Rich Gold using Xeroc PARC’s ZombieBoard:
More images here.
Krugman (“What Happened Today?”, NYT, 9 oct ’08):
On a separate note, one good thing is that there haven’t been any reports of people on Wall Street jumping out of windows. That’s because the windows in modern office buildings don’t open.
Yet.
It’s been widely noted that the national debt clock, erected by NYC real estate magnate Seymour Durst to protest the now-quaint US$2.7 trillion debt in 1989, has run out of digits, and that “[a]s a short-term fix, the digital dollar sign on the billboard-style clock near Times Square has been replaced with an integer—the ‘1’ [...]
FT:
United Airlines plunged yesterday after a false report that the carrier had returned to bankruptcy court surfaced on the internet. A six-year-old Chicago Tribune story on United’s 2002 bankruptcy filing, spotted on a Google search yesterday morning by an investment newsletter, triggered a massive sell-off of the carrier’s shares until trading was halted. [...] United [...]
…and now my dreams have come true!”
The NYT covers the hype about a new digital device, a letter-size grayscale screen, but omits key words such as “hard” or ”stiff” in lieu of the more flexible term “flexible.” Apparently unaware that the hardcopy NYT has been printed in color for over a decade (since 16 Oct [...]
Slide 3 of ANSI’s “Standards and Conformity Assessment Bodies of the United States” (PPT, version 2006-07-21):
Explanation:
The primary purpose of the chart is to attempt to portray, in high-level, block diagram form, the entities of the standards and conformity assessment systems of the United States, their and primary inter-relationships and relationships to international and regional organizations—on [...]
Anamorphic parking garage signage
is the kind of thing that wins design awards
but shouldn’t—for several reasons:
The NYT has an “interactive” piece—an aggro Flash thing that takes its inspiration from OSX’s Dock—about development of the Olympic torch from 1936 to the present.
Three alternate/additional designs for the Mexico City ’68 torch can be found at the site of Olympic Museum. Here’s a clearer detail of Type B:
This NYT graph (from late May) claims that, over the last century+, the worldwide number of disasters ranges from close to zero to 390 in 2006. We’ll leave the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster’s methods and other specifics for later, and make one general observation. If indeed variations in lots of things [...]
Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque, with illustrations by David Cuesta:
This document proposes that another lesson can be learned for architecture from computing: the way in which software is made. Here, we want to concentrate on the current most significant mode of software development—Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS)—steering clear of ubicomp fantasies that may [...]
“For now, enjoy the first world map with constant-scale natural boundary”:
Chuck Clark writes:
The art historian Erwin Panofsky, in his book Albrecht Durer, called this “prototopology,” which means merely that the map, when properly folded, resembles the object.
(Strange Maps)
BBC notes that “[f]or the first time in nearly a decade China is issuing new banknotes without the image of Chairman Mao Zedong.”
“The BBC’s Quentin Sommerville in Shanghai says Mao’s dominance of the tender came in 1999, when his image was introduced partly as an anti-counterfeiting device, albeit an unsuccessful one.”
See also “Promo currency.”
(Marginal revolution)
Title: Fairchild/Silicon Valley Genealogy Chart
Author: Don Hoefler, Harry Smallwood, and James E. Vincler
Created: 1977
Publisher: SEMI
Donated By: James E. Vincler
Filename: doc-45ff3e214d9ea.pdf (Size: 656 KB)
Pages: 1
Description: The first published version of the Silicon Valley Genealogy chart that traced the lineage of 66 semiconductor companies founded between 1959 and 1976 back to Fairchild was prepared as part [...]
Laser-cut stainless-steel plate + x-ray machine = Evan Roth’s “TSA Communication.”
Very nice.
Dr. Thomas Fingar, Deputy Dir of Nat’l Intell for Analysis and Chairman of the Nat’l Intel Council, in his 25 June ’08 testimony before Congress (114K pdf):
Elsewhere, developing countries—particularly major greenhouse gas emitters—may demand that the WTO Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) be amended to allow for the production and development [...]
“24 Pockets” and “70 Buttons,” two diagrams by Bernard Rudofsky depicting “a simulated X-ray examination of the layers upon layers of useless buttons and pockets man considers necessary to preserve dignity”:
From the 1944 MoMA exhibition “Are Clothes Modern?” via Cabinet (Fall 2004) via Harper’s (Dec 2004). Cabinet’s site shows low-res copies of the images that [...]
Ships are much older than planes, so even the most outlandish stories about “ghost” ships seem much more venerable (and therefore normal). There are occasional supernatural tales about planes, but they sound a bit silly: for example, stories about the mysterious disappearance of Flight 19 in the Bermuda Triangle (part the early 1970s rise of [...]
Early (proto?) Sesame Street segment takes the piss out of data visualization.