“The cruelest thing you can do to Kerouac,” Hanif Kureishi has a character say in The Buddha of Suburbia, “is reread him at thirty-eight.” If that was true, I wondered as I opened the first two volumes of the Library of America’s ongoing series of the complete novels, then what of Vonnegut at a decade older still? The two are linked, of course, as items on the syllabus of adolescent male samizdat that used to go like this: Mad magazine at 13, Vonnegut at 15, Salinger at 17, Hunter Thompson at 18, Kerouac at 20. (When you got real big, you read Kundera.)

1. Add the salt, peppers, Worcestershire sauce and lemon juice to a shaker glass.
2. Add ice, vodka and tomato juice. Shake, pour into a highball glass, garnish if you wish, and serve.

Time: 20 minutes plus dripping and chilling times

3 pounds very ripe tomatoes, coarsely chopped
1/2 teaspoon, plus pinch kosher salt
3 celery stalks
8 ounces gin
12 dashes Tabasco
12 dashes Worcestershire sauce

"Are video game soundtracks the new concept albums?
Does the brilliant soundtrack for Max Payne 3 hint at a future in which bands use game scores as a new creative medium?
While Max Payne 3 has its detractors (and we're not among them), there's one thing most gamers agree on about Rockstar's latest slab of edgy interactive mayhem: the music is awesome. Over several months of intense sessions, US noise punk merchants Health recorded around six hours of new material for the score, producing a soundscape every bit as enthralling and messed up as the onscreen action."

"We've just rolled out a new way for you to make atlases of the world, called Field Papers. Field Papers allows you to print a multipage paper atlas of anywhere in the world and take it outside, offline, into the field. You can scribble on it, add features, or make notes about the area, all without a GPS or complicated GIS software.

Once you've annotated your atlas, you can upload photographs of each page back into the system to transcribe your notes into digital form. Each atlas gets its own page on Field Papers, and a simple history of edits and activity which you can share with friends or colleagues, and download for later analysis."

"If digital covers as we know them are so ‘dead,’ why do we hold them so gingerly? Treat them like print covers? We can't hurt them. They're dead. So let's start hacking. Pull them apart, cut them into bits and see what we come up with.

This is an essay for book lovers and designers curious about where the cover has been, where it's going, and what the ethos of covers means for digital book design. It's for those of us dissatisfied with thoughtlessly transferring print assets to digital and closing our eyes."

"An ancient creature thought to be the first to step on land could not
have walked on four legs, 3D computer modelling shows."

"I have sometimes had occasion to murmur
meekly that those who endure the heavy labour of reading a book
might possibly endure that of reading the title-page of a book.
For there are more examples than may be imagined, in which earnest
critics might solve many of their problems about what a book is,
merely by discovering what it professes to be."

"The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world's visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way."

by craigmod

"It was the first time I'd used a fountain pen since I was about 13. I found myself enjoying writing more slowly and liked the way I had to think through sentences differently. I discovered I loved the fact that handwriting forces you to do a second draft, rather than just tidying up and deleting bits on a computer. I also discovered I enjoy the tactile buzz of the ritual involved in filling the pens with ink."

"The fish use micro-electrode arrays to sense contaminants. In their current form they can detect phenols and heavy metals such as copper and lead, as well as monitor oxygen levels and salinity.

But the team has tried to build in flexibility.

Dr Speller explains: "We have designed it so you can pull out the chemical sensor unit, and put in different ones for something else, such as sulphates or phosphates, depending on the environment that you are monitoring," he explains.

One they've sniffed out a problem, the fish use artificial intelligence to hunt down the source of pollution.

They can work alone or in a team, communicating with each other using acoustic signals and they can continuously report back to the port.

"In the future, what I'd also like to see is not just a single task robot, but robots that can multitask - robots that can do search and rescue, monitoring for underwaters divers, at the same time as tracking pollution."

"Today OMA participated in the official construction completion ceremony for the China Central Television (CCTV) Headquarters in Beijing, which will start to be used later this year. Designed by OMA as a reinvention of the skyscraper as a loop, construction on the building began in 2004. At approximately 473, 000m2, CCTV – accommodating TV studios, offices, broadcasting and production facilities – is OMA’s largest ever project and its first major building in China."

"Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason
University who were enrolled in T. Mills Kelly's course, Lying About
the Past. Their escapades not only went unpunished, they were actually
encouraged by their professor. Four years ago, students created a
Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of Edward Owens, successfully
fooling Wikipedia's community of editors. This year, though, one group
of students made the mistake of launching their hoax on Reddit. What
they learned in the process provides a valuable lesson for anyone who
turns to the Internet for information."

"I once heard Leon Botstein, the President of Bard College, compare books to stairs. “They’ve invented the elevator,” he said, “but sometimes you still walk up.” There are countless discussions on the future of the book—they are picked up in magazine feature articles, in trade conferences, and in academic roundtables—and in all of these, the future of the printed word seems certain: in a generation or two, print will become obsolete. In this age of changing habits, if print is the stairs and screens the elevator, then what could the escalator be?"

I felt Greene was still indestructible, and I did not seriously fear for his life. He was unlike any other writer I have known in his being physically fit without effort. When anyone asked him how he managed to stay in such good health, he said that he ate and drank whatever he liked, and he boasted (to Fidel Castro, among others) that he never exercised. In fact, he was an energetic walker his whole life, but he loathed fresh-air fiends and he was rather stuck on the idea of being dissolute. "I'm in the mood for a pipe," he sometimes said after a good lunch; he meant opium.

Grace Butcher's 'Crow is Walking' which appears in the Best American
Poetry 2000, edited by Rita Dove.

Crow is walking
to see things at ground level,
the landscape as new under his feet
as the air is old under his wings.

He leaves the dead rabbit waiting-
it's a given; it'll always be there-
and walks on down the dirt road,

admires the pebbles,
how they sparkle in the sun;

checks out his reflection
in a puddle full of sky
which reminds him
of where he's supposed to be,

but he's beginning to like
the way the muscles move in his legs
and the way his wings feel so comfortable
folded back and resting.

He thinks he might be beautiful,
the sun lighting his back
with purple and green.

Faint voices from somewhere far ahead
roll like dust down the road towards him.
He hurries a little.

His tongue moves in his mouth;
legends of language move in his mind.

His beak opens.
He tries a word.

What will the new system look like if economies of scope become the norm, replacing economies of scale as the primary driver of the economy?

“THE BIXBIAN TRADITION”—MARK RUFFALO IN THE LEGACY AND LOGIC OF HULKING

Under the alias JK Flesh, long-running industrial/metal pioneer Justin Broadrick returns to the electronic crucible, fortifying blazing walls of distortion with iron wrecking-ball beats. He speaks to Joseph Burnett about his remarkable history, "hateful and fucked" music, and future plans

"Using a revolutionary technique for dating ancient remains, they have built up a detailed chronology of the first farmers' arrival in Britain and have shown that agriculture spread with dramatic rapidity. In its wake, profound social changes gripped the country, culminating in the construction of causewayed enclosures where chieftains or priests held revelries to help establish their power bases."

Take the given date in 4 portions, viz. the number of centuries, the
number of years over, the month, the day of the month. Compute the
following 4 items, adding each, when found, to the total of the
previous items. When an item or total exceeds 7, divide by 7, and keep
the remainder only.
The Century-item For Old Style (which ended September 2, 1752)
subtract from 18. For New Style (which began September 14) divide by
4, take overplus from 3, multiply remainder by 2.
The Year-item Add together the number of dozens, the overplus, and the
number of 4s in the overplus.
The Month-item If it begins or ends with a vowel, subtract the number,
denoting its place in the year, from 10. This, plus its number of
days, gives the item for the following month. The item for January is
"0"; for February or March, "3"; for December, "12".
The Day-item The total, thus reached, must be corrected, by deducting
"1" (first adding 7, if the total be "0"), if the date be January or
February in a leap year: remembering that every year, divisible by 4,
is a Leap Year, excepting only the century-years, in New Style, when
the number of centuries is not so divisible (e.g. 1800). The final
result gives the day of the week, "0" meaning Sunday, "1" Monday, and
so on.

"CS101 teaches the essential ideas of Computer Science for a
zero-prior-experience audience. The course uses small coding
experiments in the browser to play with the nature of computers,
understanding their strengths and limitations."

"The Chinese government does not operate a real thought police; they
don't care what you think, or what you save on a server if it is
accessible only to you... "So as long as Evernote focuses on helping
people to remember stuff and save stuff in the cloud for personal use,
censorship and self-censorship will not be an issue... "But anyone who
plans to be an activist or organise against the Chinese government
should not expect any protections if they save their data on servers
located in China."

