Jake Berman makes better transit maps. I found this beautiful late-night subway service map of his on the New York City Subway Wikipedia article.
It reminded me of the famous 1972 Massimo Vignelli map which hangs in my kitchen, but turns out it’s primarily influenced by the relatively obscure 1966 system map. That map is [...]
Etsy’s Treasury is something I’ve long been fascinated by. It’s an ever-changing, member-curated shopping gallery with some unique constraints. Treasury lists only live for 48 hours. Each list has a limit of 42 comments. You can only create a list if the total number of lists falls below 333 (shorthand for
Books follow me around and accumulate in stacks: by my desks, bed, coffee table, couch. Sometimes they get in the way but I like having them around. If I could have the current active lot organized into a single stack based on pages viewed, notes taken and ideas generated, it would probably look like this:
1.
A [...]
The European Street Team, an Etsy Team, asked for a photo tour of a favorite place. You’ll never guess which place I chose.
From Thorpe and Fabre-Thorpe, 2001
I was first alerted to the work of Irving Biederman, professor of neuroscience at USC, via this WSJ article on the nature of addictive websites. I’ve been a fan ever since. His experiments are fascinating, probing everything from the neural basis of shape recognition—with members of remote African tribes with no [...]
Image by nateduval
A few weeks ago we had a “handmade code” hack day at Etsy, wherein many interesting features were born, large and small. One of the small hacks I crossed off on my to-do list that day because it didn’t exist yet was this Etsy search add-on for Firefox, for searching Etsy from within [...]
Image by pleasebestill, also used here
There are many strategies people use to make discoveries on Etsy. This is my favorite.
Find a shop you like? Check out their favorites. Find an item in their favorites that you like? Check out that shop’s favorites. Repeat until you realize five hours have gone by and you have [...]
I listened to a Jon Udell podcast with David Huynh regarding Huynh’s Freebase Parallax project a while back but it’s something you really have to see in action to appreciate. I just saw it in action and now I appreciate.
Freebase Parallax is an interface for browsing related sets of data on Freebase, a Wikipedia-like database [...]
Julia Rothman regularly showcases fascinating book objects on Book By Its Cover but the sketchbook category is especially special. Look at what she’s talked people into sharing:
Jim Stoten’s madly detailed secret drawings.
Andrés Sandoval’s accordion fold-out sticker collages.
Reka Kiraly’s thick bold lines.
Calef Brown’s characters.
Etsy seller Iris Schwarz’s delicate line drawings.
The handmade category is worth extensive clicking [...]
Excerpt from the text I created by clicking around Whitney Trettien’s combinatorial thesis on seventeenth-century digital poetry:
Harsdörffer used pieces of wood to make anagrams, designed letter-dice to teach children to build word combinations, and assigned numbers to letters to unlock a poem’s hidden values, earning him the title Der Spielende, or “the Player,” in the [...]
Japanese Tumblr users are “addicted to reblogging,” ffffolks on FFFFOUND are defining themselves by the images they find, and Etsians are hearting more items than ever. I’m discovering more about myself as I build up my Etsy Favorites, namely that I’m fond of hand-drawn pattern and complexity:
new EtsyNameSpace.Mini(6043418, ‘favorites’,'thumbnail’,5,4).renderIframe();
Here’s an XL view courtesy of [...]
With President Obama firing off memos and executive orders on open government, FOIA obedience and Executive Branch ethics, now feels like a good time to make sure Datamob is up to date. Notable additions:
Capitol Words visualizes the most frequently used words in the Congressional Record and does so in more useful ways than those Wordle [...]
Bubble chart of nations sized according to new business density. Source: 2008 World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey.
Good data on micro-enterprises and entrepreneurship around the world is hard to come by. There’s the World Bank’s Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Database, but it has more caveats than a prescription drug commercial. Different governments operating in different [...]
BibliOdyssey’s board-game roundup had me at “Filosofia cortesana de Alonso de Barros.” More can be found via a search for “game-board” on the British Museum’s Prints Database.