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Creative lives are just inputs and outputs. You listen, watch, read, experience – that’s the inputs. Then you write, record, shape, create – that’s the outputs. The problem of course is that there are gazillions – we might as well call it infinite amounts – of inputs: endless blogs to be perused, films to be watched, books to be read and techniques to be admired. And the outputs? Sometimes they …

Super Logo Design, edited by Taki Ono, is a two-volume set of paperbacks published in 2001 and 2002 by Graphic-sha in Japan. These spreads are from volume two, available to digitally borrow on archive.org. It gives an interesting look at video game logos (among others) designed in the 1990s and early 2000s, listing the designer, client, year of creation, and software used (mostly Illustrator and Photoshop, but also Strata Studio …

Idea to be interrogated: Selective ignorance might actually save your life. It is OK to care less. What matters most is to attend the things you can control/change/affect. The more you try to control the more miserable you become. What can I control? I can control me and me only. Which, OK yes, sure but: really think about that. Do I care enough about myself to actually focus my attention …

Ten Years of AWS Lambda Everything starts somewhere. Today, Werner Vogels shared his annotated version of the original AWS Lambda PRFAQ. This is a great inside look into how product development happens at AWS - the real working backwards process in action. This was, in some ways, the start of serverless computing2. Tim Wagner, Ajay Nair, and others really saw the future when they wrote this PRFAQ3. I wanted to …

Over the last several years in the activist and community circles I've been in, people have talked occasionally about getting licensed as amateur or "HAM" radio operators so we would have an alternate means of connecting to one another in an emergency situation when cell or internet networks may not be available. This summer I did some research on what is actually required to do that. I started studying for …

Saw a man talking on the phone while using a urinal today. Junk in one hand, phone in the other. I don’t want to judge (out loud) but, what the actual fuck

Proteins are a distinct state of matter. Globular proteins are tightly packed with a density comparable to a crystal but without the spatial regularity found in crystals. The native state is thermodynamically stable, in contrast to the globule state of synthetic polymers which is often glassy and metastable, with a structure that depends on the preparation history.For a given amino acid sequence the native folded state of the protein is …

All bicyclists ride bikes. But not all bike riders are bicyclists. I'm a bicycle enthusiast: someone who spends enough time riding and repairing bikes to know a thing or two about them. But I'm not a bicyclist, because I don't race my bike, or care about power meters or pacing or compete in events. I wrote this article to help non-bicyclists better understand bikes: which to buy, what features truly …

I should take my own advice. I tell people to be careful to look for the tiniest checks in the end grain of a log because they will open up as the bowl dries. If a log section has been … Continue reading →

For BC6H encoding in Oodle Texture, we needed a sensible error metric to use in the encoder core. BC6H is HDR which is more challenging than LDR data since we need to handle vast differences in magnitude. BC6H internally essentially treats the float16 bits as 16-bit integers (which is a semi-logarithmic mapping) and works with those integers throughout. It’s a bit more complicated than just grabbing the float bits, but …

Artist Keith A. Pettit, interviewed in Handprinted:About 20 years ago, I shifted my focus from sign making and graphic design, to an art-led living. I range from tiny wood engravings, lino reductions, and sculptures; usually using wood to create — from the reasonably small to the stupidly enormous. Sometimes they’re also on fire.I like the phrase “art-led living.” We’d all do well to live like that.

The North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) 2024 conference in Tacoma, WA was yet another fantastic gathering of cartographers, mappers, and map enthusiasts. Stamen was well-represented this year by Kelsey Taylor, Eric Brelsford, and Alan McConchie. This was a busy year for us – we presented five talks between the three of us! Now that the dust has settled, we wanted to share some of the highlights from our time …

Old Fort Niagara has a free zoom lecture for this on the 21 November. Check the webpage. In Defending Fort Stanwix, William L. Kidder tells the dramatic story of "the fort that never surrendered" and the crucial role it played in the American War for Independence. After a series of military defeats over the winter of 1776–1777, British military leaders developed a bold plan to gain control of the Hudson …

Being the party of normality has its appeal, but it reinforces precisely the wrong instinct. The polycrisis that is unfolding demands not a return to the status quo but urgent, progressive answers both at home and abroad. To formulate and articulate those, the Democrats need politicians, not algorithms. They need personalities capable of responding to the profound questions facing contemporary America.

Dear Zettlers, During a coaching session, I talked about a specific incarnation of the Collector’s Fallacy: Buying books and never reading them. My client correctly identified part of the cause for his behavior: He is using a Kindle to read. There, it is super easy to buy a book. So, when he sees a book that seems interesting, he buys it straight away. Part of the cause of this behavior …