parts of his interview on storytelling: Part 1, 2, 3, and 4.
Seems like there should be a Part 5, but it’s not on YouTube.
Two new Mac-specific trojans are in the wild and boy-oh-boy do they sound … dull:
Two security firms have reported that two rate[sic] but dangerous in-the-wild trojans are attacking Mac operating system.
Not to undercut the seriousness of any security exploit within a modern operating system, but given that a Trojan requires a user to specifically open and execute a program, they’re not that dangerous. They’re non-viral usually, since infection is not automatic, and easy enough to stop. No real danger here.
The first and more dangerous, is a rare trojan … If a user has turned on Remote Management in the Sharing pane of System Preferences under Mac OS X 10.5, or if a user has installed Apple Remote Desktop client under Mac OS X 10.4 or earlier and has activated this setting in the Sharing preferences, the exploit will not function.
So turn on Remote Management and open strange files at will!
Intego also reported another trojan posing as a poker game. When the user attempts to launch the application, simply titled ‘PokerGame’, a dialog box appears asking for the machine’s administrator password.
Alright, this is not an exploit. It’s just a malicious application. I can write a two-line AppleScript capable of deleting everything on your hard drive. If you’re stupid enough to launch said AppleScript, and provide it your administrative password, you’ve just given my little application everything it needs to do as much damage to your system as possible.
The sky is not falling. There is nothing to see here.
Do not open random files sent to you from untrusted sources. And certainly don’t give those applications administrative access. It’s just common sense folks.
June 22nd, 2008
The untold story of the TiVo remote over at Gizmodo is worth a read, if only to soak in the amount of thought that went into designing the best remote you’ll ever use.
Tom Brokaw will take over “Meet the Press”, at least through the election.
A non-controversial move, yes. But probably the best option in the bunch.
Designering.↬
June 21st, 2008
Jason Santa Maria’s call to arms continues to fester in my stomach.
Santa Maria, a wonderfully talented designer, has launched a new site where instead of the once-designed-soon-forgotten interface-esque design we’ve all come accustom to on the web, he plans to design individual entries. Altering text treatments, adding visuals, changing the page layout, whatever he feels necessary to better visually communicate. While this is common in print - especially in magazines - it’s fairly unheard of on the web.
Excuses, Excuses.
There are numerous, fantastically lame excuses for why design on the web has become such a static affair.
Often web sites are designed once by an outside firm, only to be handed off to editors and writers. The level of technical knowledge required to produce compliant, compatible markup and CSS styling rules is high. And while applications such as Dreamweaver attempt to make the entire affair visual, the code they produce is often subpar, even when it technically works. The task of creating unique visual presentations is not an easy one, and most folks just wouldn’t be up for it.
Most sites are powered by a content management system, or CMS. Systems love normalization. The more alike each thing is, the easier it is to deal with. When designing, we look for a rhythm that elements will share; header, sub-header, date stamp, paragraphs. We design those elements, then design a content management system that demands they exist. We tell our clients never to stray from our structure. And while these systems make our lives easier in some respects, they do destroy our ability to create designs as varied as what you may see on your news stand.
CSS, the language designers use to describe the appearance of a page, is sadly very broken in many ways. Browsers interpret the language differently. The language lacks any type of conditional statement - at least officially - making it difficult to craft a set of rules that describe every possible permutation a client may try.
Beginners.
Interestingly, some of the most “designed” pages – and I use that term loosely - are often pages I run across on sites like LiveJournal, or Geocities; sites crafted with no concern for all the so-called “best practices” our industry has established over the last decade.
Without the self-imposed constraints, without the content-management system gargoyle on their backs, the novice is in some ways more capable than the experienced. If you walk around, you can find sites that appear to be lovingly curated, each page unique. Sure, beneath it you have tables and image maps, and I’m sure a folder full of HTML pages that have to be updated by hand – all horrible ideas we threw away long ago. But the end result is something less static. More explorative. It’s strangely compelling.
