I’m not sure I can explain what it is, but Magical Nihilism makes for some fascinating reading.

Graphic novel creator Warren Ellis never fails to amuse, enlighten, or dismay, depending on your tastes.

Tellart Labs in Providence, RI makes physical interfaces for computing devices… they take mashups to the physical plane!

The Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science has an amazing library of works on line, including this article on urban design innovator Kevin Lynch.

I meant to post about this when it was first published back in April: Steve Crocker’s Op-Ed in the New York Times marking the 40th anniversary of the RFC, the process by which Internet protocols are standardized. It makes for some great reading. Also interesting is Crocker’s RFC 1, the initial Request For Comments that described the HOST software requirements for machines connected to the brand-new ARPA Network… which laid the foundations for this vast series of tubes we know today as teh Internetz.

For a certain someone who appreciates data visualization and all things aviation…

Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns.

My dad just sent me a demo for jaw-dropping “computational knowledge engine,” Wolfram Alpha, which went live this past weekend. You put in a search term, which could be a mathematical formula, two cities, whatever, and it analyzes the term and its context and returns related statistics, plots a curve, gives you a map, shows mortalitiy rates, whatever! Off the hook!

The design reminds me of a suggested contextual search engine design from Tufte I remember reading somewhere…anybody remember?

Check the demo, it’s a must see.

Wolfram Alpha demo

I’m skipping around Vimeo in an infographic mood tonight. Here’s a history of the Internet. Apparently foreigners had something to do with it?:

History of the Internet

And a thoroughly modern retelling of Red Riding Hood: Slagsmålsklubben

A beautiful design by Matt Jones, with limited edition prints being sold as a fundraiser for the Creative Commons organization.

(Mr. Jones, by the way, has an excellent blog about design, psychogeography, map-making, and many other topics of interest.)

In the course of enjoying his poster, I also came across this Flickr group of parodies of the original “Keep Calm and Carry On,” one of my favorites of which being this one:

(That one’s for you, MiniTrue!)

A friend’s Facebook status update pointed me to The Victory Garden of Tomorrow, a series of agit-prop posters exhorting viewers to plant gardens, compost, ride bikes, and generally Do The Right Thing. It helps that the hand-screened posters are gorgeous!

The Magnum agency presents dozens of Photo Essays on a variety of subjects. Lots of stunning visual imagery.

Found on NYT, some nice Radiology Art. The movies are particularly satisfying.

[Update: I downsized and recompressed the movie, exported it as an FLV, and implemented an open-source video player on the blog to play it back! –Steve.]

Yes, there really is a snarky website devoted to making fun of badly designed logos.