While I earlier made fun of the The Five Friendlies, the official mascots of the Beijing Olympics, I really like the pictograms they have chosen to represent each of the sports. Found via the increasingly prolific Pinyin News (this summer has been chock full of great posts), here are the pictograms, along with the ancient [...]
One thing I’ve learned about the British: they love to tell you alternative routes. If you ask how to get from point A to point B, don’t expect to just be told the shortest, quickest, route as a New Yorker might tell you. No, the British will tell you a half a dozen possibilities. My [...]
According to Crooked Timber, this powerpoint slide is Rumsefeld’s plan for ending the war in Iraq: Maybe we should put Edward Tufte in charge of the war? {rumsfeld, tufte, war on terror}
I stitched together a 360° view of the valley as seen from the National Dong Hwa University campus. If you have QuickTime installed you can explore the image in QTVR as well. {dong hwa, hualian, taiwan, 台灣, 東華大學, 花蓮}
This wonderful diagram, made in 1936 by Alfred Barr, appears in Edward Tufte’s new book, Beautiful Evidence. Banksean made a wonderful interactive version on his web site. Read more on Banksean’s blog. Some illustrations from the book can be found on Tufte’s web site. {art, cubism, Tufte}
Years ago I read a paper* about politics and architecture in Taipei which pointed out (among other things) the ways in which architecture and writing play out in the urban landscape. Mark at Pinyin News has used Google Earth to show exactly how these buildings look from the sky. (Which is the only way to [...]
A lot has been written about Las Meninas by Velazquez, most notably Foucault in The Order of Things, and later Searle’s response in “Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation.” It has also been copied and emulated by numerous painters, such as Picasso. So I was surprised to learn recently that the painting originally [...]
I finally got my camera from the states, but I’ve been enjoying taking pictures with the crappy camera on my cell phone. In some of the pictures I’ve taken of the local scenery I feel the muddy colors and low resolution add to the mood rather than detract from it. Click here to see a [...]
When I think of life in New York City, I think of the train I used to take every day. The train we heard in the distance from our bedroom window … the 7 train. You can see people reading newspapers in almost every language in the world on the 7 train. The 7 train, [...]
About a year ago I blogged about coming across an online exhibit including photos of an old friend of mine, Thorne Anderson, who I hadn’t seen in a while. Unlike a lot of other reporters, they aren’t embedded – but take risks to show us the human side of war – and of Iraq. That [...]