onfocus

Images of the future I'm supposed to be living in! Manned space flight art by Chesley Bonestell in the 50's.

Brazilian visual arts magazine. You can read them here in a Flash reader.

Nice way of summarizing the stories of the World Cup teams by finding similar American sports stories/teams.

Impossible! I had no idea Airplane! was based on an earlier movie. This video shows where the dialog overlaps between the two.

"Yet despite all the innovations in the iPhone 4, without basic telephony service it’s just a piece of shit." Matt Honan succinctly sums up Apple's AT&T problem. The frustrating part is that it's potentially solvable by opening things up to other carriers.

"Building a great display for typography without building great typographic tools is a dereliction of duty." I've been noticing this too especially on the iPad's potentially gorgeous display. The app-makers, including Apple, just don't seem to care. [via jessamyn]

Zen medium format photos by Ryan Carver. Nice to see his photos outside of Flickr. [via mathowie]

Danny Sullivan on the unhappy relationship/different norms between blogs and the mainstream media. [via mneznanski]

This site uses open health and crime data to rank your county on the seven deadly sins. [via anil]

Love these long exposure night landscapes--uniquely Midwestern.

ColdFusion code to geocode locations with Google Maps.

And Google gets in on the Twitter Archive goodness. I'm glad Tweets are becoming less ephemeral.

The Library of Congress is going to archive every tweet. It'll be interesting to see how they make the archives available.

"Slate ad critic Seth Stevenson tries out a Google service that allows you to run your own commercial on national TV for as little as $100." (Neat. But Slate 5? Did I miss 2-4? har har.)

Jay Rosen's question/answer site that tries to wed unanswered questions with journalists. "The eventual plan is to recruit journalists, or partner with an existing news organization, to answer the ones that a.) interest the most people and b.) require reporting, investigation and explanation--in other words, real journalism."

What Jay Rosen will say at SXSW about desperately needed explanation of major stories in the news.

"We have all our story elements in place. It's all politics from here on. Bring in the sports and war metaphors and let automated processes carry the rest. Don't dig, just dine. The sausage-machine rocks on." A nice explanation of how journalism's stories need to change. [via mneznanski]

The history of Alfred E. Neuman (aka. Melvin Cowznofski). I always thought he originated with Mad Magazine.

These are fantastic. I love matchbox design.

Looking at MetaFilter as an example for magazines. "Can the content produced by readers be a part of a magazine? This is crucial question that a lot of media are asking."

"He is not giving a speech or a lecture - he is giving a performance. And like any good actor, he knows that you have to learn your lines."

Yes, please. [via middleclasstool]

"The goal is not to prevent them from making mistakes, but to allow them to. Risk assessment, trust development, value determination, responsibility, self-direction — all of these very important skills grow out of the opportunity to explore, to experiment, to make mistakes and correct them."

"I spoke with Haughey this week about how he grew Metafilter from a side project into a profitable venture. In our conversation, he stressed three main things: build the site you want to use, listen to the community, and stay small."

"Unicode 5.0 encodes exactly 98,884 graphic characters on different planes...we collect information on every single character."

Cartoon intro to Neil Postman's book.

Hacking architecture with John McClane.

Nice Inconsolata mod that straightens out the quotes. I use Inconsolata as my programming font, haven't noticed a quote problem, but I'll give this a shot.

"I think that it’s a real possibility that in 10 years, general purpose computers will be seen as being strictly for developers and hobbyists." Rafe has an important analysis of the iPad announcement. We're headed toward closed platforms.

He used the Processing environment to calculate the number of track layouts possible with a simple train set from Ikea. I'll have to try these! [via Daddy Types]

A peek behind the curtain at Facebook with an anonymous FB developer.

"...Brad's work was altogether more messy and funny and human and passionate and complicated, just like the man himself. I can offer no more succinct summation of the man than that he was a good man and a good friend, profoundly funny and profoundly kind." Anil shares some memories of Brad.

"...the hero is the most damaging person on a team, particularly on a team that’s supposed to be writing high-availability or otherwise mission-critical software." Interesting analysis of team dynamics. [via jessamyn]

"One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation." Amit Singhal on how Google ranks Tweets for real-time search.

Rules for PR folks who want to work with bloggers. "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE means FOR IMMEDIATE DELETE."

I had this reaction to Avatar too, glad to see io9 spend some time explaining this problem. Hadn't made the Dune connection, that's spot on. [via mathowie]

argh, burned by this on my personal mail server.

Regex snark traced back to Unix snark.