Jason Padgett

"Jason D. Padgett is a number theorist with Acquired Savant Syndrome from Anchorage Alaska, currently living in Tacoma Washington."

Real ‘Beautiful Mind’: College Dropout Became Mathematical Genius After Mugging

Images from: http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/jason-padgett.html

BBC - The Perfect Suit

I bought my first suit the other day. All of a sudden I'm looking at the GQ website to see if I bought the right fit and all that nonsense. Here's a BBC documentary on suits that delves into the history of the suit and how it forms the male identity. And stuff.

Picture of the day

For some reason I was really into lava the other day. Via http://hawaiianlavadaily.blogspot.ca/

Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951, but cells taken from her tumour have lived on to the present day as the HeLa immortal cell line. The mutated cancerous cells can divide an unlimited number of times. Of course, normal cells don't do that, which is why we age and die, and also why we aren't all dead from cancer. Fascinating and deeply ironic at the same time, no?

"HeLa cells have an active version of telomerase during cell division,[21] which prevents the incremental shortening of telomeres that is implicated in aging and eventual cell death. In this way the cells circumvent the Hayflick Limit, which is the limited number of cell divisions that most normal cells can later undergo before becoming senescent." (Senescence being aging)

Apparently about 20 tons of Henrietta's cancer cells have been grown to be used in the testing of various things.

More dazzle camouflage

This is new to me, but it seems like dazzle patterns have been making a comeback recently over the past couple years. Check out some of these modern dazzle camouflage inspired items and art:

Installations by Tobias Rehberger:

Art by Håvard Pedersen:

Billionaire Dakis Joannou's yacht, the "Guilty", designed by Jeff Koons:

uhurudesign's War Craft coffee table:

Alexander McQueen Fall 09:

Silent Disco by architect Barbara Bestor (image-Joshua White):

London Underground x maharishi x Hardy Blechman’s DPM umbrella:

Photopic Sky Survey

You might have noticed a few unusually bright points in the sky recently, and that's because right now there are actually 5 planets visible in the night sky right now; Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Which brings us to the Photopic Sky Survey, "a 5,000 megapixel photograph of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 exposures." Imagine that Earth disappeared and you're floating in space in Earth's position. The survey is a spherical image that allows you to look in any direction. Up, down, left, right, towards the galaxy or off into deep space. You can even zoom in to see distant galaxies, and the site has an overlay mode that shows the constellations and planets.

At first I thought this was NASA's doing or something, but nope, it was all accomplished by one man, for fun. He even quit his job as a marketing director to devote the time necessary for the project. Check it.

The new Windows 8 logo

Designed by Pentagram, the preeminent design studio. Surprised I didn't find out about this earlier. My take is... it's boring, but really what alternative is there?

The window points away from the wordmark instead of towards it, which is distracting for me. Actually I'm indifferent about the design, it's the self-fellating design talk that gets me. "The team designed the system to fit into lines of perspective." – Four squares is a "system"? "The clean lines, flat shape and bold color of the logo reflect the design principles of Microsoft’s Metro design language." Clean lines, flat shape and bold color, therefore it's awesome! Haven't heard that one before. If only they used Gotham, it would have been a winner for sure.

From the windows team blog: "Our final goal was for the new logo to be humble, yet confident. Welcoming you in with a slight tilt in perspective and when you change your color, the logo changes to reflect you. It is a “Personal” Computer after all." I don't think the logo is very humble or confident. It's more precocious and stoic, a distant but intimate embrace of hue and shape, altering its nature to mirror the viewer's physical spirit.

Seriously though, the logo is pretty interesting because I get the feeling of a big shift at Microsoft. Whether or not this is reality is something else, but looking at the Metro "design language", it seems that Microsoft is actually trying something different with the aim of improving their product.

Pentagram's Windows 8 page
Windows Team blog

Film the police.

Obviously there are good cops and there are bad cops. If you see a cop doing good, you should probably thank them. If you see a cop doing bad, don't let them get away with it:

Helmet week part 7

This helmet belonged to King Henry VIII, complete with glasses for his short-sightedness.

Helmet week part 6

The new helmet that accompanies the new F-35 fighter jet. Its weird shape comes from two projectors that display information on the inside of the visor, replacing the standard heads-up-display.

Helmet Week part 5

Helmet Week part 3

A shot from the movie Without Love starring Katharine Hepburn.

"Lonely widow Jamie Rowan (Katharine Hepburn) helps the war effort by marrying a military research scientist, Patrick Jamieson (Spencer Tracy on film, Elliott Nugent on the stage), who has set up his lab in her house. Patrick has had all the worst of love and Jamie, all the best. They both believe that a marriage could be a success without love, as it reduces the chances of jealousy and bickering and all the other marital disadvantages. But as the film progresses, the inevitable happens as they begin to fall in love with each other."

Apparently it's pretty bad.

She sneezes!

Whoops! She can't wipe her nose through glass!

Helmet week part 2

A porcupine fish helmet.

