Rarely Seen Maps From San Francisco’s Quirkiest Hidden Library
By Greg Miller from wired.com: << Previous | Next >> Have you ever gone to a place you’ve always wanted to visit and found out it was even more awesome than you thought it would be? That’s how I felt last week when we visited […]
The World’s First Banner Ad
In anticipation of The Mashies, Mashable is running a weekly series celebrating some advertising “firsts.” Watch for new installments in the series every week. As opposed to other advertising “firsts” like the first TV ad or the first print execution, bringing banner ads into the world seems like a dubious accolade. …the first banner seems […]
Nooooo! It are my birthday!
My birthday today! I get cake, even if kitties don’t.
Walter Koessler project: An extensive personal look into World War I
Walter Koessler Project by Dean Putney (@deanputney, deanputney.org); Kickstarter project link: As I was getting ready to leave home after Thanksgiving, almost two years ago, my mom said she had something to show me. She pulled out a big black photo album from under our coffee table, casually laid it out in front of me, […]
The Royal Hand Ballet Presents “Swan Lake”
The Royal Hand Ballet presents ‘Swan Lake’ from milly bruce on Vimeo. “Swan Lake” program (sadly, shown without interior view) from multidisciplinary artist and designer Chris Godfrey. Other gems from Mr. Godfrey: All In One: 12 course meal in a can Contemporary culture means on every trip into town; you’re bombarded with gimmicks galore. Gimmicks […]
The Hiroshima Bombing, Visualized
Even viewed as abstractions the data have a forceful impact. By Kelsey D. Atherton from popularscience.com: Hiroshima Mushroom: Mathew Lucas In the whole of human history thus far, nuclear weapons have been used in anger exactly twice. Sixty-eight years ago today an American B-29 bomber named Enola Gay dropped Little Boy, the first atomic bomb […]
Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents (original report)
[Ed. Note: After this post, Mr. Kriesel had a follow-up call with Rick Dastin, Corporate Vice President Office and Solutions, and Francis Tse, Imaging System Architect at Xerox Corporation. His post about it is here. My previous post, Confused photocopiers randomly rewriting scanned documents, concerns an article by Peter Bright from arstechnica.com about Mr. Kriesel’s […]
Confused photocopiers randomly rewriting scanned documents (short version)
Scans can’t be trusted as Xerox machines switch numbers around. By Peter Bright from arstechnica.com: Photocopiers exist to produce close enough replicas of original documents. Traditionally, they just spit out the result onto paper. Most copiers these days can operate as (generally rather large) scanners, generating PDFs, TIFFs, or other electronic representations. But some Xerox […]
93 Photos of Brilliant Packaging Design
Jam Matchsticks Condoms Condoms Muffin or something obeestus from Reddit: (afro dude) is ‘black melon pan’, tastes nothing like melon though. Butter Cutlery Gum Earphones Teabags Meat freshness sticker Cigarettes Honey Hand lotion CD Detergent Detergent Pills Yarn Coconut Water Bread Energy drink Many many more!
