An illustrated and hand-lettered guide to the system of international maritime signal flags that are used to communicate when speaking is difficult (“because of language barriers, distance, etc….”)
See also hand flag semaphore and day shapes from the same creator.
Tags: design · flags · language
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Wow, check out this just-released image from the JWST team of star cluster NGC 602.
The local environment of this cluster is a close analogue of what existed in the early Universe, with very low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The existence of dar...
Join or Die, the documentary about Robert Putnam (author of Bowling Alone and popularizer of “social capital”) that I posted about
back in February,
is now available on Netflix.
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Conservative Man Proudly Frightened Of Everything. “I’m scared of books. I’m scared of movies. I’m scared of songs. I’m scared of cartoons.”
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From the Atlantic in 1948, Death of a Pig by E.B. White is about the story that inspired the author to write Charlotte’s Web a few years later.
The scheme of buying a spring pig in blossom time, feeding it through summer and fall, and butchering it when the solid cold we...
From 1957, this is a drawing of the synergistic strategy of Walt Disney Productions, or what Todd Zenger of Harvard Business Review calls “a corporate theory of sustained growth”.
The boxes on the chart have changed, but since the appointment of Bob Iger as CEO, Disney ha...
The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience is an illustrated version of the bestselling book by Nikole Hannah-Jones, featuring archival images, photos by Black photographers, and artwork from Black artists like Carrie Mae Weems & Vitus Shell.
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“Things look a little different around Lumon.” The official teaser trailer for season two of Severance reveals a liiiiittle bit more about the upcoming season but not much. January 17, 2025 can’t come soon enough!
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“How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are.” Maria Popova reflects on 18 years of her excellent website, The Marginalian. Learning to carry one’s vulnerability is one hell of a reframing.
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Here’s what participating in a human challenge trial for dysentery is like. They give you the disease and then try treating it, in this case with bacteriophage therapy. “I made plans to spend my 30th birthday in a dysentery ward.”
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On the logistics of building a space telescope powerful enough “to examine the features of nearby exoplanets with the same detail we can naturally see on the Moon”.
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This short video takes us on a trip through the criminal justice system and highlights a “hidden form of punishment” directed toward incarcerated people: fees. At every turn, people who are sentenced to incarceration are subject to tens of thousands of dollars in fees: bai...
New children’s picture book from the excellent Jessica Hische: My First Book of Fancy Letters, “a delightful spin on the traditional alphabet book, featuring creatively hand-lettered words from A to Z”.
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Pony Boys is a delightful short documentary about two boys (aged 9 & 11) who traveled from a Boston suburb to the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal by pony cart.
In the short documentary above, the “pony boys,” Tony and Jeff Whittemore, recount that as youngsters, they ...
Three thought experiments that suggest “the space-time continuum we seem to inhabit is not fundamental but an approximation of something deeper, and that the concept will eventually be replaced…” What a wrench in the works black holes are!
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Historian and scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder has a new book out called On Freedom (Bookshop.org), a companion to his 2017 bestseller On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have ...
Before Google, reference librarians answered questions via telephone. “We learned not merely how to find information but how to think about finding information. Don’t take anything for granted; don’t trust your memory; look for the context…”
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This Icelandic hotel offers a unique a valuable service: an aurora wake-up call. “When the northern lights appear in the night sky, they’ll wake you to make sure don’t miss a once-in-a-lifetime viewing experience.”
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“‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,’ Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him say this. ‘People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.’”
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For the latest installment of Every Frame a Painting, Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos examine the artistry and thought silent film master Buster Keaton put into the physical comedy in his movies. I used to watch all sorts of old movies with my dad (Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel &...
I love this: a carpenter fires his nail gun in time to the music of a band practicing or performing next door. Music, artistry, and playfulness is everywhere.
Tags: music · video
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The Onion: “The Donald Trump and Kamala Harris campaigns both debuted new commercials Tuesday that attempt to win support for their respective candidates with a supercut of Trump’s most racist comments.” 🎯
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These “containment cages” used in Texas prison are inhumane — standing-room only cages that prisoners are kept in for days at a time. “Solitary confinement itself was horrific, but these containment cages were catastrophic.”
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Oh boy, a new book from one of my favorite designers: Kelli Anderson’s Alphabet in Motion, a pop-up book that explains how typography works. Watch the video…this book is bonkers. Instant pre-order for me.
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From The Pudding, more than you’ve ever wanted to know about a game called Crokinole. Like: WTF is Crokinole?? (Partial A: “a mashup of shuffleboard and curling, played on a tabletop board”.)
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Too Much Love is a project from Katja Kemnitz in which she photographs the beloved dolls & stuffed animals of young children alongside brand-new versions of the same toys. Anyone who is a parent or caregiver can relate to the destruction on display here, as well as the difficulty of replacing these items.
I show old, much-loved teddies and dolls and compare them with as good as new doppelgangers. I think the broken stuffed animals have a lot of soul. The project is inspired by my older daughter, who took her plush dog everywhere when she was little. One day I found this dog again without button eye and torn seams in the store and bought it. She did not like him. The old one was better and could not be replaced.
Tags: Katja Kemnitz · photography
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Ooh, a preview clip from season three of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I like this crew. Season three premieres sometime in 2025 and, huzzah!, has been renewed for a 4th season.
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From Ryan Broderick’s comments on the state of text based social media, a new life goal for me: “One day you’ll be the last person writing words on the web and wonder where everyone went.”
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Historian Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny), who studies forced population movements, thinks we aren’t taking the Trump/Vance deportation plans seriously enough. (I agree.) The effects will be familiar to anyone who has read anything about totalitarian regimes and/or caste-based s...
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