"Many New Yorkers no doubt have dreamed of a magically emptied city,
perhaps after a sleepless night caused by loud, carousing NYU kids or
after trying to navigate the tourist-clotted sidewalks of Midtown with
the determination of an icebreaker. But "Silent World" suggests life
would not be so peaceful in a completely silent city. It's unnatural
and threatening; as fun as it'd be to climb all the sculptures at
MoMa, the uneasy feeling of being the last person on earth could build
and build until one goes mad."

John Starr Stewart Ex Libris Collection

"The Ex Libris (bookplate) illustrations below were selected from the first half of the enormous John Starr Stewart Collection at the University of Illinois. Will from 50Watts sampled the back half of the same database: [The Bookplate Collection: Second Half]."

Düsseldorf-based photographer Christian Stoll has made a name for
himself photographing the hidden infrastructures that power the
world's largest companies. Stoll has worked in the ad world for two
decades, compiling a client list of hundreds of mega-brands and
capturing a number of images that he describes as "epic." He's culled
the most remarkable into a series by the same name, which shows us the
logistical empires of IBM, DB Schenker, GE, and Microsoft.

Why does your desk have wheels? Think of those wheels as a symbolic
reminder that you should always be considering where you could move
yourself to be more valuable. But also think of those wheels as
literal wheels, because that’s what they are, and you’ll be able to
actually move your desk with them.

“If we’re not careful, we will know more about the beginning of the 20th
century than the beginning of the 21st century,” says Adam Farquhar, who is
in charge the British Library’s digital-preservation efforts.

"I'm so bookish, my bookmarks are smaller books"

Nice and very comprehensive reference site for double edge/safety razor shaving

"He added that initial units were likely to prove expensive, and that
the company - which is a division of Italy's Luxottica Group - might
also develop a product for the US military."

"They predict the technique will be used by pharmaceutical firms
within five years, and by the public within 20... "What we are doing
is mixing the concept of the glassware and the chemicals together in
the 3D printer to create what we call 'reactionware'."

Gah: " As technology becomes more ubiquitous, and things like tables,
walls, fridges and other surfaces, objects and devices become
interactive, connected and locatable - and possibly even aware of
other devices and people around them - advertising will become even
more personalised, contextual, relevant and useful."

" If Google closed GMail (or removed email support from it), email
would survive as a communication mechanism (removing email from GMail
is hard to imagine today, but keep in mind that Google's survival
doesn't require GMail but they appear to consider it a matter of life
or death for Google+ to succeed). If, on the other hand, Google closed
Reader, would RSS survive? Doubtful. And Google has already tweaked
Reader to benefit Google+. Not, for now, in a way that harms its RSS
support. But whatever Google+ needs from Reader, Google+ will get."

Documentary on the appreciation of the "promotional memo books
distributed to American farmers over the last hundred years by seed,
tractor, and other agricultural companies," plus scans of covers

-"PD 5454:2012 supersedes BS 5454:2000 and PD 0024:2001, which are withdrawn."
-"The guidance has been adapted to recognize a different approach to
environmental management. This allows for environmental fluctuations
to occur within recommended parameters, such as can occur with
seasonal changes, instead of a tight level of stability and control
being recommended around set points for temperature and relative
humidity"

"The bottle tree known as Hillgrove lockup, situated on the King River
25 miles from Wyndham is a tree with a history. When blacks were bad,
in the 'nineties, this tree was used as a prison. The holes in the
limbs indicated that it was hollow, and the police cut out an opening
and had a cell with a capacity of more than 100 square feet, where the
natives were locked up at night."

"SHORN of all the romance and glamour which seem inevitably to surround every early phase of typographic art, a Printer’s Device may be described as nothing more or less than a trade mark. It is usually a sufficient proof that the book in which it occurs is the work of a particular craftsman. Its origin is essentially unromantic, and its employment, in the earlier stages of its history at all events, was merely an attempt to prevent the inevitable pirate from reaping where he had not sown. At one time a copy, or more correctly a forgery, of a Printer’s Mark could be detected with comparative ease, even if the body of the book had all the appearance of genuineness."

"Remember the good old days when everyone read really good books, like, maybe in the post-war years when everyone appreciated a good use of the semi-colon? Everyone's favorite book was by Faulkner or Woolf or Roth. We were a civilized civilization. This was before the Internet and cable television, and so people had these, like, wholly different desires and attention spans. They just craved, craved, craved the erudition and cultivation of our literary kings and queens.

