Nicholas Rougeux designed a series of posters to visualize all 143 prime numbers with three digits based on simple rules. Each print contains all 143 prime numbers with 3 digits. Each is represented by an image composed of simple geometric shapes based on its digital root and col … | Continue reading
For his project Illustrated People, Thomas Mailaender imprinted photographic images onto people’s skin by shining a UV light through negatives. The visual effect created is not unlike that of a sunburn but it goes away as soon as the skin is exposed to light. I wonder…does it hur … | Continue reading
This is a delightfully early-80s clip about how electronic music legend Suzanne Ciani created the soundtrack and sound effects for the Xenon pinball game. Xenon was the first talking Bally pinball game and the first pinball game voiced by a woman. The idea of using the short grun … | Continue reading
This piece by Cory Doctorow on TikTok’s enshittification (also available at Wired) contains some of the best and simplest descriptions of how online platforms like Amazon, Facebook, Uber, TikTok, Twitter, etc. evolve as they grow and then eventually die. Here is how platforms die … | Continue reading
Artist Siren Elise Wilhelmsen designed a clock that knits while it tells time — the clock makes one two-meter long scarf every 365 days. Time is manifested in physical objects; in things that grow, develop or extinguish. Time is an ever forward-moving force and I wanted to make a … | Continue reading
With soooo much TV these days, everyone has their own pick for The Best Show on TV Right Now and my pick, aside from the excellent & underrated My Brilliant Friend, is Succession. Since the middle of the first season, I have eagerly looked forward to each episode and I’ve been jo … | Continue reading
This is something I’ve heard over and over again, in many cities around the world: putting in bike lanes in place of car parking and/or car lanes results in an increase in humans patronizing local businesses and increased sales. Five years ago, the city of Queens, New York, annou … | Continue reading
Some really nice work amongst the winners and runners up of the Minimalist Photography Awards for 2022. I’ve included a few favorites of mine above (from top to bottom: Daniel Dencescu, Gleici Rufatto, Julie Kenny, and Alexandre Caetano). Tags: best of best of 2022 photograp … | Continue reading
Haley Nahman on the contagious visual blandness of Netflix: It’s actually, specifically, about how movies these days look. That is, more flat, more fake, over-saturated, or else over-filtered, like an Instagram photo in 2012, but rendered in commercial-like high-def. This applies … | Continue reading
Catherine Scorsese appeared in many of her son Martin’s films — Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Casino, etc. — and would often cook for the cast and crew. Robert DeNiro said, “She made the best pizza I’ve ever eaten. I always wanted to serve it at TriBeCa Grill,” while Har … | Continue reading
It’s been a bit since we’ve checked in on artist Reuben Wu, who uses drones to paint (sculpt?) with light in the sky over dark landscapes. Most of his recent stuff seems to be video on his Instagram account but I pulled a couple of photos of his that I haven’t featured before. Al … | Continue reading
A comet called Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is currently visible in northern skies with the naked eye and here’s how you can catch a glimpse for yourself. Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is currently making its way through the northern skies and should reach its brightest magnitude in early Febru … | Continue reading
Wow! A forthcoming exhibition at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum will bring together 23 of the 37 known paintings by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, including The Girl with a Pearl Earring. As the museum’s website says: “Never before have so many Vermeers been brought together”. The exhib … | Continue reading
XKCD’s Randall Munroe recently shared some of the pages from his grandfather’s collection of Disfrustrating Puzzles and Diversions for People Who Don’t Have Time for the Hard Ones and….I cannot stop laughing at some of these. Welp, it’s no mystery where XKCD came from then. … | Continue reading
Image by Cuban cartoonist Osvaldo Gutierrez Gomez. The cartoon is a few years old, but with the increased scrutiny of and legal repercussions feared by school librarians and the never-ending gun violence in our communities, it’s more relevant than ever. (via @irwin) Tags: books … | Continue reading
Photoshop wizard Ingo Lindmeier makes these delightful mashups of animals and objects (fruits, vegetables, technology) which you can find on his Instagram account. Some of them are a little over-the-top, but the conceptually simpler ones are great. (via moss and fog) Tags: Ingo … | Continue reading
