Under Construction
I make things on the internet
In Japan, Living Large in Really Tiny Houses takes a look at Japanese micro homes.
“If you tried to build a normal house on a super-small plot of land, it would end up being really cramped. So in order to make the house as roomy as possible, we have to think up new structures and assembly,” Yamashita says.
Designers indulge in fantasy, like asymmetrical walls, cantilevered floors, or cover their houses in a translucent skin, in order to exploit all available natural light.
The Digital Comic Museum has loads of golden age comics for download which are copyright free and in the public domain.
A history of rap medley featuring Jimmy Fallon, Justin Timberlake and The Roots. Fun to watch, very well done.
Update: In their infinite wisdom, NBC has decided that videos should “expire” on the internet. So much for legal sources. Do a search, I’m sure you can find a copy.
Video games in the classroom explores the use of games as a teaching tool.
Salen’s theory goes like this: building a game — even the kind of simple game a sixth grader might build — is equivalent to building a miniworld, a dynamic system governed by a set of rules, complete with challenges, obstacles and goals. At its best, game design can be an interdisciplinary exercise involving math, writing, art, computer programming, deductive reasoning and critical thinking skills. If children can build, play and understand games that work, it’s possible that someday they will understand and design systems that work. And the world is full of complicated systems.
For a generation growing up immersed in technology, it offers a great opportunity for cross-curricular learning. Implementing a broad program like that could be problematic with the compartmentalized subject structure found in most schools. There would also be issues in an educational system with standardized testing, where you pretty much have to teach to the test. Regardless, it’s an interesting approach that has a lot of potential.
Protovis is a free and open-source graphical toolkit for visualization. It uses JavaScript and SVG for native visualizations in a web browser. Michael used it to analyze the traffic from his Chewbacca post.
A brilliant sendup of half-assed newspaper articles about scientific papers.
In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.
In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”.
The Typographer’s Glossary from FontShop provides definitions of all the type terms that you wanted to know, but were afraid to ask. Their education section provides a handy PDF of the glossary, as well as a number of other documents to aide in your typographic pursuits.
Ever wanted to know where our alphabet came from? Read The origins of abc from iLT.
That story spans some 5,000 years. We’ll travel vast distances, meet an emperor, a clever Yorkshireman, a Phoenician princess by the name of Jezebel, and the ‘purple people’; we’ll march across deserts and fertile plains, and sail across oceans. We will begin where civilisation began, meander through the Middle Ages, race through the Renaissance, and in doing so discover where our alphabet originated, how and why it evolved, and why, for example, an A looks, well, like an A.
An excellent read, with a great layout for the web, and a collage from Able Parris to boot.
Here’s a short interview with Matthew Carter, for the Boston Globe, by Liza Weisstuch. In the video Carter mentions that he has designed more than 70 typeface families, including Georgia and Verdana.
Blueprints for building your own Dalek. For those sci-fi geeks bent on true world domination, plunger style.
Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts is a joint project from the University of Oxford, King’s College and the British Library, that seeks to create a digital resource from all of the author’s surviving manuscripts.
Jane Austen’s fiction manuscripts are the first significant body of holograph evidence surviving for any British novelist. They represent every stage of her writing career and a variety of physical states: working drafts, fair copies, and handwritten publications for private circulation.
Great care has been taken to provide a digital record of the original materials, as well as an accurate transcription which can be viewed simultaneously.
Austen’s handwriting and punctuation are agreed to be of great importance in the understanding of her work but have hitherto been little studied. The mark up scheme has recorded orthographic variants and punctuation symbols in minute detail for subsequent computational interrogation.
The flash interface is somewhat awkward to use, but the “diplomatic display” is quite impressive.
Can videogames be journalism? A brief look at Newsgames: Journalism at Play, the new book from Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer.
“Games allow us to address systems instead of stories,” Dr. Bogost said in an interview. And, in some ways, they can offer more depth. People often search for simple answers to broad topics like the Gulf oil spill or the 2008 financial crisis, but in reality both were the result of a confluence of failures and events. Games can help to convey that complexity. “In particular, they can offer this experience of how something works rather than a description of key events and players,” Dr. Bogost says.