Fun and Nourishing by Frank Chimero
Related sad news (via Phoebe): Morrie Yohai, “the man behind Cheez Doodles,” has passed away at 90.
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Max Fenton writes poems in MindNode. The coolest thing about this is that entire branches of writing can be hidden or shown with a single click. I am decidedly less organized.
Modern Day Ideograms
A post on Core77 half-jokingly posits that in 5000 years, archaeologists will dig up tacky shower curtains decorated with emoticons and interpret them as modern day hieroglyphics.
It had never occurred to me how these two languages, separated by an unimaginably vast expanse of time, seem not-so-far removed from each other.
Also, An Xiao observes a few charts and graphs on an office whiteboard that resemble the Chinese characters for “field” and “life.” Citing a link on how drastically Chinese characters have changed over the years, she writes, “What would modern pictographs look like? Something like the [below], I suspect - inspired by PowerPoint and graphs, rather than images from nature.”
David Hart, Associate Media Producer, Digital Media at the MoMA:
You can imagine how excited I was when we received the photos of sitters from Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present performance and discovered that installation photographer Marco Anelli had been keeping an unofficial minutes-per-participant tally. On a long car ride I decided to compile these and chart out some of the basic information.
Above: Sitters by Duration and Date
For each date, individual sitters are represented by a colored vertical bar, and that bar’s length represents their sitting time. The first sitter of each day is at the bottom of the chart, and the last is at the top.
Worth viewing full-size, along with a few more awesome graphs on MoMA’s Blog.
Komanoff’s spreadsheet, which he has posted online, calculates how new fees and changes to existing tolls affect traffic at different times of day. It calculates which costs are borne by city dwellers and which by suburbanites. It calculates how long it takes passengers to dig for change and board buses. And it allows any user to adjust dozens of different variables—from taxi surcharges to truck tolls—and measure their impact. The result is a kind of statistical SimCity, an opportunity to play God (or at least Robert Moses) and devise the perfect traffic policy.Felix Salmon, The Man Who Could Unsnarl Manhattan Traffic from Wired Magazine
Colours & Cultures, an infographic created by David McCandless and Always With Honor for the book Information is Beautiful.
It took me a minute to realize that this is a photo of a real thing. That is amazing. CP+B has a way less glamorous but also awesome version of this that tracks the projects for their larger company.
The Panic Status Board - one of the things I’ve been working on lately. Read Cabel’s writeup!
I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I’ll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary.
Edward Tufte, who has been appointed by President Obama to “help track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds” as part of the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel.
Tufe is being nonchalant, but this is great news. Not only for design-nerds but the general public too.
(via iA)
The ultimate collective mind-map.
Fear, organized. Brian Rea, organizer of worry, “I discovered like most people I had a lot of fears — after a few months, I began to catalog them: physical fears, natural fears, political fears, random, emotional.” After 11 years in New York, he made lists of his own and those of the people around him to fill up a 7-meter-by-3.5-meter wall, an exhibition at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona called Murals.
Jonathan Harris on Cool Hunting
(Thanks, Jenny!)