Aged News

Of all the analysis and commentary I've seen on the death of old media news reporting nothing cuts to the bone quite like this piece from The Daily Show. Hilarious and brutal.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
End Times
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Jason Jones in Iran

Hobnox (Browser-based Music Application)

Music and the web aren't exactly a match made in heaven. There is the often unfortunate use of bad music as an annoying background feature of website as well as the simple fact that the quality of sound, particularly streaming, still isn't great. On top of all that most laptops and computers don't provide for very good listening experiences.

Even the creative uses of sound and music have been rather lackluster affairs. Music mixers that turn loops on and off, even when they're fun aren't fun for very long.

There is a phenomenal recently released exception: Hobnox's Audio Tool. A brower-based music production application that features all the classic electronic music gear, the TB-303, 606 and 909 drum machines as well as an assortment of effects. It sounds great, it looks great and its easy and fun to use (esp if your familiar with the analog versions of the gear).




Someone's even hooked it up to an oversized touch display. Dope.



Propellerheads software's failure to rerelease ReBirth for Mac OSX was really painful for me. I had, literally, hundreds of songs and audiofiles I created using that software that are now inaccessible to me. I would love it if someone figured out a way to open Rebirth files and load them into Autio Tool.

The ReBirth Museum

Hey Foodies!!!

A testament to DIY inventiveness in the kitchen. This is Why You're Fat: "Where Dreams Become Heart Attacks. Below are a couple of my favorites. If you dare click the link and visit the site, be warned. My gag reflex triggered a couple of times browsing these creations. Best viewed on an empty stomach.




The Royal Flush
A pile of 3 sunny side up eggs, beans, red chile sauce, cheddar cheese, 4 corn tortillas and 3 hash browned potatoes.
(submitted by Joseph Zobel)




The Pizza Party
A DiGiorno pizza on top of a Jack’s pizza topped with Totino’s pizza rolls.
(submitted by schizocentral)


Although the phot is repellant my favorite part of this one is the title: The Lord of the Rings


The Lord of the Rings
Foot long hot dog threaded through onion rings, served with cheese and bacon on top.
(submitted by Kristin Brammell via Pink’s Las Vegas)



My favorite part of the site might just be the type treatment for the header: Cooper Black (typeface) and process colors. Awesome.

Visual Design Cliches: Radiating Lines

Over the past couple of years, radiating lines have become one of the most common visual devices and overused cliches. It's one of those things that, once you notice it, you start to see it everywhere. It's a cheap and easy way to make an otherwise pedestrian message a more dynamic and visual "exciting". Often, you don't consciously "see" it. It is just a background element after all. It works like the visual equivalent of MSG, you and to and crappy layout and it becomes a little less crappy, but not really better. I've seen it used several times as a rotating background on the text-filled screen in car commercials where they show you the finance numbers.

In a culture so oversaturated visually, the demand for everything to be more and more visually stimulating just keeps increasing to the point where even an airline drink special needs to be communicated with emphatic pizazz of the Japanese Army's Imperial war flag.

Where the Medium Fails (The boring stability of digital photography)

My disappointment with digital cameras has never been about the quality and fidelity of images. It's actually hard to take bad pictures with most digital cameras. With traditional film photography there are lots of points in the process of both taking pictures and creating prints where things can go wrong. These points of susceptibility and potential failure also allow for manipulation and the creation of more interesting images: negatives can be scratched, bleached, colored, sandwiched together and darkroom techniques — like the technically complex zone system developed by Ansel Adams — are endless. The charm of images taken by Holga's (cheap, plastic, medium format cameras) were a result of the plastic lens and the fact that they don't hold the negatives flat in the camera. The also tend to leak in light.

Digital photography has made possible the creation of million and millions of good pictures that are very. very boring to look at.

The built-in camera on Apples iPhone is an exception. Slight camera movements while the picture is being taken results in odd, wavy distortions. Panning the camera quickly produces a smeared abstract image. That's how I created the images below of a leave covered blacktop path. The idea to assemble the images in a grid of squares came from the camera itself. This is exactly how the images are displayed in the cameras gallery view.






Prior to the iPhone I owned a Treo and really like the kind of images I could create in low light settings.

Porpicorn Sighting

It was October 10th 2007 that I revealed to the world the existence of a mythical creature know as the Porpicorn (porpoise/unicorn).





Yesterday I was watching an episode of The Simpons on Hulu, "Mypods and Boomsticks" and there on the screen I spotted... a Porpicorn. I've seen this episode twice before and never noticed it.

Misguided Innovation: Motorized Cooler

I actually saw a man riding one of these yesterday. His toddler son was sitting in front, riding with him. I had no idea these things existed...



Manufactured by Cruzin Cooler, (from their website): Cruzin Cooler combines two basic necessities of life, the ability to have cold food or a beverage handy along with the means to get somewhere, without walking. The Cruzin Cooler is light-weight, comes in various sizes and colors and is available in gas and electric models, with up to a 10 mile range on electric models and 30 miles on the gas models.

The cooler is light and small enough to fit in most trunks. The cooler can be used for hunting, sporting events, races, camping, golf or even a trip to the grocery store to keep your food cold all the way home. Marine use will be popular for the new cooler allowing you to take your fish/drinks/food/ ice to and from your boat with powered assistance and braking. Simply ride or power your way up and down ramps.

Adobe Font Finder

It took Adobe what? 20 years to create a font finder app.

Typography is a good example of something that lacks a well developed, qualifiable way of describing and speaking about it. Particularly what the stylistic attributes connotate. Coming up with longer and longer lists of categories (like decorative, humorous, distressed) is a childish and unsophisticated way to address this. The approach to things like this should be obvious by now: tagging and folksonomy. Letting the design community ad tags, points of reference — like projects particular fonts were used in — as well as quirky oblique, descriptions would have developed such a rich and interesting discourse over time.

