Early Morning Scout Patrol (by Avanaut)

apparently this was the world’s first mass produced mechanical typewriter… the Writing Ball. (is this a hoax?)

YES

Americhrome by Graham T. Beck - The Morning News

Fascinating reportage on Federal Standard 595, the government equivalent of a Pantone color chart.

Powers of Ten, The Flipbook.

Eames + Pentagram + Science + Fun = Oh Hell Yes I Want My Kid To Have This. 

via Brain Pickings

(Source: vimeo.com)

My wife and I are both nearsighted as shit. We’ve made peace with the fact that our soon to be born little nerdling is probably going to be fitted for specs before he/she hits 1st grade. 

But what if we could actually limit the damage to our sweet little coke-bottle-eyed angel? There’s an interesting theory that underexposure to bright outdoor light exacerbates or even causes juvenile nearsightedness. (That’s why it correlates with being a nerd: you were inside reading while the jocks were out playing ball every day.) If screens on iPads, laptops, and other things that my kid will inevitably be using all the time could be made to perform better outdoors, maybe he/she would be more inclined to do their nerdy development outdoors and save their eyesight. Maybe. 

Thumbs Up for Rock and Roll! (by katdangers)

I am saving this so that I can watch it again whenever I’m feeling overwhelmed or doubtful.

my thoughts exactly. 

(This is for a design contest, though, which means 99% of anyone who could be educated by and receptive to this message — ie, “non-designers” like yours truly — won’t be.)

Update:

Actually I’d go further and reject the idea that design is an aesthetic at all. That’s why so many people think this whenever they hear the word. Design is creative problem-solving with a strategic purpose. It’s “why” before “how”, “should” plus “could,” the preferable over the merely possible: making things make sense. That’s it. It’s not an “aesthetic” any more than engineering or science is. It’s part of the basic experience of being human — and I’d go so far as to say that we were designers before we were engineers, scientists, farmers, or anything else that we are. The monolith in 2001 didn’t make that bone-toting ape any smarter. It turned him into a designer. And everything changed.

Designers brought down mammoths and tamed wild horses, built Rome and sacked Troy, split the atom and reached the moon — as well as a whole host of other ignoble, foolish, delightful and mundane things. They didn’t all call themselves “designers”, and they were many other things as well, but that’s what they were doing. And that’s what anyone is doing whenever he or she is functioning above the level of stimulus/response lizard-brain instincts. We are designers because we have souls, and vice versa. And so are you. 

I disagree, but… touché. 

[Note: “design” isn’t just “a guy in confrontationally architectural eyewear either entertaining me visually or forcing me to pay attention to certain things”, and it’s a damn shame most people see it that way. Which is often designers’ fault.]

[Note2: I don’t disagree with the assertion that volunteering at a soup kitchen will help save the world, too.]