Map envy

Some thoughts from Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands

Subtitled "Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will," this book should have swept me off my feet--but didn't. The book is adored by many in the design and cartographic fields, garnering some awards. And it is, I cannot deny, cute, and a nice piece of book design work. The method of geolocation through a simply displayed triangulation scheme, while a little obscure, eventually comes into focus as a clever little device.

I did, though, find the text to be somewhat disjointed. Of course, the book is 50 mini-essays about 50 topics that are really disparate and related only in their physical manifestation. 

And how can I even say anything mildly disparaging about a tome that devotes two entire pages to Tristan de Cunha, that most isolated South Atlantic rock, 2700 miles from the nearest anywhere... that most ignored of all destinations? And I do adore Schalansky's cartomilitancy...

"It is high time for cartography to take its place among the arts and for the atlas to be recognized as literature."

Now, in the course of the preface, she drops the most tantalizing bombshell... she teases us with her report of a former teacher's collection of early map works, student work, refining their skills at cartography...

"A few years ago, my typography professor showed me an enormous book that she had stored in a huge map chest. I had already seen some of her collections: old poetry albums, watercolors of ribbons and varieties of sausage and cakes... But then she brought out a folio of crumpled silk paper wrapped in blue marble sheets... Each smooth, yellowed page was full of geometric constructions: crosses, boxes, single, double, triple; broken lines and solid lines; plain, cursive and decorative lettering, abbreviations, arrows and symbols, patches of watercolor and the most delicate cross-hatching. All the protagonists of the cartographical narrative were individually listed and practices in this volume--down to the black and white lines of the borders and the scale measures. Sometimes the stroke of the quill was a little clumsy, but in other places it was so perfect that is seemed barely possible it could have been made by a human hand. The folio was a bound collection of topographical drawings from the apprenticeship of a French cartographer between 1887 and 1889, as the title's ornate majuscule proclaimed."

This is a book that should be published. The idea of this manuscript has bored its way into my brain like some science fiction death worm, and I so, so want to spend time with that book. Anyway, thats my two cents worth.

Is Ken Jennings calling Watson a nerd?

Or just talking smack, and hopin' for a rematch?

 Ken says...

Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman.

From the blog Age of Uncertainty

A sad souvenir that probably won't ever be used again.

 

Chapter 1. Know books

Chapter 2. Love books.

Chapter 3. Share your love of books.

Chapter 4. Nahhhhh! More like,"Build a website..."

Life is a series of tests -- 

this material will show up when you least expect it!

One of my career goals has always been to be one of the old guys who work at hardware stores who know exactly what all those little widgets and geegaws are for.

14.5 million New Englanders completely understand this guy...

That, and laser flamethrowers to melt the snow away.

Abington man makes bombs to clear snow banks

Evil, evil snowbanks!

Here we go again....

New year promises more of same, new stuff too!

Is that a buzz word I hear?

Or, have I got a mosquito in my ear?

Linked In has posted the ten most overused words and phrases in their members' work life profiles... 

Yeah, so? I think maybe all ten fit me...

Dynamic, Motivated Team Player with Proven Track Record of Fast-Paced, Results-Oriented Problem Solving, seeks position to utilize his/her Extensive, Innovative and Entrepreneural Experience.

Can you spot them all?

Happy Holidays

A fine Christmas greeting story, well-told

From T-Minus: the race to the moon, by Jim Ottaviani, drawn by Zander and Kevin Cannon

T-Minus is a terrific graphic account of the race to the moon. They call it a work of historical fiction; it is largely set in the NASA of the 1960s, and seen through the eyes of the engineers. I especially enjoyed the depictions of the NASA procedures.

I believe that those are not French Fries

but rather Freedom Fries to which you are referring.

For the sophistic and law-savvy traveller

Awesome skivvies...

An outfit called Cargo Collective is selling metallic printed 4th amendment underwear. Protest the TSA scatter searches without opening your mouth. The perfect Christmas gift. Sadly, it looks like most of the styles and sizes are sold out already.

It was a party we'll never forget

..and guess who stopped by.

Everett Hiller takes pix of his annual holiday party and before he shares them with the attendees, he adds celebrities... "I must have been wasted; I don't even remember Obama being there."

The words just won't come

A true-to-life depiction of the dilemma

Writer's block 

newly replaced link!

