Like I mentioned, this summer I will be thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, which runs from north Georgia to central Maine along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. After a minor post-ponement I’ll be starting Sunday morning, April 22—things will be mighty slow around these parts until I get back.
I had a mostly incredible time back […]
Videos of mass human choreography at the Arirang Festival in North Korea. Here’s the Children’s Parade. It would be kind of cool if it weren’t taking place in a hopelessly poor, totalitarian state.
An interview with Chris Ware. “I think storytelling is one of comics’ aesthetic hurdles at the moment, which was the novelist’s problem 150 years ago: namely, to take comics from storytelling into that of “writing,” the major distinction between the two to me being that the former gives one the facts, but the latter tries […]
An interview with Joanna Newsom. On her time studying composition at Mills College:
My music generally retains an interest in melody and harmony and some sort of meter– it might be a polymeter, but some sort of meter that repeats for more than one bar. But a lot of these ideas that I was interested […]
Francis Tapon is going to attempt to yo-yo the Continental Divide Trail—2800 miles north and 2800 miles back south through New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. I think it’s pretty amazing to even consider it, but it seems like the next “logical” step since the AT and PCT have been yo-yo’ed. I’ll be keeping tabs […]
A long, excellent interview with Steven Johnson. A smart, knowledgeable interviewer can make such a huge difference.
The Oregonian newspaper is publishing its daily photos on Flickr. It’s looks like they’re consistently geotagging them, too. I absolutely love it. [via matt]
Some old photos of shelters in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I was surprised by how much younger and newer everything looks.
There’s a cool New Yorker article about Parkour, the cool urban running/ jumping/ climbing/ leaping thing. By no means am I as bold as the pros, but man it’s fun. [via kottke]
Fun facts about the OCLC Top 1000 books owned by library systems worldwide. “How far down the list do you have to go to get to a live author? Jim Davis’ Garfield is number 15 on the list. (Four of the 5 top works by living authors are cartoons!)”
A long essay exploring Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies.
An interview with Scott McCloud.
One of the eternal tensions of comics might be this dual aspiration that we have, on the one hand, to ensure that words and pictures are integrated. That they feel as if they were drawn by the same hand, feel as if they belong together—that they’re flip sides to the same […]
A nice little article about Helvetica in the IHT. Now that people who normally wouldn’t care about type are noticing, it’s even more ubiquitous.
Several months ago, I decided to attempt a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail this summer. In 2005 I was fortunate enough to hike the southern 1/3 of the trail, about 730 miles from Georgia to mid-Virginia. I’ve had a hankering to get out there again. A while ago I gave notice at the library where […]
Right now I’m enjoying Riding Giants, a documentary about the history of surfing.
The Universcale guides you from cosmic size all the way down to the immeasurable sub-atomic scale. Kind of like the Powers of Ten film, but this one has chill Musak.
Next time I’m in Seattle, I’ll have to remember to stop by the Wall of Gum.
I was reading this profile of Albert Einstein yesterday and came across this mind-blowing bit of trivia. Einstein “calculated how many water molecules existed in 22.4 litres.” That’s pretty cool in and of itself. But going further, “that many unpopped popcorn kernels when spread across the United States would cover the country nine miles deep”.
I just found Moon River a few days ago. A blog with lots of old books, maps, design stuff. Right up my alley.
Doc Searls talks about how to save newspapers. Nice tips there. The sad part is that readers (i.e. customers) have been complaining about many of these features for years [e.g. archive paywalls, complicated websites, lack of linking, etc.]
I’m glad that someone has called out Oprah Winfrey for featuring The Secret on her show. I was pretty stunned that she’d pick a crap book like that.
The Collective Type Project gets volunteers to write individual letters, then mashes them all together to create a united typeface. There’s only a couple characters still open for contribution, so act fast.
So in Batman: Year 100 we have the typical gritty Gotham set in a climate of heavy-hand police state dystopia, etc etc. The year is 2039. Not too distant, but plenty of time for the world to go to crap. Enough time for the old Batman to die off and a new one to take […]
I think the anthology of Missed Connection Comics could be pretty cool. The concept is to take a missed connection post from Craigslist and comic-ize it. You’ll find some samples here.
I learned a lot from this book. But at this point, I have neither the time nor the brainpower to finish it off. The half that I read is quite good, though, so I’ll share a bit from that. The title of Lee Smolin’s book foretells much: The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String […]
The Turk was a novelty chess-playing machine hoax. It first debuted in 1770 and toured for almost a century. I was surprised it had such a rich history.
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