Friday morning while I was getting ready to move my bike out for the ride to work, I heard on the radio that there are two men in a boat coming in under the Golden Gate Bridge… from Japan! My first thought was – “Well, that makes my commute look insignificant!” and the second thought [...]
This picture is already two years old, but I just recently found that page and thought I share… Here we have a photo taken of all of us by the HiRISE camera on board of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – at the time Mars was about 142 million kilometers from Earth, which is comparatively close [...]
Every now and then it is worth to sit back and remember what a beautiful planet we are living on. This photo was taken at the end of July by a new weather satellite, GOES14, in a geostationary orbit at a distance of 36000 kilometers. You have to click through to see the breathtaking large [...]
Every now and then the Internet reveals something amazing about us and the rainbow of cultures we represent on this planet… Kazumi just now called me over to her computer to look at the video below, and – wow! – that is definitely one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in a very long [...]
While walking through Chinatown a couple of days ago, I had this intense flashback – suddenly I was back in Shanghai… in May 1989. Memories just came flooding back, the smells, the sounds… the view along the Bund through the hazy air, heavy with thick smoke from the ships. There were the banners, held high. [...]
Thanks to MapSkip it’s not really much of a secret anymore that I am permanently fascinated by maps. I always loved to look at maps, trace routes across them, read the foreign-sounding place names… As a young boy I spent many hours traveling across the beautiful, large maps in my parent’s world atlas, imagining myself [...]
Here’s a fun little quiz: Name all the countries in the world in ten minutes! There’s 192 countries that are currently officially recognized, and this little quiz almost drove me crazy. I thought that I would easily be able to spell out half the countries in ten minutes, but I had 127 countries left at [...]
The always-excellent PingMag has an article about Iranian Typography that is quite informative and fascinating. Arabian writing has always fascinated me, especially when it is being used as part of a graphical design treatment. This article has several beautiful examples where the Arabian script is part of the design to the point where graphics and [...]
While I do not always agree with Jim Kunstler, he writes with a steady, intense passion about what our future without oil will be like. He abhors the suburbanized, mall-ified modern cities that have sprung up all over the United States with their dependence on cars and cheap oil and I fully agree with him [...]
Four hurricanes in one month hitting the east coast… the first hurricane ever hitting Brazil…. the worst Typhoon season ever in east Asia… the hottest summers ever in Europe… glaciers all over the world are disappearing… This, my friends, is what they call Global Warming. You don’t need scientists to crunch the numbers while they [...]