via TED Talks“Here's a powerful provocation from artist Jae Rhim Lee. Can we commit our bodies to a cleaner, greener Earth, even after death? Naturally—using a special burial suit seeded with pollution-gobbling mushrooms…”
Watch her talk here.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Jae Rhim Lee: The Infinity Burial Project
via TED Talks“Here's a powerful provocation from artist Jae Rhim Lee. Can we commit our bodies to a cleaner, greener Earth, even after death? Naturally—using a special burial suit seeded with pollution-gobbling mushrooms…”
Watch her talk here.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Psychologists Chase Down Sleep Demons
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| The Nightmare by John Henry Fuseli |
via Penn State Daily Newswire
“What do Moby Dick, the Salem witch trials and alien abductions all have in common? They all circle back to sleep paralysis. Less than 8 percent of the general population experiences sleep paralysis, but it is more frequent in two groups -- students and psychiatric patients -- according to a new study by psychologists at Penn State and the University of Pennsylvania. Sleep paralysis is defined as "a discrete period of time during which voluntary muscle movement is inhibited, yet ocular and respiratory movements are intact," the researchers state in the current issue of Sleep Medicine Reviews. Hallucinations may also be present in these transitions to or from sleep...”
Read the full story on Live.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Wait. What Was the Question? A Series of Questions for Christopher Simmons
via neenahpaperblog“The time I take to answer this question I'll never get back . . . Everything we do — create, love, mourn, worry, work, play, and so on — draws from a pool of nanoseconds into which no tributary flows. We can give away our time however we choose — just remember that you're not going to get any of it back.”
— Christopher Simmons
For the next 12 weeks Stefan G. Bucher chooses questions
from his new book, 344 Questions: The Creative Person's Do-It-Yourself-Guide to Insight, Survival, and Artistic Fulfillment and asks some seriously smart and capable men and women for their answers.
Read the interview here, find 344 Questions here.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
John Hilgart: 4 Color Process
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| Word Processor |
via how
“John Hilgart is obsessed with vintage comic books and has several interesting image collections including 4CP, which features close-ups of vintage printing, Comic Book Cartography, a collection of maps and diagrams, and Super Type!, which features comic book mastheads with amazing typography…”
Visit 4CP here.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Irony & Sarcasm Marks, Part 3
via shady characters“Ironics notwithstanding, the irony mark lay dormant for much of the latter part of the 20th century. As had been the case with many other previously obscure marks of punctuation, however, the click-to-publish ease of the web well and truly rescusitated its fortunes: more new irony marks appeared in the decade from 2001 to 2010 than in any period before. Ironically enough, the first digital irony mark was not intended to punctuate irony in a general sense but instead its laser-guided offspring, sarcasm…”
Read the rest here.
Friday, October 14, 2011
Ganesh: A Holy Holiday Leaves a Mess
“Ganesh is a Hindu festival that takes place at the end of each summer, particularly in Mumbai. Traditionally, clay statues of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of beginnings and remover of obstacles, are placed in homes and worshiped for the duration of the 10-day festival. At the end, the statues are immersed in water (such as a river) and left to float away. The festival has modest origins. First organized in the 1890s, the idea was to invoke Hindu symbolism to foster a sense of nationalism in India's struggle for independence from Britain…”
Read the rest, and see more images, here.
Bookbinding Cigarette Trade Cards
From a set of British cigarette trade cards (circa 1922-1939) on mending old books from the George Arents collection at the New York Public Library.
See others in the series here.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Touchscreen Braille Writer Lets the Blind Type on a Tablet
via wired“One group of people has traditionally been left out of our modern tablet revolution: the visually impaired. Our slick, button-less touchscreens are essentially useless to those who rely on touch to navigate around a computer interface, unless voice-control features are built in to the device and its OS. But a Stanford team of three has helped change that. Tasked to create a character-recognition program that would turn pages of Braille into readable text on an Android tablet, student Adam Duran, with the help of two mentor-professors, ended up creating something even more useful than his original assignment: a touchscreen-based Braille writer…”
Read the rest here.
PA Pixelworkers
Great shirts from Full Stop, a web design shop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Here’s Pennsylvania’s!
Atomix
via liquid treat“Atomix is an artful plaything designed in 1966 by Francois Dallegret and recently reintroduced to the market by New York-based Areaware. Sandwiched between five-inch squares of clear acrylic are 6,000 stainless steel balls that form an infinite number of fractal patterns when shaken, tilted or rotated. Originally created to help physics students visualize atomic structures, Atomix is just the thing to smarten up your desk…”
Visit Areaware here.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Confusing (and Frequently Misused) Type Terminology, Part 1
via fonts.com“In the world of type and design, several typographic terms are either commonly confused with other terms, or are simply misunderstood in their own right. In Part 1 of this two-part series, we will shed light on three pairs of words that are widely misused. The words in each pair are related, but they refer to different things - and they are not interchangeable…”
Font vs. Typeface
Character vs. Glyph
Legibility vs. Readability
Read the rest here.
Richard Nicholson: The Last Of London’s Darkrooms
via npr“Richard Nicholson recalls that in the ’90s, darkrooms were busy, exciting places for commercial photographers in London: ‘There was a real buzz in these places,’ he writes,‘a sense of competition, but also communality.’
About a decade later, he was struck by how much had changed. ‘I came up with idea for this project when printing in one of these hire darkrooms. The buzz had gone. No one else was there. It seemed like a desolate, abandoned place. I was struck by the bulky, lumpen beauty of the photographic enlargers.’
And so began his project, Last One Out, Please Turn On The Light, a documentation of London’s remaining professional darkrooms. A mere five years after starting the project, more than half of the darkrooms in the series are no longer operational.
‘I wanted to capture the darkroom before it disappeared,’ Nicholson says. ‘I choose to photograph the darkrooms of professional printers as these represent the essence of the craft.’ ”
Visit his site here.
Adobe and the 50" Hi-Def Drafting Table
via nytimes“When I entered the office of Kevin Lynch, Adobe Systems’s chief technology officer, on Friday in San Francisco, I was immediately caught off guard by a large high-definition television hiding in the corner of the room. It was at least 50-inches wide and propped up at a 45 degree angle on a drafting table.
“What is that!” I asked.
Mr. Lynch paused and looked at me as if I had just seen a Christmas present before it was wrapped and placed under the tree. “Ummm, that’s the future,” he said. “It’s a drafting table running Photoshop Touch where you can essentially draw and create on a screen.”
The future, for Adobe, it turns out, is in the past…”
Read the rest here.
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