Burger King Blow Job Ad

Absolutely nothing subtle or subliminal about this one.

I'm not even sure what to say about this kind of stuff anymore. This sort of thing is becoming so common that I'm not surprised or shocked. I'm not amused or offended. I feel just a little numb, resigned disappointment. But it fades and is forgotten quickly.




Via Kathleen ViaBuzzfeed

Bacardi "Ugly Girfriend" campaign

This campaign goes way beyond the kind of "retro-sexism" you see in work done for Axe Deoderant. I can't believe this is a campaign aimed at female consumers. Just stupid. Bacardi and their agency deserve all the consumer outrage they are sure to get.

"Shop like never before, with your own freckled pile of cellulite?" Unreal.







VIA Jezebel

The dying craft of classic print advertising

A classic piece of print advertising. There are a lot of things I love about this piece. The first, and what sets it apart from so much of advertising today is the unassuming quiet manner in which it lays itself out and invites a quiet consideration, an almost philosophical contemplation. Although the image is provacative, it is very much a word based ad. It's not selling on image, brand or or visual sizzle.




The name Porsche is include in the small set headline, but the logo does not appear on the ad. There are no tell tale parts that would identify the laid out pieces as belonging to a Porsche.

The Porsche ad is created very much in the style of the headline, image, body format that was pioneered so magnificently by Doyle Dane Bernbach for Volkswagen in the 60's, but is more subtle than those generally where. In the classic format the juxtaposition of headline and image was resolved in a "got it" moment in the readers mind. You generally didn't have to read the copy, it provided expansion that followed from the arresting moment created by image and copy. The meaning here folds out from image to headline and finally pays off in what is a great example of finely crafted copy.

As this sort of advertising fades from the pages of publications that are themselves on the verge of extinction I find it hard not to feel a bit of nostalgia for a form that feels, compared to the today's visual culture, almost "literary".

We are at the end of an era. For 50 years the huge dollars spent by automobile manufacturers were the financial backbone for the advertising industry and the media that they supported.



A collection of classic VW print ads by Doyle Dane Bernbach.

Big thanks to KidCobra for sending me this ad and giving me a moment of reflection. Happy father's Day and happy driving brother!

NYC Murder Map

The New York Times does a great job of creating small interactive features on their site. The New York City Murder Map may be the most provocative to date. Each blue dot on the map represents a murder. A slider allows you to change the timeframe to display murders by year or in the last 30 days.

What surprised me was how each dot is able to tell a tiny story just by the display of the weapon, motive and the gender, ethnicity and age of perpetrator and victim. The date and time as well as victim's name are occasionally included.)

If you live in New York, or are familiar with the city, and you see that a white 60 year old male killed a white 61 year old female with a knife at 11:15pm on a June night in Chelsea and your mind starts to take over from there and fill in a possible story.

Twitter updates work in the same way. A short statement from a friend can be enough of a hint that you know what is happening in their world, it pulls all of sorts of details forward from everything you already know about them. Both in a way work like the shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho, you see the knife raise and blood splatter but most of gory details are filled in by your mind.

There are other example of interactive features I posted about in the past, including others from the NY Times under the "data visualization" and "information design" tags below.



Thanks for the link Kathleen

On Aesthetics: Indiscriminate Palettes

Researchers gave 18 volunteers five food samples to try in a blind taste test -- and only three were able to identify the canine fodder, according to a paper by the American Assn. of Wine Economists.

LA TimesThe taste of dog food? It's harder than you think to identify:
That's because you probably wouldn't be able to differentiate which is which in a blind tasting, according to a study being released today.

Researchers provided 18 volunteers five food samples to try in a blind taste test. Only three were able to identify the canine fodder.

"We have this idea in our head that dog food won't taste good and that we would be able to identify it, but it turns out that is not the case," said Robin Goldstein, a co-author of the study, which was published online Thursday as a working paper by the American Assn. of Wine Economists.

Goldstein said the tasting demonstrated that "context plays a huge role in taste and value judgment," even though researchers warned the participants that one of the five foods they were going to taste was dog food.

The five samples came from a wide price range and were processed to have a similar consistency. The foods were duck liver mousse, pork liver pâté, two imitation pâtés -- pureed liverwurst and Spam -- and Newman's Own dog food.

Thanks for the link Jabe, priceless.

Foie Gras and Alzheimer's Disease

This make me, someone who ate foie gras at least once a week for several years, a bit uncomfortable. (A big FU to Allan the third for intentionally tampering with my ignorance.)


From NEUROPHILOSOPHY: Eating foie gras may increase risk of Alzheimer’s

"Researchers from the University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine, in collaboration with a group from Uppsala University in Sweden, have found a potential link between foie gras consumption and the development of a number of amyloidogenic diseases.

The amyloidogenic diseases include Alzheimer’s Disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), tuberculosis, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. They are termed “amyloidogenic” because they all involve a process called amyloidosis, whereby genetic mutations lead to the synthesis of abnormally folded and insoluble proteins which accumulate within or around cells and interfere with their function. In all the amyloidogenic diseases, the mutated proteins are believed to accumulate by a process called nucleation (or “seeding”).


Thus, the consumption of foie gras is potentially hazardous to those who are genetically predisposed to (i.e. have a family history of) amyloidogenic disorders. Discounting the consumption of infected brain tissue (during, for example, the ritual of mortuary cannibalism), this is the first time that a dietary component has been implicated in the amyloidogenic diseases."



The finding from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Abstract: Amyloidogenic potential of foie gras

Amyloidogenic potential of foie gras



From The Sherman Foundation Archives:

A Foie Gras Parable

Foie Gras Survey: Casa Mono (NYC)