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1.27 

“Of all the fonts issued in 2011 this is the one we’ll all come back to in ten or twenty years as clearly being of the most historical significance.”
—
Si Daniels, Lead Program Manager for fonts at Microsoft, reviews Apple Color Emoji for Typographica’s Favorite Typefaces of 2011.
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Proof by Zeus Jones. An iPad optimized web app that turns whiskey tasting into a group game. Though the app is a little wonky to navigate,  the combination of the Spartan Felton-esque interface and the analog quality of the tasting kits hits the mark quite well.

Proof by Zeus Jones. An iPad optimized web app that turns whiskey tasting into a group game. Though the app is a little wonky to navigate,  the combination of the Spartan Felton-esque interface and the analog quality of the tasting kits hits the mark quite well.

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1.24 

Conventional Signs used in the Ordnance Survey

Conventional Signs used in the Ordnance Survey

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1.16 

“There’s a fantastic speech given by Edmund Burke in the English Parliament in 1775. He takes the floor to announce to his compatriots that they better watch out, because this upstart colony of theirs is running rampant over the world’s oceans. He says, you know, “We send our sailors as far south as they can go chasing whales, and what do we find there but a bunch of American whalemen. We send our sailors up to the extremest reaches of the poles, and who do we find there? A bunch of American whaling vessels. No sea,” he writes, “but what is vexed by their fishery.” So Americans were well-known as a kind of global powerhouse, via the whaling industry, long before they were a global powerhouse geopolitically.”
—

D. Graham Burnett, Historian, on the global success of Americans in the whaling industry and the relentless determination to go ever further. From the PBS documentary series, American Experience: Into the Deep, American Whaling and the World. 

I just discovered the series on Hulu and they are really wonderful. I was seriously missing something like this.

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1.13 

Street View Stereograph is a delightful Google Street View API app. Create amazing mini-planets!

Street View Stereograph is a delightful Google Street View API app. Create amazing mini-planets!

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1.10 

“Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972-giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps-with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ‘n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins-again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising — all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.”
—

In a piece on Vanity Fair, Kurt Anderson makes a case that American culture has been stuck on repeat without the kind of radical change we have seen in almost any other 20 year period in the past century.

While I agree that we have become a popular culture bent on nostalgia and the remix, I think a lot of it has to do with the internet has done to our perception of time, or as Anderson puts it “… the very idea of datedness has the the power it possessed during most of our lifetimes.”

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1.2 

Frontiers through the Ages

dbreunig:

  • Water, 1400
  • Land, 1840
  • Gold, 1850
  • Wire, 1880
  • Air, 1900
  • Celluloid, 1920
  • Plastic, 1950
  • Space, 1960
  • Silicon, 1980
  • Networks, 1990
  • Data, 2000
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1.1 

My Year in Cities, 2011

San Francisco, CA
New York, NY
Washington, DC
Sydney, NSW, Australia
Seattle, WA
Providence, RI
San Diego, CA
St. Louis, MO
Montréal, QC, Canada
Middletown, RI
Champaign, IL
Los Angeles, CA
Squaw Valley, CA
Chicago, IL

110 nights were spent away from home (San Francisco).

One or more night was spent in each city. Ordered from most time to least. Last year’s list is here.

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12.28 

Marketers are Now Targeting Drunk Shoppers

dbreunig:

So says the NYTimes:

“The hang-ups of spending your hard-earned cash are so far removed from your life when you’ve had a bottle of wine,” Mr. Tansey said in an e-mail. The New Zealand trip was terrific, he said. But a pair of $3 sunglasses on eBay “turned out to be horrible fakes, with $17 of postage that I obviously didn’t see with beer goggles.”

 Ah, modern life.

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12.12 

“Consider the story of the boiling frog. It may or may not be true, but the point it makes certainly is. Toss a frog into a pot of boiling water and it instinctively jumps out, self-protectively. Next, place the frog into a pot of cool water. Not surprisingly, it swims around, happily. Now heat the water up very gradually and what does the frog do? It acclimates to untenable circumstances — and slowly cooks. The frog doesn’t notice what’s happening to him, until it’s too late.”
—

Tony Schwartz on HBR presenting how we are slowly pushing ourselves harder and more relentlessly to do more without taking account of the costs we are incurring. Another related HBR essay worth checking out is Daniel Gulati’s piece on how Facebook’s culture of comparison is making us miserable. 

via Adam Nathan

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12.3 

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11.29 

Progress, 2001-2011.

Progress, 2001-2011.

(Source: arainert)

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Sydney, Quick Impressions

  • Sydney, as a destination unto itself, is not worth the 14-hour plane ride (at least for me). It has this odd feeling of a generic American city with even less history than the U.S.A. That being said, the Asian food is amazing, the weather is perfect (in November at least), and the wildlife is beyond comparison (see above and below).
  • Nearly everything is priced as if the entire city were an NFL concession stand. $7.50 beers and $18.00 burgers are the norm.
  • As Australia is a Commonwealth country (and like all good subjects of the Crown) Aussies drive on left side of the road. While this took a little getting used to when crossing the street, it never seemed to sync with pedestrians. It wasn’t just me either; in the throngs of Sydney’s CBD people couldn’t make up their mind as to which to pass.
  • Big Surprise: no one drinks Fosters. It is Australian for nothing. We did see one Outback Steakhouse off the highway though!
  • The currency is some of the most beautiful and well-designed I have ever seen. And it is waterproof — perfect for trips to Bondi or the Great Barrier Reef!
  • The animals. Wow. Not exactly news but the wildlife (even in the city: flying foxes, kookaburras, and Ibises abound) was the real draw for me.
  • Australian Beers: A-
    Australian Wines: C

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11.16 

“I can “experience the most” — provided that my interest in doing so trumps my interest in “protecting one of our most precious natural resources.” So go ahead: push the button and refresh yourself, hotshot. Precious resources can go to hell! I’m sure that this hotel chain did not set out to convert its showers into a consumer behavior laboratory, confronting every guest with a stark choice between personal indulgence and the greater good. Probably the Heavenly Shower heads were installed in more carefree years. Probably they were then semi-disabled as a cost-saving maneuver. Probably the sign I was reading was a face-saving afterthought, spiced with a little eco-happy marketing claptrap. Nevertheless. It’s a jarringly honest thing, this sign, if one takes the time to read it. “Refresh yourself or restore our world,” is what it meant, and it may as well have said simply: “You cannot have it all.” Of course, that is precisely the last line of thought a bleary traveler, who just wants to take a damn shower, after all, wants to pursue.”
—

Design Observer’s Rob Walker on Starwood Hotel’s Heavenly® dual-shower head.

Update: After running a search, I found a bit too similar article on the shower heads over on treehugger from a few months ago… tsk tsk

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11.12 

“But what worries me is the amount of stupid businessmen who’ll be copying Jobs’s behaviour. (I say “businessmen” on purpose, since I’ve yet to encounter a businesswoman, on any level, who treats people in an unpleasant way). The arrogance of the man, the dreadful way he treated every genius and A-level player around him, the rudeness and unpleasant behaviour even after nearly dying three years before the end of his life – in part, because he refused to let doctors drain his stomach, and consequently caught pneumonia – is behaviour that is already too common in offices across the world.”
—
James Cridland’s reaction to Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and the potential fallout from wannabe’s emulating his less-than-savory behavior as a person.