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Posted on 10.30.07 by Emily
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Posted on 10.30.07 by Emily
Reporting from New York Criminal Court, 100 Centre St, Jury Duty, Day 2. Wow, the wheels of justice move slowly. At least you can now enjoy wifi while you’re waiting to be called, so bring your laptop (Twitter, Facebook and Meebo blocked). But during voir dire, you are expected to pay attention even while you’re not being interviewed. Not continuous partial attention but laptops, iphones and sketchbooks away total attention. You may observe, meditate, be present, and check in with yourself. You can also suck on hard candies*. Lucky for you, Papabubble just opened a few blocks away [380 Broome St at Mulberry St, 212.966.2599]. This wondrous candy laboratory with outposts in Barcelona and Tokyo provides the ultimate in jury duty lozenges: fruit candies that look like Venetian millefiore glass, peppermint pebbles and addictive chocolate-filled coffee bites. They also handcraft giant lollies, gold-tipped finger rings and even anatomically correct hearts (which I would definitely not advise sucking on in the courtroom). If you’re feeling thrifty, note they also have bags of aesthetically inferior ’seconds’ that start at fifty cents. * Note you can, but you may not… I am not offering legal advice. Don’t follow me. At least be quiet about it.
Technorati Tags: candy, food, jury duty, nyc, restaurants, vegetarian
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Posted on 10.26.07 by Emily
![]() Mocha cream cake from Maira Kalman’s mother’s bakery on Johnson Avenue in Riverdale, NY (see p.246-247), served at a celebration for the release of The Principles of Uncertainty at the NYPL. Do you engage with pleasure, curiosity, fun and celebration (with time for naps) in the face of the tragedy of the day? Do you want to? This is the book for you. Maira Kalman’s delightful new release, The Principles of Uncertainty, turns out to be a heavy book. Mostly physically. Kalman says it’s because the book is extensively inked: “all the colors are in there.” Even if you’ve been following this year-long illustrated journal at the New York Times, the high-resolution images of her gouache paintings are undeniably gorgeous in print. (Even more so in person at the Julie Saul Gallery through November 24, 2007.) Aside from the inherent pleasures of the portable printed format, the book offers a few bonuses to those already familiar with the images:
Kalman celebrated the release of the book at the New York Public Library with a 37.5 minute conversation with Paul Holdengräber, followed with 3 songs composed by Nico Muhly, and cake instead of questions. Instead of questions from the audience, that is. All Maira’s works wrestle with the eternal existential dilemma: “We are here now, and we are not going to be here at a certain point, so what is that about?” and the natural corollary, “What would we do all day long, forever?” I don’t know what we’ll do forever, but I highly recommend checking out how Kalman observes the world, “making sense and then nonsense” out of it with grace, gratitude and joie de vivre, today.
Filed under: art and books and creativity and culture and design and emily approved and food and funny and happiness and love and music and nyc and people and product review and typography and women Comments: 1 Comment
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Posted on 10.26.07 by Emily
On every street in Buenos Aires, I fell in love with the handpainted signs and lettering. Delighted to discover these fonts below by Alejandro Paul that capture the Argentinian style and energy. Paul is one of the founders of Sudtipos project, the first Argentinian type foundry collective, whose site is filled with fonty goodness. Regarding the adorable pinguinos, I didn’t see any in Argentina, but here are some pictures of the pinguinos of Patagonia (Chile) and the Galapagos (Ecuador).
Filed under: advertising and animals and art and creativity and culture and design and emily approved and love and typography Comments: 1 Comment
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Posted on 10.26.07 by Emily
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Posted on 10.24.07 by Emily
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Posted on 10.22.07 by Emily
Adrian Bowyer demonstrating RepRap version 1.0 “Darwin” at Pop!Tech 2007. Photo by Medea Material, some rights reserved.Adrian Bowyer presented RepRap, an erector set that will change the world, as part of the “Innovation from the Bottom Up” panel at Pop!Tech 2007. This open source, self-replicating rapid-prototyping machine uses a biodegradable material, polylactic acid, made from fermenting starch. This means you can use local resources to make and supply it, then compost the articles when you’re finished to fertilize crops for future batches of material. This deeply subversive technology makes manufacturing more like agriculture and brings it to everyone. If widely adapted, it would lead to more great products but less need for factories, goods transport and fossil fuels. It might even make a dent in the entire concept of money. Version 1.0 “Darwin” can produce simple plastic products, but the next generation in development will be able to build electromechanical devices as well.
