Michel de Broin is a Montreal/Berlin-based sculptor who made the Death Dead Star. Currently on exhibit at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York, this piece is a nice way of recharging the life of wasted batteries, eh?

[Via Gizmodo]

What a race the Singapore Grand Prix turned out to be last night! Bright lights, super glossy cars, loud screaming noises, frightening crashes, pit lane disasters — just awesome! Despite Fernando Alonso winning the first ever night race, Lewis Hamilton benefited the most among all the front runners for the title with Felipe Massa suffering a horror pit stop.

I’m already looking forward to next year!

The music is pretty nice, too…

It’s not based on any particular data point… We just wanted to choose a really large number.

›› A Treasury spokeswoman confides in Forbes.com

[Via Gizmodo]

Radiohead. “Reckoner”. Remix.

The Quad is a fantastic, modular shelving system which can store many different-sized objects and looks wicked too. The great part is you can actually stack them to create a bigger unit. The not-so-great part (for boys and girls on a budget like me) is that it costs US$2,000 a pop.

You may have seen that awesome Beatles t-shirt from Experimental Jetset a couple of years ago.

If you liked that but your musical persuasion happens to be more rap than rock, this Wu Tang Clan t-shirt would be right up your alley.

The Design Observer asked ‘what would you do with the domain name designersforobama.org’ and Aaron Perry-Zucker answered with a Threadless-style Obama poster/visual communications site.

Just to clear things up, there’s only one girl in the band Brazilian Girls and none of the band members are Brazilian. Their third album, New York City, is a continuation and refinement of their music style which can be described as an almost freestyle world music, down-tempo, electro-funk, techno-dub mishmash with jazz undertones. The schizophrenic nature of their music is definitely helped by the very delicious lead singer, Sabina Sciubba’s fluency in German, Spanish, French, Italian and English. It’s a good album with a high interestingness factor, although it sometimes feels like they are contriving to sound kooky in the name being experimental.

A training bike from Ferrari … sounds wimpy, doesn’t it? Even a nicely built soapbox car would have been cooler. Anyway, this is the closest Ferrari will ever come to having a green vehicle.

No better illustration exists of a culture where private gain has eclipsed the public good, public service, even public decency, and where the cult of the individual has caused the commonwealth to wither… That’s the culture we’ve lived with. It’s over now. Some new American beginning is needed.

›› Roger Cohen from the IHT lambasting the financial sector

Given his age, John McCain is more likely to have invented the Phonograph or something.

[Via grain edit]

That was fucking funny. Seems the assholes even won a fucking Emmy award.

Helvetica looked at Arial and remarked, “You’re ugly”.
Arial replied “Well, Aksidenz do happen”

What type of diabetes is a graphic designer most likely to get diagnosed with?
Type 1 →

A typographer’s favorite hotel in Las Vegas/casino in Singapore?
The Sans →

A font walks into a bar. The bartender says “Hey, we don’t serve your type here” and he called the Serif.

What typeface do fish fear most?
Gill Sans

Favourite Bob Marley song
“I Shot The Serif”

Favourite Madonna song
“Justify My Love”

Why did the graphic designer go see the psychic?
He wanted to see what was in his Futura.

Arial looked at Helvetica and remarked, “You’re ugly”.
Helvetica replied “Well, you’re no Ms Univers yourself!”

The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Any fame is a by-product of making something that means something. You don’t go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.

›› That’s Banksy trying to say something

A very interesting and enthusiastic talk from Brian “Rock Star” Cox, though you I he had gone more in-depth on some the things he talked about. But, on a completely different tangent, reading some of the comments made me remember, rather sadly, that not everyone can reconcile religion with science.

I love seeing retro ads but I didn’t know there is an entire cottage industry that sells vintage magazine advertisements. I guess real riches are truly in the niches…

If you have never heard of Mother Love Bone before, here are three main things that summarise their short history.

Fact 1:
They were one of the pioneer bands of the Seattle grunge scene of the late 80s/early 90s.