Dialogue from movies and TV shows has become more difficult to hear in recent years, prompting many to switch on subtitles for much of what they watch. As this video from Vox details, the reasons for this shift come down to a desire for realism, choices that filmmakers have acces … | Continue reading
David Shariatmadari, an editor at The Guardian, was asked by a colleague to “have a go” at inventing a new game, a new viral sensation like Wordle. The game he came up with is called Wordiply (it’s fun!) and he wrote up the whole process of how he went about designing it. The ide … | Continue reading
In 1812, Japanese woodblock print artist Katsushika Hokusai, who would later become famous for his iconic Great Wave off Kanagawa prints, published a three-volume series called Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing. All three volumes are available online: one, two, three. Even if y … | Continue reading
Here’s Kurzgesagt on the deceptively simple way we can make changes in our life: build new routines and turn them into habits. If you are like most people, there is a gap between the person you are and the person you wish to be. There are little things you think you should do and … | Continue reading
Eric Huang is the chef/owner/operator of Brooklyn’s lauded Pecking House fried chicken joint. In a recent Instagram post, Huang explains why tipping is a part of the experience at his restaurant. We do NOT use a tip credit at Pecking House. If we do not take a tip credit that mea … | Continue reading
South Korea currently has a probe called Danuri orbiting the Moon at an altitude of about 62 miles above the surface. It’s just begun its mission but has already sent back some black & white photos of the Moon and the Earth, including the two above. Over at EarthSky, Dave Adalian … | Continue reading
Jonathan Mehring’s short documentary Walls Cannot Keep Us From Flying follows two young Palestinians who have found freedom in skateboarding while surrounded by walls & barbed wire and facing harassment from Israeli authorities and their own families & communities. What do I feel … | Continue reading
If you take the vocals from The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails and match them to the beats from Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off, you get this little bit of magic: Update: I totally forgot I’d previously featured this awesomeness: NIN’s Head Like a Hole vs. Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call M … | Continue reading
Smithsonian Magazine is featuring some incredible photos from Angel Fitor’s SeaDrops project: microphotography of tiny plankton-populated worlds contained in drops of seawater. It took Fitor three years of surgically precise work to get the jewel-like images you see here. First, … | Continue reading
In the course of making his Oscar-winning documentary about basketball star Lusia Harris, director Ben Proudfoot became interested in how Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in any educational program that receives federal funding, was p … | Continue reading
Textile artist Alicja Kozlowska’s Embroidered Ordinaries series recalls the the pop art of Warhol & Lichtenstein and Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent II Diptychon while also being firmly contemporary. There’s maybe a Duchamp/readymade something something riff in there? I dunno, I’m not a … | Continue reading
Magnets are cool. Full stop. The Magnetic Games channel has a ton of videos about all the neat stuff you can do with them. I can’t be the only person who, after watching this, wants to spend a significant amount of money on neodymium magnets and magnetic putty? Some people do puz … | Continue reading
The Odyssey YouTube channel is a trove of documentaries about the ancient world, “from the dawn of Mesopotamia to the fall of Rome”. Several of their videos about Rome are presented by classicist Mary Beard, perhaps the best-known Roman scholar in the world and the author of SPQR … | Continue reading
Self-described “maker of things” Evie Bee has made a cool thing indeed: an e-bike with a frame constructed mostly from sustainably sourced poplar and birch plywood called the Electraply. Here’s a video of the bike in action: The design of the bike was inspired by my love for t … | Continue reading
For 10 years beginning in the late 90s, photographer Angela Cappetta captured the goings-on of a multi-generational Puerto Rican family living on NYC’s Lower East Side, focusing particularly on the youngest daughter, Glendalis. From a recent piece in the New Yorker by Ana Karina … | Continue reading
From steel scrap to testing the final product with a ton of water pressure, here’s how Japanese manhole covers are made. The video is perhaps a little long in parts, so I would not blame you for skipping ahead to ~12:10 to see how some of the covers are hand-painted in brilliant … | Continue reading