"Porcupine fish helmet from Kiribati, Oceania. Part of the Pitt Rivers Museum Founding Collection. Given to the Museum in 1884. This helmet is made from an entire porcupine fish, also known as a blowfish. It comes from Kiribati (pronounced 'kiri-bass'), a group of islands in the Micronesia in the Pacific. Before the 1970s they were a British colony and were known as the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. The Pitt Rivers Museum holds one of the most extensive collections of Kiribati arms and armour in the world."

Helmet Week

Because I start weeks on Sundays at 12:30 AM. You always find kooky things while you're researching stuff on image search. I found a bunch of helmet-related things today so there you go, a theme for the next few days.

Check out Helmet B by designer Julien Bergignat and Patrice Mouille that can be laid out flat for easy packing.

Documentary-CYBERPUNK (1990)

A pretty RAD documentary featuring sick GRAPHIXX from 1990. It deals with the emergence of the internet and hacker/computer culture and makes some predictions about what the future holds. Now I guess "held" would be a better word.

What Tim Leary said about democracy and people controlling the press and being able to "zap our messages around" was a pretty good prediction. Case in point being the use of social media in the Arab Spring.

Some other stuff like "data suits" never really took off. We can get by fine with screens and buttons for now.

"A must-see. Marianne Trench's campy, kinetic documentary about the cyberpunk phenomenon blends practical technological and medical hacks with philosophical forward-thinking about the often-cybernetically expanded boundaries of our humanness.

Learned commentary by luminaries like William Gibson and Timothy Leary is augmented by interviews with actual hackers and anonymous computer criminals, creating a composite essay about our increasingly internet-dependent experience that is as important today as it was in 1990 when the film was created.

The film examines actual drug-like technology designed to make the user "permanently smarter"; xeroxed zines and high tech fashion; cyberpunk music like Front 242, Manufacture, Severed Heads, and includes a discussion with Michael Balch of Frontline Assembly. Hilariously dated digital graphics meet still-relevant realizations about how we define our human experience as our abilities are continuously extended by technology."




via RW

Saul Bass Pitches the new Bell System Logo

If you're wondering how to deliver a killer presentation or just be a total BOSS when it comes to design, watch this.

"Bass' work in logo design and movie title credit sequences spanned the latter half of the 20th century, with prominent work in each field. He worked closely with AT&T, designing not only the 1970 "bell" logo that was ubiquitous for a decade, but also, upon the divestiture of AT&T, he designed the original "death star" logo, unveiled in 1984.

One reason for this bell logo's ubiquity? That redesign was the largest corporate re-identity program in the U.S., ever.

The redesign covered:
135,000 Bell system vehicles
22,000 buildings
1,250,000 phone booths
170,000,000 telephone directories

This film was made by his company as a presentation to AT&T executives. It would have extended to be shown to the public, but a number of his ideas in the film were not ultimately adopted, like his phone booth designs, and men's and women's uniforms. But a great many were—including, most memorably, the telephone vans and hardhat designs of the 1970s. He designed down to the details, showcasing in this film a myriad of ideas, right down to the yellow pages book designs, cufflinks for executives, and flags.

Bass' other very recognizable logo designs that persist today include those for Minolta, Girl Scouts of America, Avery International, Geffen Records, Warner Int'l, and many more. Bass' design for AT&T was the foundation for the logo that the company has today, redesigned in 2005 by Interbrand. Produced by Saul Bass Footage courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center, Warren, NJ"

From the AT&T Tech Channel.

Via TWBE

Painted games

I just came across this newer game called Bastion which has some pretty awesome painted graphics. It reminded me of some super old games from back in the day that featured hand painted environments. I guess any video game is "painted" or "sculpted", but these have a real organic look to them. I've never played any of these games, but the screenshots are nice to look at. I've also included a couple pics of the levels from the game Metal Slug, which are kind of more pixel-arty but awesome nonetheless.

In order of appearance, Bastion, Legend of Mana, SaGa Frontier, Metal Slug.

Taking a photo everyday for a really long time.

Dan Hanna, a CG artist, took 2 photos of himself for 17(!!!) years. He starts off at 32 years old and it ends at 49 years. His head is also rotating as it's going on. A pretty cool example of some stop motion animation too.



And some babe takes a picture of herself for 4.5 years. The interesting part for me was how her haircuts changed her face. I was kind of digging the pixie cut thing. Either that or when her hurr was at its longest.

The History of the Universe According to the International Style.

There aren't any other significant events in the history of the universe, really, when you think about it.

Designed by wearebuild for the Helvetica movie, apparently.

Documentary - Big River Man

The true story of Martin Strel's swim down the entire 3300 mile length of the Amazon River.

"Martin Strel (born 1 October 1954) in Mokronog, SFR Yugoslavia, is a legendary Slovenian long-distance swimmer, best known for swimming the entire length of various rivers. Strel holds successive Guinness World Records for swimming the Danube river, the Mississippi River, the Yangtze River, and the Amazon River. During his swims, he sleeps for 5 hours each day. He prepares himself for a long-distance swim over a year and a half. It usually takes 6 to 7 months for Strel to recover physically. His motto is 'swimming for peace, friendship and clean waters.'" (Wikipedia)