Exhibition showcases artist’s highly intricate, hand-drawn maps
Incredible maps take on subterranean London, Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia. By Olivia Solon from wired.co.uk: Artist Stephen Walter has a solo exhibition [in London] showcasing his intricate hand-drawn maps, including two of London and one that revisits Thomas More’s fictional island state of Utopia. In addition to cartography, Walker has created a series of […]
A Second Life in a Second Language: A Change of Language for a Writer Is a Dangerous Thing
![Illustration: "Later that day, just when everything had [undecipherable text] into a giant ball of flames."](https://www.nicolaginzler.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/second-language-writers.jpg)
By Costica Bradatan from newyorktimes.com: In her exploration of the Catholic religion, “Letter to a Priest,” written the year before her death in 1943, Simone Weil noticed at some point that “for any man a change of religion is as dangerous a thing as a change of language is for a writer. It may turn […]
Thumbs-up from reviewers of first lab-grown burger
From IrishTimes.com: Taster says in-vitro food cultured from cattle stem cells tasted ‘close to meat’ A lab-grown meat burger made from Cultured Beef. Photograph: David Parry/PA Wire Cooking doesn’t get much weirder than this. The round, pink mass sizzling in the frying pan looked like any other burger, and probably one from the cheaper end […]
Parasites are little-understood, and they are everywhere. WARNING: Ick factor photo
By Rachel Nuwer from slate.com: This digitally colorized micrograph shows the underside of a bedbug, Cimex lectularius. From this view you can see the insect’s skin-piercing mouthparts it uses to obtain its blood meal, as well as a number of its six-jointed legs. Photo by Media for Medical/Haney Carr J./UIG via Getty Images Parasites are […]
What Is the Icelandic Word for “Four”? Fjórar. No, fjórir. No, fjögurra. No, fjarki. No …
By Daniel Tammet from slate.com: Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer The following is an excerpt from Thinking in Numbers: On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math, by Daniel Tammet, out now from Little, Brown. Ask an Icelander what comes after three and he will answer, “Three what?” Ignore the warm blood of annoyance as it fills […]
Making Everyday Activities Trippy
By Alyssa Coppelman from slate.com: Left: Flying, 1980. Right: Dancing to TV, 1982. Mike Mandel Photographer Mike Mandel creates playful, trippy images that combine everyday activities with bursts of color and light that track his subjects’ motions. For his project and subsequent book, Making Good Time, which took the better part of the 1980s to […]
Jupiter Structural Layer Cake
By cakecrumbs.me: When I posted the Earth cake, I did not expect it to get anywhere near the amount of attention it received. Getting featured on the Facebook pages Think Geek and I Fucking Love Science was a total highlight of my blogging life. I’m big fans of both pages so it was kind of […]
New Cloud Magically Appears Inside a San Francisco Room
By alice from mymodernmet.com: By now, you’re all familiar with the name Berndnaut Smilde, the Dutch artist who magically makes clouds appear inside rooms. His latest work took him to the Green Room of the Veterans Building in downtown San Francisco where he let Julia Wilczok and Maria Judice of Avant/Garde Diaries shoot him and […]
LousyBookCovers.com: Just because you CAN design your own book cover doesn’t mean you SHOULD
Please, please hire me if you’re self-publishing. Don’t design it yourself. Please. Mating With The Raptor A Different Kind of Fairy Tale Culture Shock The Legend of Oescienne: The Beginning Hard [Full site with many, many more]
An Elephant-Octopus Mural on the Streets of London by Alexis Diaz
From thisiscolossal.com, July 23, 2013: This awesome hybrid elephant-octopus was just completed this week by Puerto Rican artist Alexis Diaz. Comprised of thousands of tiny brushstrokes, the mural took a week to paint and you can see it yourself on Hanbury Street off Brick Lane. Running on Cargo Londres, Inglaterra CONTACT Londres, Inglaterra Vienna, Austria […]
National Geographic’s Cartographic Typefaces
By Juan Valdes from nationalgeographic.com: Our maps have long been known for their distinctive typefaces. But few outside the Society know little of the history that lies behind them. Until the early 1930s, most of our maps were hand-lettered—a slow and tedious process requiring great patience and even greater skill. An alternate process—that of setting names […]
Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World
By Maria Popova from brainpickings.org: Two Victorian women race against each other around the world, countering the cultural inertia of their era. “Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real,” science fiction godfather Jules Verne famously proclaimed. He was right about the general sentiment but oh how very wrong about its gendered language: […]
Cartoon Laws of Physics
From TheFunnyPages.com: Cartoon Law I Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes […]
Walking Your Octopus: A Guidebook to the Domesticated Cephalopod
Available at BabyTattoo.com: Walking Your Octopus: A Guidebook to the Domesticated Cephalopod is an illustrated book by artist Brian Kesinger about the adventures of a Victorian-era lady and her land octopus. The book is available as a hardcover on Amazon and as an e-book for iOS.
