uk.shop.lomography.com/lomokino-smart-phone-holder So roundabout! The Lomography folks have created a “digitizer” for their LomoKino product that uses an iPhone’s camera. So to get your movie on the web you need to: (a) use a LomoKino camera to shoot 144 frames on a roll of 35mm film (done in less than a minute?); (b) develop this film (at least US$10?); (c) load the film into LomoKino Smart Phone Holder and use your iPhone’s camera to record the movie as you animate it via a hand crank. 21:54
www.aphotoeditor.com/2011/08/23/mitchell-feinbergs-
8x10-digital-capture-back/ So many insane steps to this: (1) Dude commissions two 8x10 inch digital capture backs that (2) together cost as much as a house so that (3) he can preview what’s going to happen when he takes the shot for real on (4) 8x10 Polaroid film. (He’s especially keen to be able to preview because Polaroid aren’t making the film anymore.) Further, because it’s custom kit, it (5) only does 10M pixels! 20:37
tatt.ly/ “Designy temporary tattoos.” 07:57
nymag.com/fashion/11/fall/andrej-pejic/ “Many people are blessed with beauty. Some even make a career of it. But very few can work both sides of the runway.” 20:00
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_
PD-Art_tag Wikipedia’s reckon that digital copies of works of art can be used on Wikipedia (or anywhere else) provided the copyright on the original work has expired. i.e. you can copy an image from a gallery’s website, and use it on your own. 23:49
www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/18/110418fa_fact_
osnos A Chinese tour group takes on Europe. (Interesting, and provides some insight into Chinese values and attitudes.) 09:33
www.silentuk.com/?p=2792 Urban exploration: report on a journey through the tunnels of the abandoned Royal Mail railway that runs for 6 miles underneath London. 20:56
blog.okcupid.com/index.php/10-charts-about-sex/ Really interesting visualisations of some sex and self-image data, collected by the dating website OkCupid. 20:56
www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/magazine/27christie-t.html Profile of Chris Christie, the entertaining and savvy Republican governor of New Jersey. 12:28
www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/25/libya_analysis/ Analysis of the UK’s defence strategy, and how well the requirements of action in Libya matches up with the current and future capabilities of the defence force. 10:15
www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/03/28/110328crbo_
books_gladwell?currentPage=all Various nice parts to this Malcolm Gladwell review of a book contrasting Helena Rubinstein and Eugéne Schueller (founder of L’Oréal)—their different styles of entrepreneurship, Schueller’s collaboration with the Nazis (for which Gladwell more or less gives him a pass), a comparison to Ingvar Kamprad, founder of Ikea. 09:27
www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/ContactUs/LowFlyingComplaints.htm How to complain to the Ministry of Defence if you’ being bothered by low flying aircraft. (No, the country drop-down does not include Libya.) 23:09
www.theawl.com/tag/the-fucking-moon “Moon Just As Ugly From The Back.” The Awl is not a fan of the moon. 22:34
www.wejetset.com/blog/category/wallpaper Some nice photos suitable for use as desktop wallpaper. 21:21
vimeo.com/18446531 Captivating video of street dance moves set to Girl Talk’s album “All Day.” (Backstory from the NY Times.) 23:14
design.canonical.com/2011/03/quit/ Some excellent UI thoughts on the “Quit” menu item—the usability problems it causes, and how they can be fixed. 21:14
thesartorialist.blogspot.com/2011/03/fendi-fall-2011.html What regular people can get out of Fashion Week runway shots: “Fendi, for example, was really about fantastic color combinations. Even if you didn’t like the clothes you can focus on the color schemes. These suggestions of color can be used whether shopping Fendi, or Zara, or vintage.” 21:45
www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/garden/17location.html Quite like this little house in Red Hook, Brooklyn. 23:22
tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/model-morphosis/ Somewhat captivating before and after model shots, which a nifty slider to switch between the before and after. 23:45
irinawerning.com/back-to-the-fut/back-to-the-future/
Pretty awesome: childhood photos, and recent re-enactments of childhood photos with the same, now grown-up, children. 21:54
lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/through-my-eye-
not-hipstamatics/ Defence of the third place photograph in the feature pictures story category, which was taken (by a professional photographer) using an iPhone and the Hipstamatic app. 16:31
www.theawl.com/ My favourite new blog. 20:44
www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/us/24garage.html Miami Beach has a $65 million Herzog & de Meuron designed parking garage. The top deck gets rented out for weddings. 20:42
www.andyfreeberg.com/guardians.html Some nice portraits of the elderly female guards of Russian Art Museums, together with the artworks they guard. 21:26
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_
furiously The purpose of Chomsky’s “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” was not to demonstrate that it was possible to construct a meaningless, though still grammatically correct sentence, but to show that the Markov Chain model of language was incorrect via the example of two similar but equally improbable sentences, one of which was grammatically correct, and the other not. 21:15
www.slate.com/id/2282768/pagenum/all/ “Brandt has been inserting feces into his patients for a decade now and claims to be solving their problems nearly 100 percent of the time. If his method really works—and he’s not the only doctor who believes that it does—then we may have found a viable, if weird, solution to a serious problem.” 19:37
fontsinuse.com/tzegoh/ Little reviews of sites that use type particularly well; in this case a profile of fashion designer Tze Goh’s wonderfully minimal website for his equally minimal clothes. (Striking photography, too.) 16:55
www.collegehumor.com/video:1944668 Surprisingly long, technical, funny and expensive (?) Photoshop tutorial rap. 11:16
www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/business/16build.html American architects are really appreciative of Chinese clients: “‘There’s no way a U.S. developer would let us do these,’ Mr. McVoy says, adding that the American mentality is, ‘if it hasn’t been done before, then you shouldn’t do it. It’s all about risk, risk, risk. The Chinese have a kind of fearlessness to build things.’” 09:11
