Issue 8 - Flight
Thanks to the internet, we all live in our own private mediaspheres now, in a way which we didn't just a few decades ago.
The precise collection of newsletters, RSS feeds and Slack channels I'm subscribed to is almost certainly unique. And even if it weren't, my own personal "filter" - the priorities and signals which dictate where I focus my interest most - would make it so.
One of my signals for paying attention to stuff is, quite naturally, repetition. If I see the same headline linked to by multiple sources, it's more likely to be of interest to me. At the same time, it's less likely to be useful to share it here, because it's more likely that you already saw it.
So, anyhow, here's a piece which hit my filters at least 5 times this week, about how no-one actually knows how planes stay in the air. Did you see it? You probably did. But here's my 10 cents of "value add"...
...because if the detailed physical principles underpinning flight still aren't understood, even after we've been putting heavy machinery into the air for over a century, then it seems unlikely that we ever would have discovered flight without an impetus to do so... the most obvious impetus being birds.
So, without the glaring natural "flight is possible" signpost of birds, our present world would look very different. My own life would have turned out very different.
And as a bonus, planes currently run on oil, aka old dead dinosaurs. And birds are descended from dinosaurs.
So, thanks dinosaurs?
Project Updates
Pays-the-mortgage Work really messed with my schedule and available energy this week.
But I did get an instance of Trello set up to track tasks for IDGAF, at least. Onwards...
A Thing of Beauty
Stella Forma XL by Andy Gilmore.
Ephemera
I discovered Golden Arches Unlimited this week, and it just seems so perfectly of this moment that it's frankly blowing my mind. For the uninitiated, it's an honest-to-god McDonald's merchandise store, but the merch is all high-end and pretty nicely (in a Disney kind of way) designed. It's genuine quality in the service of selling food which is the very definition of exactly, barely good enough. There's nothing there I'd actually buy, never mind proudly wear. But still, it's... look, I can't quite process my feelings here. Although their Quarter Pounder calendar is straight-up, genuinely hilarious.
I didn't know XKCD's Randall Munroe was now doing his smart, funny pop-sci thing for the New York Times, but also, how hasn't he always been writing for the NYT?! His latest, on the World's Worst Smell, is predictably fantastic.
I love love love this marine epoxy producer's chart explaining how their mildly complex product line works together. It's a really compact, powerful piece of information design. I like their brand, too, but probably partly because it involves Eurostile.
...and the reason Eurostile speaks to me is that it was used, in its extended variant, as the predominant signage typeface in the odd 1960s-era housing experiment, New Ash Green, where I grew up.
And lastly this week, this is about as compact as an entertaining story about linguistics, euphemisms and taboos could possibly be. (Futility Closet)
Endnote
Yes, I still, still need to fix the section-divider image so it looks less weird on non-white backgrounds. I'll do it soon, I promise.
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