Crime, Punishment and Gettin' Your Face Smashed In

Justice and injustice on America's Indian Reservations

From Mother Jones. One in three American Indian women will be raped in her lifetime. On some reservations crime levels are 20 times the national average. The story of vigilante justice that may be the only justice available.

And, as for those rumors that all Native Americans are getting rich off the tribal casino interests:

A quarter of American Indians live below the poverty level; Ruben is on food stamps. His casino royalty check last year was for $8. "I'd rather they send a midget to my house to knock on the door," he says, "and when I open it, have him punch me in the nuts and say, 'Thanks for bein' Pawnee.'"

Mac McClellan covers human rights for Mother Jones.

Things required for Thanksgiving Day

1. turkey, 2. Alice's Restaurant, 3. cranberry sauce

A big shout out to Metafilter for giving us the lyrics to Alice's Restaurant in their entirety

At left, Arlo and family

ican going to graduate to now

A grad student thanks her professional term paper writer

The Chronicle publishes a guy who makes over $60,000 a year writing term papers for struggling college students. Best part is the comments section where educators line up to claim no responsibility for the problem.

He offers a free sample sentence that will work in any paper you write,

A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come.

Viva Linkdump!

Here's some stuff I been carrying around in my pocket...

How home runs happen,,.that anyone can even hit a big-league pitch is a wonder in itself. That some can hit home runs is practically a miracle. On paper, at least, the feat seems impossible.

The Navy has figured out how to turn a stream of sea water into an antenna... Damn, those guys at NRL are frickin clever...

Sick of waiting for red lights? Buy your way through.

to Mollie: sorry the packhorse librarian program ended in 1943.

S.O.S....S.O.S.... uh... nevermind.

A tale of Ed White...

I don't know if this story is true, but it ought to be...

From The Lampshade by Mark Jacobson

"Weird tattoo you got there," I mentioned to Skip, referencing the image on his right bicep depicting an astronaut, wearing a NASA suit, floating free beside a Gemini space capsule. "Who's that?"
"Who?" Skip replied, ever peeved at the ignorant, poking an index finger at his upper arm. "That's Ed White, my hero."
"Ed White, the astronaut, is your hero?"
"First American to ever walk in space. Ed fucking White."
It was at this point that Skip's version of the Ed White spacewalk diverged from the official NASA account. As per many published stories at the time, Skip believed that when White made his historic jaunt on June 3, 1965, the astronaut was subject to a condition know to scuba divers as being "narked," or so one theory goes. This occurs when the change in external pressure makes nitrogen more soluble in the body tissues, causing the diver, or in this case the spacewalker, to experience sensations not unlike ingesting several drinks or breathing nitrous oxide. In other words, while floating amid the boundless expanse of the universe, Ed White was stoned out of his mind.
He was enjoying himself so much that he refused to return to the space capsule. When fellow astronaut James McDivitt signaled that the walk should conclude, White replied,"No way." "McDivitt had to drag White back in," Skip recounted. When White was finally pulled back into the ship, he said,"This is the saddest moment of my life, coming back in here."

American Business Coops

Profits!? We don't need no stinkin' profits

Calvin Coolidge once said, it is said, that the business of America is business. Business can have more than one model thoough... we don't all have to work in LLCs, or other manner of corporate legalistic structures.

Coops offer a different way of doing business...American Worker Coop, sporting the new ".coop" domain suffix (is that what those are called?) links to a ton of useful assets about the history and formation of coops.
Like the Hoedads...

It all starts with a mission statement...

The goal of the site is to assemble a contemporary history of the worker cooperative movement in the United States, first by accumulating an inventory of people, organizations, writings, media, and eventually through some sort of synthesis.   \

On being a snob

Book and language snobs....

It is really not worth it. Snobbishness raises its ugly hackles in me about math in the news... I become a calculator pounding, scratch pad filling ideologue when I come across a headline the doesn't make mathematical sense. I admit it, I am trying to be better...

Here, though, are a couple of thoughts on snobbishness in books and language...

Penelope Trunk's, concludes that being a book snob is too limiting to the classification of books.

British maven and raconteur Stephen Fry's words ride upon kinetic typograophy to demonstrate his annoyance at grammar snobs.

66 Days to A New You...

Science knows how we make habits...good and bad

It takes a little over two months to develop a new habit that operates automatically in your psyche, that from recent University College-London research. 

The average time to reach maximum automaticity was 66 days, although this varied greatly between participants from 18 days to a predicted 254 days (assuming the still rising rate of change in automaticity at the study end were to be continued beyond the study's 84 days).