Technorati Tags: design, poptech2007, rapidprototyping, sustainability
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Posted on 10.22.07 by Emily
Stockport Emotion Map by Christian Nold, from presentation on “The Human Impact” at Pop!Tech 2007 conference.Christian Nold looks at cities… differently. Most people go around cities with their head down. 50% of people live in them, yet they are more a concept than anything else. Nold posits cities are a consensual hallucination. Historically, maps personified rivers and trees, and activities were embodied within the artful human-scale maps. How can we represent people again and all their human interactions? Nold has been exploring these ideas through biomapping, participatory sensory mapping, for the last 4 years. The first projects began with blindfolding people and having them explore their local area. The main thing they noticed was smells. Now he uses a biomapping device that measures physiological arousal, how are bodies react to the world. Chris Nold’s biomapping device consists of a Galvanic Skin response sensor/data logger and a commercial GPS unit. The data is then loaded into Google Earth.
Nold notes that young people he encounters often don’t value their own perceptions and stresses how important it is to see themselves on the map. It’s important to visualize that you matter and also that you make up part of a larger place. The map helps show conflict and situations where some of the aspects are difficult to see and even contradictory. People begin to recognize cities as personal stories of place, get stimulated by their own experiences and start talking about their own stories. It makes a compelling entry point for civic engagement. Personally, biomapping has made Nold more aware of his own behavior, life and level of association. He used to think of himself as an individual or mass, but now sees himself as a member of groups and small societies and sees social change happening most effectively at that level of organization. The next day, Jonathan Harris presented his exploration of human emotions on the Web, We Feel Fine, that also tracks location data. I’d love to see a dynamic emotional map generated by a Google Earth mashup with the We Feel Fine data. I wonder if Nold has tried biomapping any other urban species? What does Paris really look like to the rats? I have often imagined Cosmo’s canine map of NYC’s West Village. No electronic device is required to map his arousal level; it spikes at every venue that has ever dispensed treats, along with pet food stores, farmers markets, veterinarians, dog-friendly cafes, parks and patches of grass.
Technorati Tags: activism, art, design, information visualization, maine, photography, poptech2007
Filed under: activism and art and better world and creativity and culture and design and emily approved and environment and happiness and health and interconnected and science and technology and travel and webstuff Comments: 1 Comment
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Posted on 10.21.07 by Emily
Recommended musical accompaniment: Deep Water (iTunes) by Seal Claire Nouvian sailing in Penobscot Bay for a session on “Oceans in Balance” at Pop!Tech, off the coast of Maine. (More photos from Pop!Tech 2007)Claire Nouvian, a documentary filmmaker, thinks really deep thoughts about the ocean and its inhabitants. She’s especially concerned about how we relate to ecosystems that are far removed from our own. Even though oceans represent about 99% of the planet, they have only been looked at in detail since the 1950’s, and we’ve only sampled about 0.5% of the surface. The ocean remains the last frontier.
Because the deep sea is remote both horizontally — you have to go over the continental shelf before you go down to the depths — and vertically, it is literally out of sight and out of mind. Alas, it is not out of harms way. Creatures we haven’t even discovered yet are under threat from deep sea mining, deep sea dumping, co2 sequestration, ocean acidification, methane & oil exploitation and bottom trawling. Why should we care? Sure there are boundless medicinal and biotech discoveries to be made, but aesthetics alone are reason enough for Nouvian. And they are breathtaking. Tim Burton, HR Giger and George Lucas have nothing on nature. On the very first look through her magnificent book, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss, I fell completely in love. As it turns out, the deep sea is where the creatures from our wildest dreams live. But seduction always has a price… once you fall in love, you’ll want to protect them. And Nouvian argues there’s no just reason not to do so: deep sea trawling provides only 5% of the worldwide catch and only 300 or 400 ships engage in the $400 million per year industry. Nouvian argued that we are “destroying a unique, unassessed planetary heritage at unprecedented speed and scale in an irreversible manner for no reason but the increased profit of a handful of people.” Nouvian recommends checking out SeaAroundUs.org, SaveTheHighSeas.org (the website of the Deep Sea Coalition), eating less fish and using seafood watch cards, and her new organization: the Bloom Association which aims to link people with the deep sea, rousing emotions through beauty.
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Posted on 10.20.07 by Emily
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Collage of 
Adrian Bowyer demonstrating RepRap version 1.0 “Darwin” at Pop!Tech 2007. Photo by 

Claire Nouvian sailing in Penobscot Bay for a session on “Oceans in Balance” at 


