fluffynotes

via treeporn “The amazing baobab [wiki] (Adansonia) or monkey...

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 04:34:22 -0500

“The amazing baobab [wiki] (Adansonia) or monkey bread tree can grow up to nearly 100 feet (30 m) tall and 35 feet (11 m) wide. Their defining characteristic: their swollen trunk are actually water storage – the baobab tree can store as much as 31,700 gallon (120,000 l) of water to endure harsh drought conditions.”

“Baobab trees are native to Madagascar (it’s the country’s national tree!), mainland Africa, and Australia. A cluster of “the grandest of all” baobab trees (Adansonia grandidieri) can be found in the Baobab Avenue, near Morondava, in Madagascar.”

via 10 Most Magnificent Trees in the World. – Neatorama

Sparkling Ginger Chip Cookies Recipe

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 04:24:44 -0500

Sparkling Ginger Chip Cookies Recipe:

(via somethingchanged)

Sweet! Is Sugar the future of publishing?

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:36:13 -0500

The state of affairs in publishing is beyond depressing. Unless, of course, by publishing you mean the shiny new online-only startups who are behaving as if it were boom times for journalism. An example is Sugar Publishing, the 3 1/2-year old blogging company that focuses on young women. The San Francisco company has 12 sites, 114 people, and boasts an online audience that’s approaching that of Time Warner’s (TWX) People.com (almost 8 million monthly visitors in October for Sugar versus 12 million for People, says comScore).

Two broad themes define what’s cool and exciting about Sugar: the way it does journalism and how it makes its money. According to Brian Sugar, every staff writer is trained on how to do everything it takes to produce a blog post, from writing and Photoshop to editing videos. That is so antithetical to how it works at big-time magazines, where specialization rules. Sugar’s money-making tactics also signal a break from the past. It recently bought a company called ShopStyle, whose site allows users to shop for products they like and takes referral commissions from retailers. ShopStyle is so popular that Sugar licenses it to other sites, creating a lucrative revenue stream for Sugar off the audience of other online publishers. Sounds like Google’s (GOOG) AdSense, right? Sugar calls the licensing product ShopSense.

More is in store. The company is rapidly building out its video capabilities. It plans to launch a video game on Facebook next year…

A doubtful coin 1869 John Frederick Lewis July 14, 1805 –...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:18:00 -0500

A doubtful coin 1869 John Frederick Lewis

July 14, 1805 – August 15, 1876) was an Orientalist English painter. He specialized in Oriental and Mediterranean scenes and often worked in exquisitely detailed watercolour.

Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery

Time to transform school into a place where kids go to learn, not to power down

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:07:56 -0500

IT was the flamboyant New York publisher Malcolm Forbes who once said that education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

From simple mathematics to the intricacies of the Pythagoras’ Theorem, Stevens shows how through the use of laptops in the classroom, as well as at home in their own time via social networking, kids can absorb vital knowledge at a critical stage in their development. The lessons appear as visual quizzes, puzzles and games to keep young minds engaged. Teachers can monitor their progress and ensure that struggling students are supported. Entire education clouds where teachers can share knowledge, arrange lesson plans and file reports are now being used to manage millions of students in the US. “These platforms are not just delivering content,” explains Fiona O’Carroll, executive vice-president at HMH in Dublin. “They instruct their young minds and also allow teachers to assess the children and provide them with individualised learning paths. Kids with particular needs can be ushered in the direction of individualised lessons.”

Time to transform school into a place where kids go to learn, not to power down - Technology, Business - Independent.ie

Barcelona (via ConvincingBlack)

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:30:19 -0500

Barcelona (via ConvincingBlack)

Allen Lane and the paperback revolution | London Magazine

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:53:59 -0500

To be quite clear: Allen Lane did not invent paperbacks. They had been tried before, and successfully too. Even the famous cover design was largely borrowed, from Albatross Books, a Hamburg publisher of the day. Allen’s particular gift was to notice what other people did not and it took even him a year or more to realise what he had stumbled upon. The ‘paperback revolution’, as it is still occasionally referred to, was not ultimately about books or those paper-thin profit-margins, never mind about Penguin: it was about answers - and about people who had never needed them so badly on such a scale. It was about a world that had never spun so giddily nor cried out so urgently to be made sense of. Anyone with a paperback in their hands is holding the history of the last hundred years or so in their hands, whether they know it or not.

