Several months ago: A friend then remarked that Flickr’s URLs were annoying (yes), and I added: Well, Mat Honan at Gizmodo has made me feel a bit better about myself. Turns out, it’s probably not my fault. But I also now feel quite bad for Flickr and all of us who’ve been using it for [...]
Stamen recently unveiled a set of three types of maps based on OpenStreetMaps. All three (“toner”, terrain, and watercolor) look terrific. Here, an example of the watercolor view of Sydney: The designers have given some insight into how they made these on their blog.
One of the interesting results of the retraction of This American Life’s Mike Daisey monologue on the Foxconn factory in China is the shoulda/coulda/woulda-ing of the press corps, particularly those who have some experience covering tech, China, and/or Mike Daisey. After hearing the original broadcast, Marketplace’s China correspondent thought some of the details were odd, [...]
From the Echoes of History Dept: Around the turn of the last century, Nikola Tesla went to JP Morgan, hat in hand. He needed money to fund this idea he had for wireless technology. Depending on the source you consult, he wanted to communicate wirelessly, or he wanted to actually transmit energy wirelessly. Morgan and [...]
1. Yesterday, I learned that Wilson Pickett did a cover of the 1969 Archies hit “Sugar, Sugar.” One of the best known examples of the Bubblegum Pop genre, “Sugar, Sugar” actually sounds pretty good when given the Pickett treatment. 2. “Sugar, Sugar,” remains popular at weddings, a grand generalization I base solely on the fact [...]
In 2007, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works questioned EPA administrator Stephen Johnson about issues like emissions regulation and toxic release tracking. The EPA was also shutting some of its public libraries. Committee Chair Barbara Boxer was critical of this, while ranking Republican James Inhofe said it was a good and necessary step. [...]
The sound designer Tim Prebble has a nice post from his recent recording trip to Papua New Guinea. If you’re having as busy a day as I have had, his field recordings, of buzzing insects, rainfall, birds, provide a nice, dreamlike, and all too brief break from the madness. So this is what I’m listening [...]
We’ve discussed the affordance of paper in this space before—the unique abilities that the medium gives you: you can shuffle pages, mark up and highlight, fold down corners, etc. One of my favorite affordances is the ability to flip quickly between two pages at once, which is not so easy with digital texts. In light [...]
I am disappointed in Pat Leahy. The good senator from Vermont and I probably agree on more issues than disagree. But we do disagree on his Protect Intellectual Property Act, also known as PIPA. You may have heard of PIPA, or its more notorious House counterpart, SOPA. Many notable web sites have gone dark or [...]
김정일 사망 —South Korean headline, 19 December 2011. “Kim Jong Il Dead” Two days ago, we learned that Kim Jong Il had died two days earlier. This morning, I was struck by the photo below of the Kims in a stark, imposing hall, looking at a scale model of a Pyongyang neighborhood. Students of the [...]
Fine, fine we’ve all beaten up on Comic Sans at one point or another. It’s inspired loads of discussion online, most of it quite ferocious ridicule. (You can see some hilarious examples at Comic Sans Criminal.) Still, we’re all pretty accustomed to it, no? In LOLing e-mail forwards and cobbled-together personal websites, that kind of [...]
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