Gulfstream: 2011

So many insane steps to this: (1) Dude commissions two 8x10 inch digital capture backs that (2) together cost as much as a house so that (3) he can preview what’s going to happen when he takes the shot for real on (4) 8x10 Polaroid film. (He’s especially keen to be able to preview because Polaroid aren’t making the film anymore.) Further, because it’s custom kit, it (5) only does 10M pixels!

“Designy temporary tattoos.”

“Many people are blessed with beauty. Some even make a career of it. But very few can work both sides of the runway.”

Wikipedia’s reckon that digital copies of works of art can be used on Wikipedia (or anywhere else) provided the copyright on the original work has expired. i.e. you can copy an image from a gallery’s website, and use it on your own.

A Chinese tour group takes on Europe. (Interesting, and provides some insight into Chinese values and attitudes.)

Urban exploration: report on a journey through the tunnels of the abandoned Royal Mail railway that runs for 6 miles underneath London.

Really interesting visualisations of some sex and self-image data, collected by the dating website OkCupid.

Profile of Chris Christie, the entertaining and savvy Republican governor of New Jersey.

Analysis of the UK’s defence strategy, and how well the requirements of action in Libya matches up with the current and future capabilities of the defence force.

Various nice parts to this Malcolm Gladwell review of a book contrasting Helena Rubinstein and Eugéne Schueller (founder of L’Oréal)—their different styles of entrepreneurship, Schueller’s collaboration with the Nazis (for which Gladwell more or less gives him a pass), a comparison to Ingvar Kamprad, founder of Ikea.

How to complain to the Ministry of Defence if you’ being bothered by low flying aircraft. (No, the country drop-down does not include Libya.)

“Moon Just As Ugly From The Back.” The Awl is not a fan of the moon.

Some nice photos suitable for use as desktop wallpaper.

Captivating video of street dance moves set to Girl Talk’s album “All Day.” (Backstory from the NY Times.)

Some excellent UI thoughts on the “Quit” menu item—the usability problems it causes, and how they can be fixed.

What regular people can get out of Fashion Week runway shots: “Fendi, for example, was really about fantastic color combinations. Even if you didn’t like the clothes you can focus on the color schemes. These suggestions of color can be used whether shopping Fendi, or Zara, or vintage.”

Quite like this little house in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Somewhat captivating before and after model shots, which a nifty slider to switch between the before and after.

Pretty awesome: childhood photos, and recent re-enactments of childhood photos with the same, now grown-up, children.

Defence of the third place photograph in the feature pictures story category, which was taken (by a professional photographer) using an iPhone and the Hipstamatic app.

My favourite new blog.

Miami Beach has a $65 million Herzog & de Meuron designed parking garage. The top deck gets rented out for weddings.

Some nice portraits of the elderly female guards of Russian Art Museums, together with the artworks they guard.

The purpose of Chomsky’s “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” was not to demonstrate that it was possible to construct a meaningless, though still grammatically correct sentence, but to show that the Markov Chain model of language was incorrect via the example of two similar but equally improbable sentences, one of which was grammatically correct, and the other not.

“Brandt has been inserting feces into his patients for a decade now and claims to be solving their problems nearly 100 percent of the time. If his method really works—and he’s not the only doctor who believes that it does—then we may have found a viable, if weird, solution to a serious problem.”

Little reviews of sites that use type particularly well; in this case a profile of fashion designer Tze Goh’s wonderfully minimal website for his equally minimal clothes. (Striking photography, too.)

Surprisingly long, technical, funny and expensive (?) Photoshop tutorial rap.

American architects are really appreciative of Chinese clients: “‘There’s no way a U.S. developer would let us do these,’ Mr. McVoy says, adding that the American mentality is, ‘if it hasn’t been done before, then you shouldn’t do it. It’s all about risk, risk, risk. The Chinese have a kind of fearlessness to build things.’”

A story and a strategy.

Graph showing U.S. states; if two states border each other, they’re linked by an edge. There’ only one state with a single neighbour, and surprisingly few with only two. (An example from a JavaScript graph layout library.)

Small documentation on Scott Schumann, of The Sartorialist. He’s annoying in a small way but it’s nice to see how he works. (And the barber shop he goes to at the start is amazing.)

Some splendid shots in The Selby’s picks of his favourite photos of 2010.

Excellent graphic showing the rate of return from investing in the S.&P. 500 for all pairs of years (start point, end point) from 1920 until now. It’s rather difficult to achieve rates over 7% for any period of time; picking a point on the graph at random (which is more or less what you have to do) yields an average return of between 3 and 7%.

Interesting and well-written profile of Christopher Hitchens, now struggling with cancer.

Liz Phair’s review of Keith Richards’s biography Life.

Parking rules in snowy South Boston: “Making It Clear That a Clear Parking Space Isn’t.”

On the large numbers of Dutch men in high-powered jobs who choose to work part-time. Interesting, despite such indicators of liberal values, on several measures Dutch women don’t work a great deal: though 70 percent are employed, women average only 24 hours a week, and women work less than men “even taking housework and child care into account.”

Fun, offbeat piece on how no-one in Mexico City has or wants any heat, even though the temperature drops to near freezing over Winter.

“Mr. Barrett’s talk was titled, “Like Listening to Paint Dry,” and to judge from the droopy faces in the audience, it was a hit. He was speaking, after all, at a conference of boredom enthusiasts called Boring 2010, held here Dec. 11.”