At the end of each year, art director Chris Barker collects celebrities who have died in the past 12 months into a Sgt. Pepper’s album cover collage — here’s 2022’s edition. There doesn’t appear to be a complete listing of everyone pictured, but you can easily pick out Coolio, G … | Continue reading
The length of winter near the northern 45th parallel requires events to look forward to in order to feel like you’re not forever adrift in cold and dark. Big things like vacations and reunions with friends & family as well as small things like getting outside in the afternoon, ha … | Continue reading
Based in Dubai, video artist André Larsen spends a lot of time shooting the Burj Khalifa which, at 2,722 feet and 163 floors, is the world’s tallest building. In this video, a drone piloted by Larsen dives the entire height of the building…and it’s kind of astounding just how muc … | Continue reading
The USGS Astrogeology Science Center recently released a series of detailed geological maps of Mars that detail features from the red planet’s past like volcanos and flowing water. If you’re thinking, “hey that looks a lot like a river in that second image”, you’re not far off. O … | Continue reading
The Art of the Title, Print magazine, Slashfilm, and Salon have each compiled their picks for the best film and TV opening title sequences for 2022. There’s quite a bit of overlap, with the opening titles for Severance (which I added to the Unskippable Intros Hall of Fame earlier … | Continue reading
Paul Cronin’s book of conversations with filmmaker Werner Herzog is called Werner Herzog - A Guide for the Perplexed. On the back cover of the book, Herzog offers a list of advice for filmmakers that doubles as general purpose life advice. 1. Always take the initiative. 2. There … | Continue reading
I am loving these vibrant fabric portraits by Bahamian artist Gio Swaby (Instagram). Here’s a brief statement of work from her website (italics mine): Gio Swaby is a Bahamian visual artist whose practice is an exploratory celebration of Blackness and womanhood. Her work centres o … | Continue reading
Well, would you look at this great photo by Rob Antill of the amazing Takaosan Interchange located in Sagamihara, Japan. It’s like Bézier curves meets highway engineering meets Euler’s Seven Bridges of Königsberg meets Mr. Messy. See also Aerial Photos Reveal the Sculptural Beaut … | Continue reading
This video is a simulation of a rogue wave 58 feet tall recorded by a buoy off the coast of Vancouver Island in 2020. For centuries, rogue waves were considered nothing but nautical folklore. It wasn’t until 1995 that myth became fact. On the first day of the new year, a nearly 2 … | Continue reading
This is such a trip to see the familiar original version of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda being played as a VR first-person shooter. You only get one screen at a time with the top-down 2D view, but in this version, you get as much of the map as you can see - it looks like it str … | Continue reading
Sure, the James Webb Space Telescope and ok, the Hubble, but the Solar Dynamics Observatory has to be right up there for producing some of the most jaw-dropping space photography around. This 4K video from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center condenses 133 days of the SRO’s observa … | Continue reading
Written in Stone is a collection of photos of stamps and seals imprinted in sidewalks by the people and companies who made them. Great examples of vernacular design. Tags: design photography | Continue reading
Clive Thompson, himself a person with a number of “weird, offbeat obsessions”, writes about the power of curiosity, including the story of how a trip to Yellowstone’s burbling hot springs led to the PCR method that enables accurate Covid testing. Back in 1964, the microbiologist … | Continue reading
For Beautiful Public Data, Joe Keegan takes a look at the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways, the style guide published by the Federal Highway Administration that governs how America’s roads are marked. The MUTCD states that it “shall be recognized … | Continue reading
During the medals ceremony for the 200 meter race the 1968 Olympics, gold medalist Tommie Smith and bronze medalist John Carlos, both standing shoeless on the podium, each raised one black-gloved fist in the air during the playing of the US national anthem as a gesture in support … | Continue reading
People running “unconventional miles” is a thing now (see the beer mile) and during the pandemic, when meets and other usual track activities were cancelled, running a mile while dribbling a basketball became part of the human competitive story. What started out as a curiosity-d … | Continue reading