You adopt templates and content systems because you know they save you time. But what good are they if they’re making us look lazy in the face of the dedicated amateur?
Fester.
The reason Santa Maria’s post festered so long in me is that, like many designers I’m sure, it feels like I’ve perfected the art of the template. I can sit down and layout a content-heavy site in a day or two, knowing what elements to account for, what uses are most common, issues I’ll have to resolve to translate the design into markup and eventually into a data store and administrative interface. Worse, as a data nerd, I’ve come to love my perfectly partitioned systems. I think in text and repetitive texture, not necessarily in visual systems. I have my grid and vertical rhythm like everyone else, but it’s a problem I’m used to solving once. Not solving every day. I design the “home page”, then an “article page”, then an “archive page” and I’m done. Lorem ipsum fills in the white space and I move on to the markup and back-end code.
Yet, Mr. Santa Maria seems to be on the right path. As browsers continue to advance, and as our libraries become more stable, problems more predictable, capabilities better documented, it makes little sense that we wouldn’t turn back and look at the techniques of print designers. That we wouldn’t revisit the idea of the template itself, making it broader, more elastic. In retrospect, it feels almost amateurish that no one had done that before. Or at least, done it well.
Jason’s post makes me feel amateurish. Lazy. All those terrible adjectives that should make a professional cringe. This is a problem I feel I should have solved years ago. Something more important than rewriting my personal CMS for the fourth time in as many years. Damn you Mr. Santa Maria!
Next.
What’s worse of course is that, despite my agreement, it will take me a long time before I can try what Jason is trying. Time is a bitch. Never enough of it to explore everything. But it’s something I’m going to keep in the back of my mind until I can come back to it. It’s something that will eat at me every time I open Illustrator.
Don’t just design the site. Design the page.
Reihan Salam, on the “inequality” of campaign finance donation limits:
If George Soros or Michael Bloomberg wrote Obama a check for $500 million, he’d surely continue to build his more sustainable network of small donors. He’d also be able to buy hours of time on primetime network television to share his vision of America’s future. Or he could literally put a chicken in every pot, or create a series of Obama-themed daycare centers across the country, winning the support of stressed-out parents everywhere.
Salam’s point is not a new one. “Is money equal to speech” is an old question in politics and law. While there are numerous arguments for limiting donations, the primary argument for not boils down to individual liberty. It is deemed oppressive that a billionaire can not donate a vast sum to a political candidate of his choosing.
This misses the point of the law. The law is aimed to ensuring that candidates are not beholden to any large entities at the expense of the people they govern. If George Soros wrote you a check for $500 million, and he really wanted you to make clubbing baby seals legal, you’d probably find a way. By limiting the maximum contribution, you effectively democratize the process.
Justice Stephen Breyer said it a good deal better than I can:
To focus upon the First Amendment’s relation to the Constitution’s democratic objective is helpful because the campaign laws seek to further a similar objective. They seek to democratize the influence that money can bring to bear upon the electoral process, thereby building public confidence in that process, broadening the base of a candidate’s meaningful financial support, and encouraging greater public participation. Ultimately, they seek thereby to maintain the integrity of the political process - a process that itself translates political speech into governmental action. Insofar as they achieve these objectives, those laws, despite the limits they impose, will help to further the kind of open public political discussion that the First Amendment seeks to sustain, both as an end and as a means of achieving a workable democracy.
Tata, India’s largest automotive company, is ready to begin production on the MiniC.A.T, a car powered by compressed air:
It costs less than one Euro per 100Km (about a tenth that of a petrol car). Its mileage is about double that of the most advanced electric car (200 to 300 km or 10 hours of driving), a factor which makes a perfect choice in cities where the 80% of motorists drive at less than 60Km. The car has a top speed of 68 mph.
An info-graphic from Xplane that details how Barack Obama fundamentally changed campaign financing.
That’ll never work, a collection of quotes from relatively smart people dismissing relatively awesome technologies:
There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will. ~ Albert Einstein
Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation. So let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emissions standards for man-made sources. ~ Ronald Reagan
Let this be a lesson to us contrarians.