Photographer’s Facemash Project Reveals Uncanny Genetic Resemblances
By Quenton Narcisse from Mashable.com: One photographer has taken face-swapping to a whole new level. In his Genetics Portraits series, French-Canadian photographer Ulric Collette photographs two family members and edits half of each face to create one portrait. Some of the portraits look so seamless, it’s hard to tell they’re even mashups at all. While […]
French Revolution Wallpapers
By Gregory Herringshaw from cooperhewitt.org: Sidewall and border: République Française Liberté Égalité. France, ca. 1792. Woodblock print on paper. Gift of John Jay Ide Collection. This is an example of wallpaper used as propaganda. This is a paper produced during the French Revolution, woodblock-printed ca. 1792. The citizens of France felt that the Revolution could […]
Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming in Conversation (1958)
We take you back to 1958 when Ian Fleming, creator of the great spymaster character James Bond, meets up with Raymond Chandler, America’s foremost writer of hard-boiled detective fiction. The two authors, who read and admired each other’s work, sat down for drinks one day and got down to talking about villains (real and imagined) […]
Fearsome Font Friday
In celebration of the SyFy network’s world-class, glorious horror movie “Sharknado” (see my previous post, ‘”Sharknado” saves the Summer!’), today we have three fearsome fonts guaranteed to strike terror into the hearts of all who behold them.
“Sharknado” saves the summer!
By Mary Elizabeth Williams from Salon.com: When a summer’s this terrible, it takes something truly, gloriously terrible to redeem it. We are in the midst of a long, hot summer that has already strained the limits of our threshold for awfulness. We’ve been subjected to the racist hat trick of Paula Deen, “Big Brother” and […]
Living People Linked to 5,500 Year-old DNA
By George Dvorsky from io9.com: Members of the Metlakatla community recently collaborated with scientists in ongoing genetic studies of Native peoples in British Columbia. Those pictured asked that their names be withheld. Credit: Metlakatla Treaty Office. Back in the 1980s, the 5,500 year-old remains of an aboriginal woman were found on a British Columbia island. Now, […]
“Umami” Was Coined by the Inventor of MSG to Describe Its Taste
By Matt Novak from Paleofuture.com: In 1908, Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda created monosodium glutamate, more commonly known to English-speakers of the 21st century as the often-maligned MSG. Ikeda thought that his discovery was so special that the taste deserved to be described with a brand new word, a word that a century later has become quite […]
How iOS 7’s Font Change Looks in the New Beta 3
By Kyle Wagner from Gizmodo.com: iOS 7’s switch to the Helvetica Neue Ultra Light typeface was one of the bigger design points for the new OS. But it came with a catch: It looked, in places, pretty bad on non-retina screens. The fix was simple enough. Just change it back to regular weight. Here’s what […]
X-Ray Reveals How Bats Take Flight
By Megan Garber from Mashable.com: If you have seen a bat in nature — which is to say, if you have seen a bat that will go on to haunt your nightmares, mercilessly — you have probably seen the creature in one of two situations: in mid-flight, or hanging upside-down, sleeping. It’s unlikely, though, that if […]
The Largest Structure Ever Built Has Opened in China
By Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan from Gizmodo.com: At what point does a building become a city? At 1.2 million square feet, the New Century Global Centre certainly toes the line. New Century, which has been under construction since spring of 2012 (which isn’t long, for a building of this size), opened officially on July 1. The 18-story, glass-and-steel […]
‘Shortcat’ utility replaces mouse clicks with keyboard presses
As a visual person, this is completely counterintuitive to me, but others may find it useful. By Marco Tabini from MacWorld.com: Review Product Specs At a Glance Shortcat 0.4.3.1If you’re a keyboard junkie, Shortcat allows you to use keys to access almost any any onscreen element, avoiding a mouse or trackpad (almost) altogether. Nearly two […]
Undervalued Inventor Nikola Tesla’s 157th Birthday
Nikola Tesla, unlike contemporaneous inventor Thomas Edison, was unconcerned with fame and financial gain. Edison co-opted many of his inventions. An innovators’ group in Nebraska has painted a mural of Nikola Tesla’s life and work on their building: This mural, dedicated to the life of Nikola Tesla, is freshly painted on the outside of our […]
The Hut Where the Internet Began
Alexis Madrigal for The Atlantic: Let’s start at the end point: what you’re doing right now. You are pulling information from a network onto a screen, enhancing your embodied experience with a communication web filled with people and machines. You do this by pointing and clicking, tapping a few commands and organizing your thoughts into […]
