"Most notably Kartograph allows to select and fine-tune the map projection, which is like the fundamental equipment for telling stories with maps" If that doesn't already make you excited, this introductory blog post should do the trick. Lovely.

How you slice the x dimension of a graph of, say, tax take can massively change the way people perceive the result. (I'm tempted to suggest that the only good way to do it is income deciles, but there's probably a case when there's a reason not to do that.)

A nice collection of some of the visualisations that Paul Lamere's SXSWi talk on music and discovery covered.

"Walk around any major American city today and you will still be able to see at least a few rusty Fallout Shelter Signs attached to buildings of a certain vintage. These distinctive metallic, reflective signs remain the most durable—literally and figuratively—symbol of the Cold War. But how did the sign come to be and who exactly was responsible for its creation?"

"That's the line we use around the office whenever the subject of HTML and canvas comes up - we use Adobe Flash for most everything now, but we don't expect that situation to last forever. The work done by Mozilla on Gecko and Apple on WebKit is one possible future for online design and visualization, and it's turning slowly to face us right about now." Lots of good stuff in here.

Gizmodo on Photosketch. "Take any rough sketch, with the shape of each element labeled with its name, find images corresponding to each drawn element, judge which are a better match to the shapes, and then seamlessly merge it all into one single image." Just watch the video.

"I wondered how convincingly I could model [30 St Mary Axe] in Mathematica." Somewhat interesting stuff (although possibly more so if you note that the original buildings themselves were digitally modelled as part of the design process).

The first example of diegetic 3d titles? (See also: Fringe, Heroes, and apparently, Moon).

"Unlike traditional forms of nostalgia, this is not at all based on lived experience. Most of those who have bought this poster, or worn the various bags, T-shirts and other bits of tat based upon it, were probably born in the 70s or 80s, and have no memory whatsoever of the kind of benevolent modernism it seems to exemplify."

A PDF thesis (full title: "Automatic Layout Of Metro Maps Using Multicriteria Optimisation") on using Java and graph theory to lay out rail networks using Beck-esque metro map principles. According to the research, the automatic maps were preferable to geographic and published ones. No London or NY (ie really big) networks, though.

It's nowhere near as powerful as Can Combine Icons (which seems to have vanished now) but it might be handy anyway.

Impressive, but almost as interesting are the 350 links in 5 hours, and that fact that it's about 50% of my network's output since then. As yoz put it: " it bounces on a lot of coolness buttons in one go".

A visualisation of comments to a BBC News Have Your Say debate on whether white people are ignored. The comments are sadly their usual incoherent mess, but it's pretty. Hurrah for Helvetica.

More on Ladislav Sutnar, the Czech/American designer I'd managed never to hear about.

"An attempt to improve text rasterization algorithms using only publicly available information" Follows on from the Safari 3 for Windows rendering debate, apparently.

"designing for the Web with the typographic grid as my primary layout tool" I think of grids as being both horizontal and vertical, hence my annoyance with the ALA article title. This didn't feel right for me, but it's a good article.

Graphs of twitter, flickr, zooomr, and cricket.

Even just scanning this I get a sense of Fourier analysis. Might come in handy.

for future reference

Call me a stinking commie, but this looks bad. Also: Flash kills SVG, or SVG gets decent plugin? Vote now!