February 2012
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“The Whitney is proud to be able to redistribute resources from major corporate...”
– The Whitney Biennial releases a frank statement denouncing two of their past sponsors, announcing their break with Sotheby’s and Deutsche Bank.
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Can Monkeys Understand Money?
Keith Chen, a Yale economist, and Laurie Santos, a psychologist, are studying the effects of introducing capuchin monkeys to money. A nice article from the Freakonomics series by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt. I’m always very apprehensive about animal testing, but this seems like one of the more useful things you could do.
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Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital...
John Naughton’s article The true fathers of computing contains a short summary of the alternative history of computer as put forth by George Dyson in his new book, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. Following that there’s an interview with George Dyson about many details. Anyone who’s interested in this will probably also like George Dyson’s TED...
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“Personally, I’m a minimalist: I value content more highly than aesthetics.”
– By thoughtyoushouldseethis:
In Graphic Designers Are Ruining The Web, Observer writer John Naughton outlines his dismay that so many webpages have turned into so much bloat (over the last decade, the size of web pages has more than septupled.) He has a point, and designers and developers certainly...
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“Our firm’s reputation for providing quality service reflects the high...”
– This exact sentence in a Google search leads to 2,270 results. And all of them are accountants—so much for being different and high standards. They’re all using websites created using cpasitesolutions dot com (I really don’t want to link to them and give them more Google juice).
This is...
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An Insanely Comprehensive Primer on China's...
I warned you: it takes a while to read through. But it teaches you everything you ever needed to know about China’s political system and the upcoming 2012 leadership transition.
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January 2012
19 posts
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WatchUrbanized is the new documentary by Gary Hustwit of Helvetica and Objectified fame and the last part of his Design Trilogy. Urbanized takes a closer look at how cities and urban communities work; how they become stale, decay, make people miserable; how they grow, excite, make people’s life amazing.
Watch the trailer above. You can also directly buy the streamed version above for $6.99 – the...
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How Hollywood Fucked Up SOPA
The Hollywood Reporter offers an interesting inside view into the industry’s fight for new anti-piracy legislation that was ultimately doomed because it went way too far, posed unacceptable risks for the internet, and was pushed through committee by people with absolutely no idea about how the internet works – technically or socially.
Talking of the White House’s repudiation of...
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Gadgets And Global Supply Chains
Good New York Times article about a squeezed American middle-class and the realities of a global manufacturing landscape, using Apple’s iPhone as the prime example.
Foxconn Technology assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics. “They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined...
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Do you like the taste of beer?
Or: Will you have sex with me on the first date?
The dating site OkCupid has long been known for great data-driven blog posts about dating-related topics, and The Best Questions For A First Date from a year ago is no exception – and worth a revisit. It goes to show that perceived correlation is very often wrong. It’s not the common importance of God, sex, and a shared disgust about smokers...
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“SIR – Thanks for the story nine years ago on the benefits of office clutter (“In...”
– A letter from Australia. (via theeconomist)
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“The waitress comes by, hands me the bill, and glances with contempt at Layla....”
– Shalom Auslander has written an interesting introspective read for GQ, My Hard-Core Obsession, about how everybody has their own private porn fantasies, but looks down on those with fantasies that one deems disgusting.
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LOLCODE
The internet – and the amount of time put into asinine, useless, amazing ideas – never ceases to amaze me. This time: LOLCODE, a programming language inspired by the LOLCATS meme language.
HAI CAN HAS STDIO? VISIBLE “HAI WORLD!” KTHXBYE
or
HAI CAN HAS STDIO? PLZ OPEN FILE “LOLCATS.TXT”? AWSUM THX VISIBLE FILE O NOES INVISIBLE...
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December 2011
19 posts
6 tags
“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic,...”
– Dale Carnegie
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Types With Plenty of Character
Types With Plenty of Character by the NYT is a nice intro to handset typography and review of an exhibition happening in New York City right now.
The Imprimerie Nationale in Paris is a unique institution in this digital world. In one form or another it exists since 1538, having collected hundreds of thousands of steel punches, matrices, hot metal letters, and many rare, beautiful books....
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Albrecht Dürer: Portrait of the artist as an...
The Economist published this nice text about the master painter Albrecht Dürer who earned his (large) fortune not by painting kings, but by creating and selling prints of his engravings all over Europe.
His “Praying Hands”, for example, wonderfully cross-hatched in white chalk on blue paper, was only one of dozens of preparatory sketches for an altarpiece that contained, in its central panel...
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“The attitude it portrays is what we’ve been missing from corporate design these...”
– The always poignant Armin Vit on the XL brand redesign.
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“Q. Why are so many new products so bland and derivative?
A. So many companies...”
– Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple Inc, interviewed by the British Council Design Museum in 2007.
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Watchcolinmford:
Saul Bass Pitches the new Bell System Logo. Amazing, sometimes over the top, brand pitch. Thanks to @benbours
If you have just a minute, watch the segment from 13:25 on. So much over the top it’s amazing again.
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The New "I Smoked, But Didn't Inhale"
Andy Baio on how young people see copyright today. I completely agree with him, and we have to come up with models for intellectual property in a future when this view is a common reality for the majority.
What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they...
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H&M Puts Real Model Heads On Fake Bodies
Compare the four bodies. Despite color changes, they’re all the same. Only a matter of time until the heads are CGI, too.
The bodies of most of the models H&M features on its website are computer-generated and “completely virtual,” the company has admitted.
Via Jezebel
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Capitalism: 100% Pure
Beijing-based writer Bradley Gardner tells the interesting story of the Chinese city of Wenzhou. Through a mix of negligence by the national and local government and profitable initiatives by local commerce interests, an anarchist type of capitalism seems to have taken hold. Underground banking, tax evasion, prostitution, privately built roads and airports – but also some of the highest wages in...
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WatchFunniest product video I’ve seen in a while. RokfoR is an online publishing system to produce books and other printed matter. It allows for algorithmic design formulation paired with an editor that makes collaborative production easy. The use of old TV segments mixed with voice-overs makes it stand out. The video is German only, sorry.
November 2011
10 posts
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Microwhat →
Tumblr of the day: Microwhat, as in “Before and After pictures of microwaving everything”. Via @bigspaceship
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Killian Eng
Killian Eng’s artworks are quite astonishingly beautiful. Not all of them may suit your taste, but they are incredibly imaginative and well colored. I would love to see animation work by Killian.
Via @Eike_Koenig.