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From Strange Maps, cartography meets typography as a pair of Brazilian designers explore what the world would look like left- or right-aligned.
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This site collects infographics of a slightly unusual or quirky nature, or with a particularly pleasing aesthetic. Recent posts include a graph charting the changing length of US #1 songs since 1950 and the sub-neighbourhoods of Greenpoint in Brooklyn.
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links for 2008-09-23
Posted September 23, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
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links for 2008-09-22
Posted September 22, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
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Slightly bizarre 3D shoot-em-up from Japan, quite similar to Space Harrier and so on. Built using Papervision, it runs in the browser and is pretty addictive
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Monday morning links
Posted September 15, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
This weekend everything here was moved from brelson.com/blog to brelson.com, and a couple of links summaries were missed as a result. So I’ve decided to post them manually instead…
Planet of the Lemur: 10 Beautiful Little-Known Species
Here are some excellent pictures of lemurs. My favourite is the crowned lemur.Thoughts for an eleventh September: Alvin Toffler, Hirohito, Sarah Palin « Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird
The titular concept of sociologist Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book “Future Shock” was a predicted social reaction against a period of accelerated technological change. Or, in other words, social and technological change leading to a large section of society with a feeling of disconnection and disorientation. The author of this article, Adam Greenfield, had always imagined ‘future shock’ as a sudden outbreak, like a flu epidemic, but in this article, whose sentiments I wholly sympathise with, he speculates that this condition may have been slowly starting to manifest itself for several years now, and that Sarah Palin is among its prime exemplars.BBC NEWS | Magazine | Compact and bijou – the slums of tomorrow?
The shiny, aspirational and modern-looking blocks of flats dotting the modern skylines of suburban London are, once you’re inside, cramped and claustrophic, and have strong potential as the cornerstones of future slums. JG Ballard was right, etc.Local paper ‘tweets’ the funeral of 3-year old boy killed in ice cream shop
“When Twitter goes wrong” – a bizarre case involving a reporter posting updates from the funeral of a 3-year-old. There’s something intrinsically trivial and quotidian about microblogging in the same way as there is about text messaging, which is possibly the reason why the headline of this feature alone triggered a confused/repulsed response on my part. I should add though that I’m also faintly repulsed by the tone this article takes in its final paragraph.Social Networking Watch: Friendster, Kent Lindstrom – CEO Interview
To be honest I’d assumed Friendster must have died a death after its explosive growth in 2004-2005 was bogged down by general infrastructural fail. But in fact Friendster lives on and is the number one social network in Asia, with loads of users in Malaysia, Singapore, Korea and so on. A happy ending!The end of the beginning of Web 2.0 – broadstuff
“In other words, the current generation of ‘2.0’ technology is becoming settled – reliable, predictable etc – and, well, boring. That layer of bedrock is done, and people are using it for the next layer…”Tags: links | Comments (0)
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links for 2008-09-12
Posted September 12, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
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I only spend around 20-30% of my time working from home but can still sympathise with the sense of social alienation it would lead to if I did it much more. This article contains links to co-working initiatives for digital nomads who miss the social interactions of an office. I can see myself getting involved in such schemes if my working situation were to change and I was spending more time at home – my kitchen could serve as a comfortable office for three or four people, I reckon
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Marissa Mayer of Google posts an insightful piece about where search might go in the next 10 years or more. Among the suggested directions are ideas coming from ubiquitous computing (the wearable device that continually runs searches for words it picks up in your conversations) as well as less far-fetched notions such as location-sensitive or rich media search. I get the feeling, however, that for a lot of these ideas, there's a pay-off between usefulness and privacy. For example, if Google knows where I am it can give me a much more useful answer to the query "sainsburys opening times". But do I want it to know where I am? Personally I anticipate that people will be less hung up on privacy than we might suspect – the recent past has shown that people are more than happy to surrender personal details as long as there's a tangible benefit for doing so…
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Interesting in-depth case study involving Amazon's Mechanical Turk. "Feed the Animals" is an album comprising samples from over 250 tracks. Andy Baio wanted to carry out some analysis on them and so went to Mechanical Turk. What follows is a fairly complex exercise in data aggregation and visualisation of data such as what years were most frequently sampled and how far through tracks samples were introduced. It makes me tempted to investigate Mechanical Turk further (and perhaps carry out a similar analysis on a mix I helped produce called All Cylinders).
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links for 2008-09-09
Posted September 9, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
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A diatribe against lazy use of the phrase "this changes everything". Makes the accurate observation that this utterance often comes from people who are talking about things that their under-paid, under-30 interns and trainees have probably known about for ages. And they're wrong anyway, nothing really changes everything just as hardly anything changes nothing.
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links for 2008-09-05
Posted September 5, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
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Interesting article about the Rosetta Project and the challenge of storing data over vastly long periods of time. I didn't know about the Rosetta Space Probe, which is a much more sophisticated artefact than the Voyager record.
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links for 2008-09-04
Posted September 4, 2008 in links | 1 Comment so far
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Part one of a two-part article on user-centred taxonomies.
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links for 2008-09-02
Posted September 2, 2008 in links | 2 Comments so far
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Mushrooms and their allies are strange life forms with inconceivable but doubtless malicious intent, as these time lapse videos demonstrate. They're ripped off from Planet Earth, however, and have been overdubbed with music from Higher Intelligence Agency
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I was born in 1975. At around the same time some people in IBM were producing this slideshow involving some vintage computer imagery and amazing typography. The presentation was about the transformative powers of databases.
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Ed Catmull, president of Pixar, discusses the company's creative culture. The article covers the resolution of a creative crisis on Toy Story 2, the "brain trust" model and the importance of post-mortems. Catmull repeatedly comes back to the theme of open communication and how important it is for people to communicate passionately without it being taken as personal, something that creative teams often find difficult.
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links for 2008-08-29
Posted August 29, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
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I agree with Stan Schroeder (writing for Mashable) here, the idea of a Facebook movie made me check that it wasn't April 1st when I saw it on the BBC site earlier today. It's particularly stupid that the person apparently tasked with writing it openly admits to knowing nothing about it.
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links for 2008-08-28
Posted August 28, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
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Hilarious story about a man who found that his banking password, "Lloyds is pants", was changed to "no its not" without his knowledge, and his attempts to get it changed back. Needless to say, he had the last laugh…
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