Lady Chatterley’s Defendant - Allen Lane and the paperback revolution | Three Monkeys Online

Good Will Hunting Will: Why shouldn’t I work for the N.S.A.?...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 04:53:47 -0500

Good Will Hunting

Will: Why shouldn’t I work for the N.S.A.? That’s a tough one, but I’ll take a shot. Say I’m working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I’m real happy with myself, ‘cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin’, “Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area” ‘cause they don’t give a shit. It won’t be their kid over there, gettin’ shot. Just like it wasn’t them when their number got called, ‘cause they were pullin’ a tour in the National Guard. It’ll be some kid from Southie takin’ shrapnel in the ass. And he comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, ‘cause he’ll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain’t helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And they’re takin’ their sweet time bringin’ the oil back, of course, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin’ play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain’t too long ‘til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy’s out of work and he can’t afford to drive, so he’s got to walk to the fuckin’ job interviews, which sucks ‘cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin’ him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he’s starvin’, ‘cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they’re servin’ is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I’m holdin’ out for somethin’ better. I figure fuck it, while I’m at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president.

First impressions are usually wrong. Unfortunately, they usually turn into stereotypes, which then turn into the truth

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 04:30:36 -0500

Nobody really cares what specific stereotype they happen to be debating; what matters more is how that label was spawned, because that defines its consequence. It raises a fundamental query about the nature of existence: Is our anecdotal understanding of the world founded on naivete, or is it built on dark, unpopular truths? That is the question. And here (I suspect) is the answer: neither. Stereotypes are not really based on fact, and they are not really based on fiction. They are based on arbitrary human qualities no one cares about at all. Whenever a given stereotype seems right (or wrong), it’s inevitably a coincidence; the world is a prejudiced place, but it’s prejudiced for the weirdest, least-meaningful reasons imaginable.

by Chuck Kolsterman in Esquire

The art of the chart: How we fell in love with ranking the world

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 04:16:29 -0500

Our modern obsession with chart rankings, top tens and (these days) books that chronicle the 1001 albums, movies, buildings, walks, paintings and places we must experience before we die… have become big business, a staple of publishng and media industries.

Certainly, the pleasure of consumption has never felt so much like tick-box duty. The gift-idea tables in bookshops groan with titles that promise rosters of the ten, 100 or 1000 leading items in their class. Even misanthropes can relish the genre, with Quentin Letts’s 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain (from Jeffrey Archer to Harold Wilson via Greg Dyke and Charles Saatchi) now re-issued in a credit-crunch edition “with added bankers”.

The Independent

Tejano culture in Laredo, Texas, 2002 “In 2002 I was awarded the...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 04:00:00 -0500

Tejano culture in Laredo, Texas, 2002

“In 2002 I was awarded the National Geographic Photography Grant to continue my ongoing documentary work on the Texas/Mexican border and Tejano culture. This region of Texas is a place where cultures clash and are constantly being redefined.

I spent a total of four years developing the body of work, to this day I am still documenting the culture and the geography. This photograph was taken in the Texas/Mexico border town of Laredo. The young woman is being fitted for a dress by the designer, at right, her mother and designers assistants. She is being introduced into “high society” at a ball and pageant that happens annually by the Society Of Martha Washington. This induction into “high society” is based on family heritage and class and has been passed down from generation to generation since the 1950’s.” Penny de los Santos

Make Headers and a paragraph’s first sentence...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 03:57:47 -0500

Make Headers and a paragraph’s first sentence descriptive

The first sentence of a paragraph is the most important. People scan content and there is no stopping that. That being said, the more complex and boring a sentence in your paragraph is, the less likely it is to be read. This is why headers and first sentences are so vital. The goal is to include the main idea of the paragraph while hooking your readers in the first sentence.

News websites are a great example of online content that is victim to constant scanning. CNN sets the tone for each paragraph of their news articles in the first sentence so that a reader can easily browse over an article and get the main ideas quickly. This method can be described as the “inverted pyramid” style of writing, which has the most important information at the top of the paragraph or story and the least important at the bottom.