www.theawl.com/2010/12/the-emergency-cigarette-plan A story and a strategy. 21:45
arborjs.org/atlas/ Graph showing U.S. states; if two states border each other, they’re linked by an edge. There’ only one state with a single neighbour, and surprisingly few with only two. (An example from a JavaScript graph layout library.) 21:42
www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5NgG5koPZU Small documentation on Scott Schumann, of The Sartorialist. He’s annoying in a small way but it’s nice to see how he works. (And the barber shop he goes to at the start is amazing.) 21:12
www.theselby.com/1_15_11_Favorite2010/ Some splendid shots in The Selby’s picks of his favourite photos of 2010. 21:30
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/business/20110102-
metrics-graphic.html Excellent graphic showing the rate of return from investing in the S.&P. 500 for all pairs of years (start point, end point) from 1920 until now. It’s rather difficult to achieve rates over 7% for any period of time; picking a point on the graph at random (which is more or less what you have to do) yields an average return of between 3 and 7%. 12:54
www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/14/christopher-
hitchens-cancer-interview Interesting and well-written profile of Christopher Hitchens, now struggling with cancer. 15:00
www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/books/review/Phair-t.html Liz Phair’s review of Keith Richards’s biography Life. 14:59
www.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/us/29boston.html Parking rules in snowy South Boston: “Making It Clear That a Clear Parking Space Isn’t.” 11:24
www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/world/europe/30iht-dutch30.html On the large numbers of Dutch men in high-powered jobs who choose to work part-time. Interesting, despite such indicators of liberal values, on several measures Dutch women don’t work a great deal: though 70 percent are employed, women average only 24 hours a week, and women work less than men “even taking housework and child care into account.” 11:15
www.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/world/americas/29mexico.html Fun, offbeat piece on how no-one in Mexico City has or wants any heat, even though the temperature drops to near freezing over Winter. 11:09
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703395904576025482554838642.html “Mr. Barrett’s talk was titled, “Like Listening to Paint Dry,” and to judge from the droopy faces in the audience, it was a hit. He was speaking, after all, at a conference of boredom enthusiasts called Boring 2010, held here Dec. 11.” 11:07
www.fastcodesign.com/1662812/qatars-world-cup-engineering-
marvel-pr-nightmare-slideshow On the architectural challenges Qatar faces to prepare for the World Cup: “If you thought building 12 open-air, air-conditioned stadiums was hard, try shipping them abroad when you’re done. And then try to explain why one of your top architects is called Albert Speer.” 17:38
www.aerosocietychannel.com/aerospace-insight/2010/
12/exclusive-qantas-qf32-flight-from-the-cockpit/ Interview with one of the flight crew onboard QF32. On trying to figure out whether they would be able to stop the plane on Singapore’s 4000m runway: “We didn’t have the ability to dump fuel, the fuel dumping system had failed and we were about 50 tonnes over our maximum landing weight. In the Airbus and the A380 we don’t carry performance and landing charts, we have a performance application. Putting in the ten items affecting landing performance on the initial pass, the computation failed. It gave a message saying it was unable to calculate that many failures. So we then looked at them in more detail and rejected ones that we considered minor and things that were affecting landing performance on wet runways. It was a beautiful day in Singapore thankfully and not wet so it obviously wasn’t going to affect our landing performance. After we’d eliminated about three or four items the computer happily made a calculation and it gave us a touchdown speed of about 165kt and showed us about 130m of surplus runway (it’s a 4,000m runway) so basically said we could stop on the runway.” Also: “So it was nearly two hours on the ground with major fuel leaks and engines running.” 10:48
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHy9W9LpvlQ Free running video. (Shot in London, 720p available.) 19:43
www.atsb.gov.au/media/2888854/ao-2010-089%20preliminary%20report.pdf Very readable preliminary account of the Qantas A380 incident. Minutes after the explosion, the flight crew had to process and evaluate at least 17 separate warning messages (!), which took nearly an hour. (The second officer took several largely fruitless trips into the cabin to visually inspect the damage during this time.) Eventually they decided to land overweight with the left wing leaking fuel, and only one engine available for reverse thrust. (Only two engines on the A380 can reverse thrust.) After they landed, one engine would not shut down despite manual intervention by ground crew. During this time passengers were disembarked via stairs on the right side of the aircraft. Eventually the engine was drowned with fire-fighting foam but because it took so long to render the aircraft completely safe (over two hours after touchdown), and because the cockpit voice recorder only stores two hours of audio, all the audio from the initial incident was lost. 11:49
www.johnsphones.com/ Simple mobile phone (no text messages!) from Dutch design firm. Shame it’s 80€. 16:04
www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/nyregion/29onefood.html “One two-block stretch of Spring Street has a creperie, a café dedicated to chocolate cake — a Portuguese transplant called the Best Chocolate Cake in the World — and even a business, Rice to Riches, that has managed to thrive since 2003 on rice pudding alone.” 22:14
parisvsnyc.blogspot.com/ Beautiful, minimal illustrations comparing NYC and Paris. 10:11
aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/11/the-burger-lab-
revisiting-the-myth-of-the-12-year-old-burger-testing-results.html McDonald’s burgers are no more invulnerable to rotting than any other burger of the same size. 09:13
www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,725798,
00.html “Brooke Greenberg is almost 18, but she has remained mentally and physically at the level of a toddler.” 09:12
withouthotair.blogspot.com/2010/10/making-numbers-
stick-desalination.html It costs about the same (in terms of energy) to desalinate sea water as it does to raise its temperature 80°C; to melt ice is equivalent to an 80°C rise. (i.e. it’s almost as energy-intensive to melt ice as it is to boil water.) 12:23