Dupond & Dupont

feltron:

Saw this series at the Venice Biennale years and years ago… still thinking about them.

bbbbird:

Roman Opałka was a French-born Polish painter who painted numbers. In 1965 he began painting a process of counting – from one to infinity. Starting in the top left-hand corner of the canvas and finishing in the bottom right-hand corner, the tiny numbers were painted in horizontal rows. As of July 2004, he had reached 5.5 million. (via triangulation)

20 Things Learned

Google created a resume of the 20 things “they” learned about browsers.

It’s kind of fun to browse through it and check the illustrations created by Christoph Niemann

All this Data

Did you ever think about the amount of data we are creating and assembling in digital age?

The Economist did it in an interesting report

Analyse Twitter

a different view on twitter accounts tweetpivot

Time Zones

Are you also experiencing this? Setting up a meeting didn’t work as you forgot to check his or her time zone?

Some tools to help out:

Current Time Around the World - a quick overview of the time zones via a map that lays out every region. It’ll also show the zones considering daylight saving time.

Time Zones - takes your time and shows you the related time zones

World Clock - helps you figure out meeting time

found via Mashable :)

Design Principles

Photo Credit: Michael Maggs

As a member of the A-List Blogging Club I get the opportunity to discover numerous blogs and see their evolution. It’s a great way to open the mind to tons of information and fun things.

One of the nice blogs I discovered is Positively Beauty written by Cristina Colli. She has been doing a great job so far to build up a good looking blog as well as great content. Amongst this you’ll find her series on Design Basics which addresses the principles of interior design as well as design elements.

The principles of interior design:

The principles of interior design are guidelines to the various ways you can arrange design elements and they can help you create the house of your dreams.

Design Elements:

Presentation Skills: Gates vs Jobs

great presentations seem to be so easy to do - and well it’s the secret - the easier they seem to be the better they usually are. The only drawback it’s much more work and training to do, but creating a successful communication is the reason you do the presentation. Aim at being successful.

But how do we achieve that?

Garr Reynolds has a good overview on the evolution of the presentations given by Bill Gates. It is quite a good learning experience to watch and compare.

Go ahead and watch them.

Visualising the Web

BBC News has an interesting collection of data to visualise the web.

The visualisation of the top 100 sites by country is something in between shocking (there is one country dominating the graph) and funny (a really small country, where I happen to live, shows up in it).

To see more of it head over to SuperPower: Visualising the internet

Neutrality or Equality

The discussion about net neutrality has been ongoing for quite some time and is quite active again.

The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) has ongoing discussion with ISPs over it, probably one of the reasons why Google and Verizon came out with a proposal distinguishing between wireless and wired internet access.

Just wondering if Google had already planed it like that in 2006 but back then wireless hadn’t taken off like it has now.

Interestingly the discussion isn’t as active in all countries, even in Germany the state leaves the discussion up to the telecommunication companies.This leads me to the question as to how we can handle global questions, until now I don’t see any institution capable to establish rules accepted and (if needed) enforced all over the world and yet we have the internet which could give equal chances to its users all over the world.

The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy. It is the basis of democracy, by which a community should decide what to do. It is the basis of science, by which humankind should decide what is true. Let us protect the neutrality of the net.

Tim Berners-Lee

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Map the World

Maps have always been intriguing to me, at least in the sense that they raise my curiosity and are fun to study. A map of a country for example will let you think of everything that country represents, you’ll figure out how it is structured, some details of its history, where to go to and maybe you’ll be reminded of the places you’ll already went to.

A map thus also is simply a collection of data or a way to represent it. Thanks to Geek in Disguise I discovered this fabulous example of digital map showing how digital data can be organized as a map.

Being a big fan of old maps, I also loved this documentary on medieval maps. It also describes The Hereford World Map (Mappa Mundi). That they also look like a mind map is due to the fact, that mappa mundi were schematic and were meant to illustrate different principles.