Writing User Friendly Content | UX Booth

Hungry, 1971, Shepards and Sheep National Geographic new book,...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 06:26:28 -0500

Hungry, 1971, Shepards and Sheep

National Geographic new book, 120 years of photos

Five Magazine and Newspaper Publishers Introduce Their Digital Newsstand l New York Times

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:33:43 -0500

Five major magazine and newspaper publishers on Tuesday announced plans to build an industry-standard platform to present their work on the Web, phones and e-readers in a richer, more flexible and more lucrative form than is possible today…

The consortium of Time Inc., Conde Nast, the Hearst Corporation, Meredith and the News Corporation does not lack for ambition, hoping to design software primarily for devices that do not yet exist – cellphones more advanced than anything now on the market and e-readers far more sophisticated than today’s mostly static, black-and-white devices.

Time Inc. has released a video giving some idea of what it has in mind – a full-color, touch-screen digital magazine that readers would find not only more attractive than what is now available on mobile devices, but also vastly more interactive and malleable to their tastes.

New York Times

Entire Vogue Italia is Twitter themed Here we go. The complete...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 02:50:56 -0500

Entire Vogue Italia is Twitter themed

Here we go. The complete Vogue Italia internet age, twitter like, editorial by Steven Meisel; The biggest surprise, besides the concept and amount of models here, is the camera shy Steven Meisel him self. Who’s appearing here in his own editorial, titled by the update its self, but beginning with the word ‘Feeling’. Are his own feelings, and thought process, changing as he departs one decade and set to enter another? Are we doing to see a new development in his career? The January issue is now highly anticipated.

Via In Full | Meisel Graces His Own Editorial In ‘Feeling…’ For Vogue Italia’s Model Extravaganza - Fashion Copious

The Penguin Blog: How to win friends and influence people

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 02:47:00 -0500

Last week I was in Paris explaining to 600 French publishers, librarians, booksellers and writers that editors at Penguin were more and more often thinking ‘beyond the book’ when they considered publishing opportunities for their authors. The view that we are in the content business rather than the book business is not one that made me popular in Paris, where the publisher’s role in the preservation of literature is taken very seriously indeed.

But over the last few weeks I’ve had approaches from a number of Penguins asking whether particular titles might make good iPhone apps, interesting ebook especials, digital learning tools and even an ‘artificial reality app’ (whatever that is!). And at the same time we’ve also started talking to creators of video games about books that might be able to be adapted in interesting interactive ways to create new products which might attract new readers to our authors and their books.

The Penguin Blog

via loz-jpg

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:19:51 -0500

via loz-jpg

German publisher's plan to save the newspaper business: a “one-click marketplace” where consumers could buy their content

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:19:16 -0500

The German publishing community has this cockamamie idea that when Google displays their snippets of content that Google should pay them for the privilege. In essence, Google would be paying for the free advertising it is giving publishers! It would be a nifty trick if, in other parts of the media, publishers had to pay advertisers.

…That’s not the worst idea in the world — although once again it seems based on the premise that people should pay for content rather than that people would be willing to pay for content — but the German publishing community’s plans for how to deal with the online world totally go off the rails in an idea that appears to be at least as insane as the one put forth by Rupert Murdoch, who actually thinks it might be a good idea to pull News Corp. content off of Google, even though Google and Google News account for more than a quarter of News Corp.’s online traffic.

New York Times NEWSPAPERS and novels are moving briskly from...

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 04:33:55 -0500

New York Times NEWSPAPERS and novels are moving briskly from paper to pixels, but textbooks have yet to find the perfect electronic home. They are readable on laptops and smartphones, but the displays can be eye-taxing. Even dedicated e-readers with their crisp printlike displays can’t handle textbook staples like color illustrations or the videos and Web-linked supplements publishers increasingly supply.

Now there is a new approach that may adapt well to textbook pages: two-screen e-book readers with a traditional e-paper display on one screen and a liquid-crystal display on the other to render graphics like science animations in color.

Amazon in secret plan to open high street shops

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 04:25:43 -0500

AMAZON, the world’s biggest online retailer and scourge of bookshops everywhere, is planning a surprise invasion of the British high street. Property landlords said that the Seattle-based company, which has a market value of $59.1 billion (£35.6 billion), had launched a secret search for bricks-and-mortar stores to support its rapidly growing website. It is understood to be scouring the country for high-profile sites just as the Borders book chain is shutting up shop.

It represents an extraordinary reversal from the dotcom boom, when there were fears that internet shopping would kill off the high street. It would also be the most high-profile move by a web-only retailer into stores.