Well, that time never existed."

"The thing I’m more worried about is how can I say anything which someone will be able to see in 20 years in the form in which it was created, anything, even a chair would be good. That’s a serious problem, it’s like a new contemporary problem, how do we make something work in a situation where the means of production are in a maelstrom or things are politically or financially falling apart? I don’t expect the bookstores are going be there, I don’t think the libraries are going to be there, I certainly don’t expect Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Twitter to survive 20 years, I don’t expect Microsoft to survive 20 years, I don’t expect NATO to survive. I don’t know about the EU. This is not like a gospel of despair or anything I just really think we could do something magnificent by just rising to the scale of the actual problem. "

Essay from Bruce Sterling on the New Aesthetic

"A century ago, 90% of Londoners' journeys under six miles were made
on foot. Now we are alienated from the physical reality of our cities.
Will Self on the importance of walking in the fight against corporate
control" "Borges's animals and beggars are those who still seek the
disciplines of physical geography – we understand that to walk the
city and its environs is, in a very powerful sense, to use it. The
contemporary flâneur is by nature and inclination a democratising
force who seeks equality of access, freedom of movement and the
dissolution of corporate and state control."

April Fools!

"Using a special PNG as a mask for an img element with a background-image property, you can turn flat-looking static maps into nifty skeuomorph-ized paper objects."

"I understand the value of coding. It is good and necessary that coding will become more widespread and less alien to average people in the coming decades. But those who compare it to literacy do not understand the value of literacy."

"Written in the vein of Douglas R. Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning Godel, Escher, Bach, this original and imaginative book sheds light on one of Borges' most complex, richly layered works. Bloch begins each chapter with a mathematical idea--combinatorics, topology, geometry, information theory--followed by examples and illustrations that put flesh on the theoretical bones. In this way, he provides many fascinating insights into Borges' Library. He explains, for instance, a straightforward way to calculate how many books are in the Library--an easily notated but literally unimaginable number--and also shows that, if each book were the size of a grain of sand, the entire universe could only hold a fraction of the books in the Library. Indeed, if each book were the size of a proton, our universe would still not be big enough to hold anywhere near all the books."

"The project aimed to be a study of South African commuter culture (something that is nearly non-existent here), but it's turned into a portrait of a nation through the bicycles that they own and ride every day - revealing all manner of social, class, historical and cultural nuances never imagined."

Toner
These high-contrast B+W (black and white) maps are featured in our
Dotspotting project. They are perfect for data mashups and exploring
river meanders and coastal zones. Available in three flavors: normal,
no labels, only labels.
Terrain
Orient yourself with our terrain maps, featuring hill shading and
natural vegetation colors. These maps showcase advanced labeling and
linework generalization of dual-carriageway roads. Terrain was
developed in collaboration with Gem Spear and Nelson Minar.
Watercolor
Reminiscent of hand drawn maps, our watercolor maps apply raster
effect area washes and organic edges over a paper texture to add warm
pop to any map. Watercolor was inspired by the Bicycle Portraits
project.

"The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on annual expeditions to the ends of the earth exploring unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies. Join the Division as each year we navigate a different global cross section and map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures.
 
Here we are both visionaries and reporters, part documentarians and part science fiction soothsayers as the otherworldly sites we encounter afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios."

[Blog: http://www.unknownfieldsdivision.com/blog/ ]

"After all of the testing, tweaking, and paperwork, I’m happy to present Instapaper’s new fonts:

Elena by Nicole Dotin, the new default on iPhone and iPad.

Lyon Text by Kai Bernau

FF Tisa by Mitja Miklavčič

Ideal Sans by Hoefler & Frere-Jones

FF Meta by Erik Spiekermann

Proxima Nova by Mark Simonson"

“Take these three items right here. You can have this. WD-40, vise grips, and some duct tape. Any man worth his salt can do half the household chores with just those three things.” -Walt Kowalski

Interview with the author of REMAINDER and C.

"First, let’s just get clear on the terminology here: “Curation” is an act performed by people with PhDs in art history; the business in which we’re all engaged when we’re tossing links around on the internet is simple “sharing.” And some of us are very good at that! (At least if we accept “very good” to mean “has a large audience.”)

