A cool slide show on the evolution of writing. I'm partial to the early Roman and later Italian letters. Mature Gothic looks cool en masse... but I can't read it.

Lovely photos at Flickr tagged with "GuyFawkesNight". Oooooo. Aaaahhh.

Wikipedia reveals other reasons to celebrate (and/or mourn) November 5. Today is Guy Fawkes Day. This is the 401st anniversary of Fawkes' involvement in the Gunpowder Plot to assassinate King James I. A couple generations later, this date also marked the beginning of the Glorious Revolution that eventually toppled James II. Another little bit of rebellion came in 1872, when Susan B. Anthony did a little bit of civil disobedience by daring to cast a vote. (A woman! Gasp!)

Monopoly first hit the shelves during the heart of the Depression, and I Love Lucy debuted on November 5, 1951. In 1979, the United States was declared to be the Great Satan. And Saddam Hussein was just sentenced to death.

The New York Times and the BBC both have "On This Day" features.

Spencer Tunick will be giving a talk at SCAD-Atlanta on Tuesday night. Tunick is known for large-scale photography using masses of volunteer nude models. You might even like to sign up to be a participant.

Nelson Minar has has gathered up a number of cool links for Parisian street art. Go check them out.

Phew. I'm glad to see this message again. I had done some tweaking in the background and made a grand mess of things. I swear, sometimes this stuff makes me feel like an ape in a chem lab. But I'm learning.

Scott McCloud's latest is all about story-telling secrets and how to shape your own vision for comics. It mimics the style of his earlier book, Understanding Comics, using the form to explain itself, and expands a bit more on the theories he presented there. I think it's wonderful to see how much more mature McCloud's own work is in this book. The art is better; the layouts are cleaner and more interesting. The visuals are all just more inventive and lively. I was glad that McCloud seemed to stretch himself and take the opportunity to demonstrate his competence by illustrating in a lot of different styles--you can tell that he really put a lot of work into these panels. All that effort pays off, especially in the chapters devoted to backgrounds and to facial expressions.

One of my complaints about UC was that he didn't give enough examples--but Making Comics absolutely makes up for that. To boot, there's an excellent bibliography, and every chapter has some supplementary wrap-up content. Each chapter ends with a couple pages of footnotes, commentary, and also exercises to help you flex your comics skillz. Very impressive, and a lot of fun to read.

TEDTalks are weekly presentations by "trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses." Among the talks already posted are those from Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Tony Robbins, Eve Ensler, and many more... [via nb]

You probably have a certain special someone in your life that just looooooves to forward crap to your e-mail account. Let them know that FWDitOn is a Digg-like service where all those forwarded e-mails can go to be truly appreciated.

Some interesting thoughts on blog readability. Paul Bausch crunched the readability of the most popular blogs using the Gunning and Flesch-Kincaid measures: "My prediction that the most popular blogs would have very good readability scores didn't quite hold up. I can't pinpoint a "sweet spot", but maybe blog readers enjoy more densely layered text. (Think Time instead of Newsweek, but not quite Harvard Law Review.)" A text file of the results is available for your perusal.

Game mechanics are rule based systems / simulations that facilitate and encourage a user to explore and learn the properties of their possibility space through the use of feedback mechanisms.

A time lapse (music) video of a drive from Los Angeles to New York. I'd prefer a full, uncut version, but it's still really cool. [via digg]

Apple is sponsoring the Insomnia Film Festival for students. The goal is a 3-minute film in 24 hours. I always had a good time with the very similar Campus MovieFest, which operates on the 5-minute, 7-day rule. Factor in some healthy procrastination, and the two festivals are about even. Most CMF movies didn't really get serious until the last 40 hours or so anyway. Might as well be realistic about it.

National security employees have been using a wiki to share and update information. I think it's notable that that they describe it as not just a pure issue of organizational communication, it also involves generational work trends. There's a need to pass along old wisdom and adjust to the competencies of a younger workforce:

Not all U.S. intelligence analysts have embraced the new tool, but many younger analysts have, said Michael Wertheimer, DNI's deputy director of analysis and chief technology officer. Half of all U.S. intelligence analysts have one to five years of experience, he noted. "This is how they do their work," he said. "This is how they like to work."

The Americans with Disabilities Act could apply to access to websites. Uh-oh. As if net neutrality and copyrights weren't enough to worry about. [via findability]

If only everyone knew about research beyond Google. I love the Google but it ain't always the easiest. One bright and shining day we won't need to know all these hundreds of unique resources. In the meanwhile, Peter Morville suggests some intrepid soul create a Google Custom Search.

The Worldchanging book was released today. After a bit of nicely coordinated purchase-bombing, the Amazon rank bumped up to #14.

A documentary on one of the greatest games ever: Tetris. [via jb]

This platitude is the new dead metaphor. Kottke revives and collects some previous research into one of the latest language fads, where X is the new Y. I think I'm officially over this phrase.

I love the jacket design Small is the New Big. Really, how could you not pick it up? And luckily, the contents of Seth Godin's collection don't disappoint too much. This is one of those books I like to call "toilet books"--a collection of short, snappy sparks to get you thinking about how to be better. Sort of a daily devotional for marketing and entrepreneurial nerds. It's hard to summarize because he zips (or is that zooms?) from topic to topic, but you'll find that Godin is obsessed with: freebies, lagniappe, surprises; JetBlue; change; agility; remarkableness; customer advocacy; etc. And he's similarly frustrated with: protocol, American Airlines, stagnation, old-school advertising, risk aversion. Worship is reserved for the relentlessly focused who are doing special work on their own terms. Cool. It's a nice little anthology, Godin has some great ideas and thought experiments, and I had some truly 'eureka' moments. But is it remarkable? It's worth a glance or two.