Fact 2:
Their exuberant lead singer Andrew Wood died of a drug overdose at the age of 24 right before the band was due to release their debut album in 1990.

Fact 3:
The band’s bassist, Jeff Ament, and lead guitarist, Stone Gossard, went on to found Pearl Jam and went on to achieve critical and commercial success.

Most of what remains of Mother Love Bone is the 1992 compilation album, Stardog Champion. The world will never know what they might have achieved, but the sad story of Mister Faded Glory is all that we are left with.

Oh, you should also check out the webcam feeds from the LHC.

This is just too damn funny — Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie have to be the two most funniest guys on TV for me right now.

Before the days of calculators and computers, Nomograms (or Nomographs) were often used to approximately calculate values of a function. There are specific nomographs for specific applications and all of them will only give approximate answers (since accuracy is dependent on the precision of the drawing itself). Invented by French mathematicians Massau and M. P. Ocagne in 1889, the precision, geometry and symmetry involved in the graphics of Nomography can produce some beautiful ‘visualizations’ like the Smith Chart above.

Recycling materials is a great idea, but recycling newspapers into bags while keeping the newsprint intact is quite brilliant! If you are waiting for someone or something and you have this bag with you, you know you will definitely have something to read.

If you’re a fan of Family Guy, you’ll bloody love the Seth McFarlane’s YouTube channel Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy. Despite the big name commercial sponsor (yeah, I am suspicious and cynical like that), the Cavalcade seems a promising and funny web series.

Evgeny Parfenov is a freelance Russian illustrator who has a wide variety of styles in his toolbox. My personal favourites are the very strongly geometric, almost dystopian/propaganda style portraits that he seems to do quite regularly.

I’m happy the guillotine does no longer exist, otherwise some of you would have been delighted to send me there… I didn’t kill anybody. Maybe if I had, I would have benefited from mitigating circumstances.

›› French coach Raymond Domenech to the press

You could describe Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient album Music For Airports a masterpiece or a classic. You could lavish it as being seminal or quintessential. You could also say it was groundbreaking and extremely accessible. It is a lot of things, but you just shouldn’t spend too much time trying to describe it. You just have to listen to it, hear it and feel it for yourself.

Type this into the address bar of your freshly installed beta version of Google Chrome.

:%

‘Whoa’, but hey, it is beta software.

[Via atc]

Almost every year, Nike comes up with new designs and technology that help runners run faster, more comfortably and with less injury. Now, they have a runner’s belt which Batman would have been proud of — the Nike Running Hydration Pack is a great lightweight utility belt for really long distance runners. The adjustable belt comes with three six-ounce (about 175 millilitres) water bottles, a multi-purpose pouch (that can just about fit an iPod classic) and a small zipper compartment to store your utilities.

Sleevefacing is defined as ‘one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion’. I saw some of these a few months ago but completely forgot about it, but on the interwebs, nothing remains forgotten for too long.

Now, that is old school!

Looks like the browser wars are upon us again. With the introduction of Google’s Chrome browser to the party, I cannot wait to see how the loyalty of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera users will be tested (and I include myself in there). The IHT has a good write-up on how Google doesn’t actually have to win this browser war to cause Microsoft to wobble.

And yeah, I am convinced Chrome is going to be the killer app for Android. In fact, since it’s WebKit powered, it could be ported to the iPhone someday, somehow.

I became the proud owner of a 3rd generation video-enabled iPod Nano last week. While researching armbands for bringing my Nano along for runs, I found a good variety of armbands on the Apple Store but surprisingly, the Griffin Streamline is not listed there. It’s a utilitarian armband that is comfortably adjustable and (very importantly) easily washable. You can get three for US$40 from the Griffin online store, or just one from Amazon for about US$16.

Can you really explain to a fish what it’s like to walk on land? One day on land is worth a thousand years of talking about it, and one day running a business has exactly the same kind of value.

›› Warren Buffet