Items of interest around 102510
Monday, October 25th, 2010-
- Pink Ribbon Lettering [Ministry of Type]
- “Niels Meulman of Calligraffiti (AKA Shoe) was commissioned to customise a Mercedes-Benz B-Class by the Pink Ribbon Foundation in the Netherlands. The work consists of hundreds of women’s names, representing the Dutch women the foundation works to help, and is a product of Mercedes’ sponsorship of the foundation.”
- Free internet: The librarian’s tale [The Economist]
- “Almost all of America’s public libraries provide free internet access. Over the past two years, hard-hit Americans have been economising by cancelling their broadband contracts at home and looking to public libraries to fill the gap. At the same time, companies and government agencies are saving money by moving job applications and services online; so a rush of new visitors is arriving at libraries just as the local governments that fund them run out of money.”
- Trap Rooms [BLDGBLOG]
- “While finalizing my slides for tonight’s lecture at SCI-Arc, I was reading again about one of my favorite topics: trap streets, or deliberate cartographic errors introduced into a map so as to catch acts of copyright infringement by rival firms. In other words, if a competitor’s map includes your “trap street”—a geographic feature that you’ve simply invented—then you (and your lawyers) will know they nicked your data, gave it a quick redesign and tried to pass it off as their own. But this strategy of willful cartographic deception is not always limited to streets: there can be trap parks, trap ponds, trap buildings. And trap rooms. “
- Why art books won’t become e-books any time soon. [Slate Magazine]
- “Unless you’re very dedicated, and very well-traveled, most of the art and photography you’ve seen has been on the printed page as well. Will these, too, gradually be replaced with e-books? I suspect not, and I certainly hope not, but to understand why, we need to indulge in a little metaphysics.”
- Data Hacks [Jehiah Czebotar]
- “Data Hacks is a new library we have developed at bit.ly which is a set of command line tools to assist in data analysis.”
- The Graffiti Knitting Epidemic [The Guardian]
- “A bunch of ‘graffiti knitters’ are on the loose in the UK – hellbent on liberating us from the forces of drabness. Maddy Costa hits the streets with a woman called Deadly Knitshade”
