Archive for the ‘art+design’ Category
Lego Fallingwater
August 28th, 2010
Apparently Lego is now selling a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. They’re making a few other architectural models, like the Guggenheim and the White House, though they’re much simpler.
I’d love to see them try to implement something by Frank Gehry, but I won’t hold my breath.
Artisanal Pencil Sharpening
August 11th, 2010
Purported professional pencil sharpener David Rees invites you to “reacquaint yourself with the pleasures of a hand-sharpened pencil.”
Above-Car Buses
August 3rd, 2010
Beijing is getting ready to build tracks for a fleet of these double-decker bus-tunnel contraptions. They don’t interfere with traffic as much as regular buses since other cars can drive under them. There’s a pretty cool video if your Chinese is up to snuff.
Powers of Ten
July 27th, 2010
This 1968 film zooms out by powers of ten from a picnic in Chicago to encompass the visible universe, then zooms back in to a proton in a carbon atom. Behold the power of logarithmic scales.
Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour
July 20th, 2010
The sixth and final volume of everyone’s favorite nerdy graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim was released today. As you can see, it’s awesome. Buy buy buy.
Solar Sailing
July 17th, 2010
The Japanese spacecraft Ikaros successfully deployed its solar sail and it seems to be working! For those of us who misspent our youths reading Clarke and Asimov and Heinlein, this is some exciting stuff.
Readability
May 14th, 2010
Readability is a script/bookmark that cleans up online content. It’s very convenient if you regularly read blocks of text online. I’ve been using it for a few months now, and I’ll testify that it makes reading on a screen much more pleasant.
EDIT: Added link. Hurr, durr.
Debt Webs
May 6th, 2010
In the wake of today’s stock-market-crash-cum-partial-recovery, here’s a diagram1 documenting the loans that a few of Europe’s weaker economies owe to each other. Figures are in billions of dollars. Click for a larger view.
While there seems to be plenty to criticize about the fiscal policy of the Eurozone, it’s worth noting that America’s national debt is at $12.31 trillion (as of Q4 2009). For the infographically-minded, if we were to extrapolate from the size of the European debt circles then attempting to represent the US debt would exceed the size of the diagram.
1 Diagram blatantly stolen from the NYT.
The Nietzsche Family Circus
April 7th, 2010
Move over Garfield Minus Garfield, I’ve got a new favorite surreal mash-up webcomic thing. The Nietzsche Family Circus matches random Family Circus panels with quotes from the German philosopher, often generating surprisingly appropriate juxtapositions. So by reading them, we’re applying the random quote to the random picture and still ascribing meaning to the result. Minds are awesome.
art+design, books, language, old dead white guys | No Comments »
Content-Aware Fill
March 25th, 2010
I don’t know which dark god Adobe sold their collective souls to to make this work, but I think they got a good deal for them.
Unrelated P.S.: It looks like a team of researchers at Caltech just cured cancer. FYI.