But we should not delude ourselves for a moment into bestowing any special significance on this, because when we do this thing that so many of us like to call “curation” we’re not providing any sort of ontology or semantic continuity beyond that of our own whimsy or taste or desire. “Interesting things” or “smart things” are not rubrics that make the collection and dissemination of data that happens on the internet anything closer to a curatorial act; these categories are ultimately still reducible to “things I find appealing,” "

"(So why bother to look up the notes at all? Because some of them were zingers. A note on the emperor Gordian: "Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than for ostentation." And one correcting an error by a friend of his: "M. de Voltaire, unsupported by either fact or probability, has generously bestowed the Canary Islands on the Roman empire.")"

"Curator=92s Code is an attempt to codify and standardize =93via=94 links a=
nd
attribution from link blogs and aggregators with two new symbols." "The
inscrutability of these little symbols is irrelevant, because most writers
aren=92t going to use them. The problems with online attribution aren=92t d=
ue
to a lack of syntax: they=92re due to the economics and realities of online

"...suppose you have a moral view that counts future people as being
worth as much as present people..."

I've probably bookmarked this before, but this is still the best
reason for me to turn on the internet.

"You want a physicist to speak at your funeral.by Aaron Freeman of NPR
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist
to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so
they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the
physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of
thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none
is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every
vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was
her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the
physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the
cosmos, you gave as good as you got."

Old book smell

"Plans made a year ago for library additions or even modest
renovations�never mind an entirely new building�are probably out of
date. Longstanding formulas to calculate the space required for
stacks, seating, and even computer stations no longer apply...
Built-in flexibility in how spaces can be used now and reconfigured in
the future is paramount. Thankfully, libraries have been migrating
away from a reliance solely on books�and quietude�for years... Where
once the sheer number of volumes afforded status, today the important
statistics are how many pertinent and engaging services and programs
are offered and how many rooms, sociable niches, intimate nooks, and
computer crannies are available for people to meet in, do their taxes
online, collaborate, learn how to operate an e-reader, hold a book
club session, gossip, have a cup of coffee, navigate the Medicare
bureaucracy (with a librarian�s help), record music, write and read
poetry, and on and on. What are we looking at? In general terms, there
will be more, varied spaces but probably less overall square footage,
fewer physical books, and more services... A client library in an
academic setting is systematically removing some stack space to make
room for computer carrels and seating. Consequently, the lighting will
have to be changed. If those stacks were built today, the lighting, as
well as the space, would be designed for multiple uses. To maintain
their important role in a rapidly changing information environment,
today�s public library staff members hold marketing meetings to better
identify and serve their various constituencies, such as retiring baby
boomers looking for activities, people to talk to, or second careers."

"I can’t seem to get enough of the PBS series, Downton Abbey, and neither can you. This became clear at the Cheddar class I taught on Friday night at Tria’s Fermentation School. It was a Masterpiece Theater-loving crowd (lots of beards and one waistcoat); Lady Grantham would have fit right in.

By the end of the night, we’d eaten seven Cheddars, and there was hardly a crumb on the tables. After everyone left, I couldn’t help but imagine them settling in on their settees at home with a spot of port and an episode of Downton Abbey cued up for a nightcap. Since today is Sunday, and you’ll surely be watching, let me offer you a few crumbs of wisdom about building a Downton worthy cheese plate."

"Since its origins, the London Library�s acquisition brief has been
fervid and wide-ranging, and its membership both illustrious and
diverse. Started by Thomas Carlyle in 1841�he was peeved at not being
able to borrow books from the British Library�it has grown into the
largest private lending library in the world. Its members have
included Dickens, T. S. Eliot (who was once the library�s president),
Isaiah Berlin, Thackeray, and Rebecca West.
The one million books in the library are available to all members at
all times. A friend once borrowed Hobbes�s Leviathan, only to realize
that he�d taken home a first edition; there is a first-edition copy of
Portrait of a Lady that contains typos (typos!); there is reputedly a
dictionary whose F section bears the inky fingerprints of Leonard and
Virginia Woolf, which they left when looking up naughty words. If you
borrow an old book from the library, you may go to bed with a volume
that Dickens once read by candle light in Doughty Street, or that
Eliot read as he walked over the London Bridge."

The broadest single collection of historical maps from around the
world is now available online.
The JISC-funded Old Maps Online, described by its creators as like
Google for old maps, will act as a central repository to a vast
collection of maps held by institutions across the globe. It is the
first time that access to such an extensive collection has been made
available online.