What happens when an ambidextrous pitcher faces off against an ambidextrous hitter?
Scientist finds evidence of the “selfish gene”:
In studying genomes, the word ‘selfish’ does not refer to the human-describing adjective of self-centered behavior but rather to the blind tendency of genes wanting to continue their existence into the next generation.
Dawkin’s original book, now over 30 years old, is worth picking up - if you’re a biology nerd.
The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center has digitized a series of donated 16mm kinescope film recordings of The Mike Wallace Interview from the 1950s:
The bulk of these were 16mm kinescope film recordings, some of the earliest recordings of live television that were possible, and that survive today. Many of these have not been seen for over 50 years, and they represent a unique window into a turbulent time of American, and world history.
Be sure to watch Aldous Huxley, Salvador Dali and the oddly compelling Eldon Edwards, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
June 19th, 2008
Illegal downloaders will be barred from broadband access in France thanks to a brand-new, immensely retarded law:
“There is no reason that the internet should be a lawless zone,” President Sarkozy told his Cabinet yesterday as it endorsed the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” scheme that from next January will hit illegal downloaders where it hurts.
Less you think this was a complete industry buy-out of a country’s legal process:
Under the accord, the entertainment industry will also drop existing copyright protection on French material so that music or videos bought legally online can be played on any sort of device.
This plus the Red Bull thing from earlier today doesn’t exactly make France look particularly friendly to us geek types.
Video visualizations of the Gecko rendering engine figuring out just what mozilla.org, Wikipedia and Google should look like.
Carl Ichan, Yahoo-proxy-fight-starting American billionaire, has a new blog where he rants about the problems plaguing corporate America. There’s something oddly compelling in reading the rants of a man who could buy and sell me:
Today our economy is in a major crisis. Many of our companies are incapable of competing. Additionally our banking system has issued mortgages that cannot and will not be paid back. Why did we get here? Because in corporate America there are no true elections. It is tyranny parading as democracy. It’s a poison running through the blood of corporate America.
Spornography - that is porn created with the Spore Creature Creator - is perhaps the only thing we’ve invented stranger than japanese tentacle porn. Thanks, Geoff.
Wordle is an online tool that crafts beautiful word clouds. Here’s one crafted from all the words on this page.
Lots of folks are linking to this story on Time about a movement of folks attempting to reduce their possessions to just 100 items.
“It comes down to the products vs. the promise,” says organizational consultant Peter Walsh, who characterizes himself as part contractor, part therapist. “It’s not necessarily about the new pots and pans but the idea of the cozy family meals that they will provide. People are finding that their homes are full of stuff, but their lives are littered with unfulfilled promises.”
Hopefully I’m not alone in this, but I find the entire line of reasoning behind this to be the broad side of stupid. Believing that getting rid of all your things will make you happy is just as ridiculous as the belief that buying lots of things will do the same. Instead of addressing the real problems in your life, you glance around and decide to embark on some hair-brained self-improvement regime which may start out rather liberating, but is gonna end with you making the difficult choice between an extra set of sheets and a pillow.
Just stop buying things you don’t need. Throw out items you’ve already bought that you don’t need, and for god’s sake don’t start a blog about it.
Apparently, Red Bull has finally been allowed into France, on the condition that taurine be removed from the drink.
Weren’t aware you couldn’t get Red Bull in France? Neither was I. Not surprised? Neither am I.
Advertise your desire that we “teach the controversy” of alchemy with a handy t-shirt.
The edge-notched card, a technology time has forgotten:
One handy method this side of a high-rent computer is Indecks. It’s funky and functional: cards with a lot of holes in the edges, a long blunt needle, and a notcher. Run the needle through a hole in a bunch of cards, lift, and the cards notched in that hole don’t rise; they fall out. So you don’t have to keep the cards in order. You can sort them by feature, number, alphabetically or whatever; just poke, fan, lift and catch.