LifeClever compiled 17 interviews with David Allen.

I'm pretty much fascinated with the Whitney Music Box, which explores some of the ideas in John Whitney's 1959 book Digital Harmony. I like the microtonal variation, and the sine wave harmonics are cool because harmonics are inherently cool. Jim Bumgardner wrote more about this project and some of the mathematics of the patterns in his blog.

"The Cinema Redux project explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time. The end result is a kind of unique fingerprint for that film. A sort of movie DNA showing the colour hues as well as the rhythm of the editing process."

The political cartoons of Dr. Seuss, who created around 400 editorial cartoons during the first part of World War II. See also the book Dr. Seuss Goes to War, which shows about half the collection.

Wow, 101 versions of "Stairway to Heaven".

A collection of old comic-strip style advertising.

The Open Architecture Network is an online, open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design. [via awln]

There are a couple little perks that made me like this book right off the bat. The Surrogates is set in Atlanta. It was written by a local named Robert Venditti, and it's published in nearby Marietta over at Top Shelf Productions. Cool. AND it's a really cool story. I haven't seen a lot of sci-fi comics, but this one makes up for the absence. The Surrogates is set about 50 years from now. Technology has advanced such that humans can stay home safe and sound, while remotely controlling their electronic replacements, their surrogates, to take care of work... and play. Some folks don't like it. So there's some terrorism, some politics, and a good bit of gumshoe detective work. Luckily, Venditti's writing doesn't dwell too much on the heavyhanded dystopian riff, and the best meditative moments come out naturally in the characters' conversations and interactions. Mixed between the chapters are Watchmen-like interludes, "primary documents" that help to flesh out the story, including sales brochures, editorials, news articles, and television transcripts.

I love Brett Weldele's artwork in this book. Besides the sensitive work the the lettering, speech bubbles, and very spare sound effects, the coloring is especially good. It reminded me a bit of Dean Motter's book, Batman: Nine Lives, with its restrained palette. One great set of panels show a crime scene inside a major industry lab. The lights have been tampered with, so the lab is drawn in a wash of a dark blue and grey, except for flashlight glare as the investigation goes on. A couple dozen panels later, the lights have gotten fixed, and the wash turns to a warm yellow. It's a simple, but very cool effect. I read it all the way through the first time I started it. I predict that will happen again and again.

A fascinating story of pranking the 2007 Super Bowl half-time show. Sometimes security really is only theater. Hilarious and frightening.

I like this collection of photographs called Wee Planets. Each photo is a panorama stitched and warped in a way that makes the scene look like a little globe floating in the void. Some of my favorites are the Eiffel planet, glass building planet, Louvre planet, and the Luxor obelisk planet. [via dooce]

Last October in London the Detour Exhibition was held to showcase how creatives use their Moleskine notebooks. There's more than 70 videos flipping through the work of illustrators, designers, architects, writers, and other Moleskine afficionados.

There's a fairly good profile of Edward Tufte in the current Stanford Magazine.

Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void wrote a manifesto on creativity over at ChangeThis.

Twittervision lets me act like Big Brother, and other people do all the work. I just absorb the data.

An essay on student expenses in graphic design schools.

A nice little writing kick-in-the-pants in the form of twenty basic plots: quest, adventure, pursuit, rescue, escape, etc.

From an excellent New Yorker article on the history of dueling:

Whatever else “honor” may be, it is the knowledge that every impertinence carries with it the seed of a greater, more fundamental insult: the suggestion that a person can get away with it---which is, after all, where humiliation really begins. Somewhere in our molecular makeup a sword-bearing protein squalls to have its day. But that doesn’t mean we have to listen... Ultimately, the duel was sustained not by a failure of communication but by a failure of imagination.

A Tom Swifty is a kind of wordplay that plays a pun on the content of the quoted sentence. They're delightfully awful. E.g."'You have the right to remain silent,' said Tom arrestingly." They came originally from the Tom Swift series of books, whose writers tried to avoid repetition of the word "said" without any decoration, so they kept looking for adverbial additions. Here are a couple lists of Tom Swifties and an essay in appreciation of the books.

The California Milk Processor Board collects the top 100 rip-offs of their "Got Milk?" advertising campaign.

Reading Ben Yagoda's latest book is like having a good friend analyze every word that comes out of your mouth. But it's not a book about Grammar Rules and Policies. I was relieved to find this sentence in the first dozen pages: "Ultimately, the issue of correctness just isn't very interesting." When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech for Better and/or Worse is more of a progress report on our English language. Each chapter covers a part of speech: Adjective, Adverb, Article, Conjunction, Interjection, Noun, Preposition, Pronoun, Verb. Yagoda spends an enjoyable 30 pages on just a, an, and the. I think of it as sort of reverse dissection, where the language becomes more alive as you pick at it.

Yagoda is not a real stickler for rules, per se, but certainly has a strong sense of taste. More than that, he shows a real appreciation for how we actually use our words. He pulls from a number of resources: famous authors, The New Yorker (particularly the Harold Ross era), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Bible, sports television, a variety of dictionaries & style guides both old and new, popular music, advertising, film, etc. I love the variety of research material. One chapter begins, "Any unified theory of interjections---the words that, all by themselves, express reactions or emotions or serve other purposes in discourse---would have to start, like much else, with The Simpsons."

Some miscellaneous trivia I enjoyed:

• The "&" symbol comes from the ligature of letters e and t in the Latin word "et" ("and"). That's not a huge surprise. But as recently as the 1800s, & was also the 27th letter of the alphabet!

When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words "and, per se [i.e., by itself], 'and'." This eventually became corrupted to "ampersand."

• The TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer coined at least 55 -age words, such as "agreeage, kissage, and weirdage." Who knew there was one source for all that appendagage?
• Quoting some good advice from C.S. Lewis: "Keep a strict eye on eulogistic & dyslogistic adjectives---they should diagnose (not merely blame) & distinguish (not merely praise)."
• The word ye comes from a misprinting of the word ?æe. The þ character is called thorn, and used for th sounds. Back in the day, when printers typically didn't always have the sorts for every symbol, "it was usually replaced by putting the letters t and h together, but sometimes y was used because it was felt to look similar."

Great book. I've really had fantastic luck with my recent readings.