I’ve spent much of this evening browsing the incredibly fascinating material at Radical Cartography, where I made this calendar showing the years 2011-2014, daylight hours, when various planets will be visible in the night sky, daylight savings shifts, equinox and solstice points, lunar cycles and more. Continue reading
Above: My walk home, tracked with OSMTrack for iOS and converted into a SVG with GPS Visualiser.
I have an idea for a crowdsourced map of Cardiff: People send me their data (favourite places, sneaky shortcuts, hidden wonders or even GPX files of routes) and I’ll use it to build a unique map of the city.
Just a thought.
Created by over two years, Slate explains what made David Imus’ map The Essential Geography of the United States of America the Best of Show at the annual competition of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society.
Some fan has uploaded the out-of-print Blade Runner Sketchbook (1982) to Issuu. Sadly it doesn’t seem like you can download the PDF from there, so go and appreciate it before it vanishes! There are more Blade Runner goodies from the uploader at the Future Noir Tumblr blog.
Professors Steve H. Hanke and Richard Conn Henry at Johns Hopkins University are proposing a new calendar in which each date falls on the same day of the week as it did the year before.
“All of the major (other calendars) have involved breaking the seven-day cycle of the week, which is not acceptable to many people because it violates the Fourth Commandment about keeping the Sabbath Day,” Henry says. “Our version never breaks that cycle.”
The two men also propose eliminating time zones and adopting a universal time around the world to streamline international business.
(via Professors’ proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days – edition.cnn.com)
I love it. It’ll never happen.
(via gestalten.tv)
Erik Spiekermann explains how he does what he does, and why.
The Atlantic have taken up my campaign against crap infographics:
Now that Obama’s dog has won the War on Christmas, or something, it’s time to get down to a war that really matters: the war on terrible, lying infographics, which have become endemic in the blogosphere, and constantly threaten to break out into epidemic or even pandemic status.
The reservoir of this disease of erroneous infographics is internet marketers who don’t care whether the information in their graphics is right … just so long as you link it. As a Christmas present to, well, everyone, I’m issuing a plea to bloggers to help stop this plague in its track.
I’ve had a busy evening on Twitter! I recently made a Christmas cracker hat for my Twitter avatar, and I offered to do the same for any of my followers who were interested.
There were a few takers…
Social Times yesterday posted an infographic (sponsored by AssistedLivingToday – slogan: ‘Information you can trust’). They introduce it by highlighting the most interesting statistic, which will be the focus of this blog post.
According to a fascinating infographic entitled “How Social Media is Ruining Our Minds,” over the course of the last ten years the average attention span has dropped from 12 minutes to a staggeringly short 5 seconds. As a person deeply ensconced in this connected age my experience shows this to be true. These days, we give a YouTube video just a few seconds to determine if it’s worth it. So what else does social media and technology affect within our minds?
This is the relevant section of the infographic:
Shocking yes? Perhaps a little too shocking to be true?
Yup…
A brilliant summary of design. Kind of a taster.
Here’s a fun illustration project:
Illuniverse is ‘the first illustrated universe on the web. The main idea is to create a universe full of planets and stars created by the worlds best illustrators and designers.’
One final Star Trek render (for this weekend at least)…
View full size (1200 × 675) or in glorious HD (1920 × 1080) on Flickr.
An amusing story from the FreeBSD mailing list:
Everyone:
I just got a call from the owner of a hotel for which we provide hotspot service. She says that a guest spotted the “Powered by FreeBSD” logo at the bottom of the login page, and was offended; the guest was convinced that either we or the hotel management “worshipped the Devil” and refused to stay at the hotel unless the logo was removed. The owner could make no headway by explaining that the besneakered mascot was a cartoon character and was a daemon, not the Devil. And she feared upsetting the guest even more if she said that large portions of the same software are inside every Mac and iPad. The hotel stands to lose more than $1000 if the guest, who had originally planned to stay for a long period, moves out.
One of our tech support people also got a call directly from the hotel guest, who claimed that having the logo on the page constituted “abuse.” The guest also claimed to be “losing money” because she wouldn’t use the hotspot if there was a “devil” on the splash page. He didn’t even realize what she was talking about at first…. He couldn’t imagine why on Earth this person was calling him and going on about devils.
Attempts at misguided religious censorship notwithstanding, I don’t want to see one of my ISP’s customers lose business. And I’d like to keep a FreeBSD logo on our hotspot page. Is there artwork that doesn’t include horned creatures that might offend the ignorant or superstitious?
–Brett Glass
I’ve just finished watching season 1 of The Next Generation, and I’ve been inspired to get back into LightWave 3D to produce a quick homage (or two).
View full size (1200 × 675) or in glorious HD (1920 × 1080) on Flickr.
This is a faithful reproduction of one of the most widely-used promo shots of the Enterprise D (see below for the originals).
Imperial Leather SkinKind hydrate cotton extract & oat milk BODY WASH hypoallergenic
As a non-single guy who has relinquished control over the buying of bathroom products, I am regularly confused when confronted with a new selection of unfamiliar bottles. For example, I was just faced with Imperial Leather’s “SkinKind hydrate cotton extract & oat milk BODY WASH hypoallergenic”. At least here the keywords are capitalised, but I’m pretty sure it’s often the case that marketing jargon entirely replaces the keywords (Shampoo, conditioner and body wash or shower gel) that I’m seeking.
Perhaps the soap companies could spare a little space on the lids for a simple icon that quickly explains the intended use to the uninterested user.
In these quick examples below, the first icon is a shampoo and conditioner, while the second is a body wash.
Please and thank you.
Ten years of road accidents in Cardiff:
This is a screenshot from an interactive map on The Guardian, which covers the entire UK:
The numbers are horrific: 32,955 killed, nearly 3m injured between 2000 and 2010. This is 10 years of deaths and injuries on Britain’s roads. But how do you visualise that level of disaster? Transport data mapping experts ITO World have taken a little-known but forensically detailed police dataset called Stats19 – published by the Economic and Social Data Service – and produced this powerful map ahead of Sunday’s world day of remembrance for road traffic victims. You can zoom around the map using the controls on the left or search for your town. Each dot represents a life
via Road casualty UK: 10 years of deaths mapped and visualised – guardian.co.uk
Note: The final sentence ‘Each dot represents a life’ is disingenuous inaccurate at this scale*. Each dot represents an effect on a life, but only the big squares represent a fatality.
I’d like to offer my design services to the Occupy Cardiff movement for the purpose of creating a one-shot newspaper for the protest. This would be a great way to connect with people outside of Cardiff, and those not wired in to Twitter and Facebook.
With some creative guerrilla distribution tactics, this could get a lot of information into a lot of hands.
For my recent post about the terrible quality adverts appearing on WordPress.com sites I created a nice high resolution blue glossy version of the WordPress logo. Then I was inspired to make a few variations.
They’re made avaliable here as 1000x1000px PNGs, with transparency, under a CC BY-NC-SA licence. Feel free to share and enjoy, but please remember to give credit (to Foomandoonian), ideally with a link back to this page.
halfblog.net 