Fearsome Chrome T-Rex Sculpture on the Banks of the Seine in Paris
By EDW Lynch from laughingsquid.com: photo by Anthony Gelot A fearsome chromed skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex was recently installed on the banks of the Seine in Paris. Created by artist Philippe Pasqua, the aluminum and chrome sculpture is nearly 23 feet long and consists of 350 bones. photo by Jean-Charles Sarfati
World’s Most Wired: Designer Robert Egger
By Beth Carter from Wired.com: Robert Egger crests a hill in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and a spectacular view of his 50-acre ranch overlooking Monterey Bay fills the windshield of his pickup. He and his wife made everything you see, from the Mediterranean-style adobe house to the hand-cut stone barn to the huge iron gate […]
9 Superheroines Who Deserve a Movie
By Gabe Bergado from mashable.com: Nothing says success at the box office more than spandex, superhuman powers and a villain to take down. The superhero movie genre has continued to dominate the silver screen, with this summer’s Man of Steel and the highly-anticipated Avengers 2 that is slated to come out in 2015. There’s a long list […]
Wild Cat Found Mimicking Monkey Calls; Predatory Trickery Documented for the First Time in Wild Felids in Americas
From sciencedaily.com: In a fascinating example of vocal mimicry, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and UFAM (Federal University of Amazonas) have documented a wild cat species imitating the call of its intended victim: a small, squirrel-sized monkey known as a pied tamarin. This is the first recorded instance of a wild cat species […]
‘A Nice Cup of Tea’ by George Orwell
From the Evening Standard, 12 January 1946: If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points. This is curious, […]
NASA Set to Fund World’s First 3D Food Printer
From worldindustrialreporter.com: NASA has announced that it will fund construction of the world’s first ever 3D food printer. The American space company has given a $125,000 grant to mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor, who has already designed the machine. And they hope it will eventually be able to provide food for astronauts on long-distance journeys through […]
Disaster Preparedness: San Francisco Emergency Drinking Water Hydrants
In the spirit of Independence for July 4th, be independent in case of disaster by knowing your closest San Francisco hydrant with drinking water. Go here for an interactive map of all 67. Note: There doesn’t seem to be a Hydrant #19 for some reason. Emergency Drinking Water Hydrant #1 Anza St. & 43rd Ave., […]
This Subway Window Whispers Ads That Only You Can Hear
Do you ever feel like ads are speaking to you? Well, new talking windows ads for Sky Go—a mobile streaming service—literally speak to you using bone conduction technology. So you’re just riding the train, commuting home, and you lay your head against the window and close your eyes for a minute. Just as you drift […]
Cortex 3D-printed cast for fractures
From de zeen magazine: 3D-printed casts for fractured bones could replace the usual bulky, itchy and smelly plaster or fibreglass ones in this conceptual project by Victoria University of Wellington graduate Jake Evill. The prototype Cortex cast is lightweight, ventilated, washable and thin enough to fit under a shirt sleeve. A patient would have the […]
Orwell’s birthday celebrated with party hats on surveillance cameras
By Anne Sewell from DigitalJournal.com: Utrecht – The famous author of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, George Orwell, would have turned 110 on June 25, 2013 if he was still with us. Two Dutch artists found the perfect way to celebrate his birthday in the current surveillance climate. With the current revelations by Edward Snowden about the NSA’s spying […]
In an appalling decision, the Supreme Court stops use of a key part of the Voting Rights Act
By Robert Barnes from WashingtonPost.com: Video: Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday he was “very disappointed” with the supreme court’s invalidation of part of the Voting Rights Act. A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday invalidated a crucial component of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, ruling that Congress has not taken into account the […]
Supreme Court’s ruling overturns both the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8
The Supreme Court’s ruling this week overturned both the Federal Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8, both of which restricted the right of same-sex couples to legally marry. Edie Windsor, the plaintiff in the DOMA case, will be one of New York City’s LGBT Pride Parade’s Grand Marshals. From HuffingtonPost.com: NYC LGBT Pride […]