First up is from a great couple of people who design subway maps for unlikely places. Take for example this map of a hypothetical subway system on the “Bar Harbor/Acadia Metro Area.” They offer a number of cool poster size maps on their website of various unlikely locations for subways. You can find them over at Transit Authority Figures.

Next up is an interesting slideshow from the New York Times about Michael Najjar, a photographer that uses mountain peak lines to express the rise and fall of the stock market. After finding a mountain in Argentina that already looked like a stock chart, he proceeded to go home and recreate new mountains that expressed real stock data. Here is the link.

While looking through some pictures of the old Terminal Station of Atlanta, (which is now a parking lot) I found a post over at infrastructurist ranking the top ten demolished train stations. It’s too bad these epic structures are gone, especially in light of the new push for high speed rail in the US. We can only imagine what it would be like to arrive at one of these stations in a modern train. Unfortunately I imagine there will never again be the desire or incentive to build such monuments to transportation. Number 1 on the list is naturally the original Penn Station, a true marvel of New York City:

First up was a really great video of the Trans Siberian Railway that has been matched with Google maps to its location as it travels across the length of the Russian nation. What is pretty great about the Google hosted page linked here, is that you can listen while traveling to the sound of the train, or if you want to put yourself in the position of the traveler, the books on tape of Tolstoy and Gogol. You can start in Moscow and either jump ahead to interesting sections, or travel the length of Siberia until you finally make it in Vladivostok. Also, the videos hosted on Youtube go to an amazingly clear 1080p HD. (Thanks to my brother James)

Next up I have a selection of info-graphics created by some very clever people. Susanna Hertrich has done some great work, but my favorite is one depicting the perception of risk and actual hazards:

Last up is another awesome visualization of the undersea cables that line the ocean’s floor sending the first international telegraphs and hosting current international interweb traffic.

[via: Gothamist]

Next is a really interesting dictionary site. Wordnik takes any word you enter and provides a comprehensive set of meanings, using different resources to let you appreciate the depth of a given word’s meaning. Using history, social uses, basic definitions, flickr tag matches and cool info-graphics, it provides a resource to which I give too much time.

Next is a thoroughly good read by Bruce Haley, The Tao of War Photography, in which he lays out the wisdom and peril of working in a war zone. There are some gems that get to the heart of the matter better than many have tried to do in expansive books. Here is a snippet:

“8.  If a rebel commander asks whether you would like to be buried in his country or your own, he may very well be serious and not just testing your resolve…”

This man knows what he’s talking about. He was one of the only photographers in Afghanistan during the 1980s Soviet occupation.

The rest of his site is quite interesting with an excellent collection of photos from his work in much of Asia, Africa, and Russia.

From words and photos we are going to move on to a few info-graphic selections. If you’ve read through the site before you’ll know I’m a fan of information visualization and lately I’ve been stumbling across quite a few interesting graphics.

The first shows visually the route, length and name of every space flight undertaken from Earth. Click on the picture to make it big.

Next is a map of the current account balance of the world’s nations. The units are in billions.

Next is a quite comprehensive visual explanation of America’s political landscape and the characteristics there-in. This one definately deserves a closer look by clicking on it and zooming in. Credit for the smart people who created this is on the bottom of the image itself.

That’s all for now. See you next time.

]]> http://rikenography.com/blog/2009/10/riken-links-interesting-tid-bits-and-more/feed/ 0 http://rikenography.com/blog/2009/09/254/ http://rikenography.com/blog/2009/09/254/#comments Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:49:31 +0000 Riken http://rikenography.com/blog/?p=254 This isn’t quite a links post, nor it is a focus on one interesting story, but a mash-up of wonderful things in the world of photos that I have come to discover recently.

One of the most interesting photo projects I’ve seen in a while is the vector series by photographer Andrew Bush. He took his pictures while driving on the southern California freeways with a flash mounted to his vehicle that would light his subjects as they drove unaware (sometimes) alongside. I think the project is especially striking because of its uniform quality of exposure, the capture of each driver’s moment in time, and the factual and occasionally witty caption. While at it, check out his business card series. It’s worth a look.

“Man rolling along (and whistling audibly) on U.S. Route 101 at approximately 55 mph on a summer day in 1989.”

Brian Ulrich’s Copia series is another project that I just really love. Retail, thrift, fair, and dark stores are the subjects of the project, but for me, Retail is by far the most captivating. You can check it out here. It is quite excellent.

Next is a great online piece by the New York Times that interviews the three largest press pool photo editors and asks them to select the most iconic or representative photos from the two Bush administrations. It is pretty cool to see how the same event could produce strikingly different images but also how they can all try to preserve the same moments in time. You can find it here.

That’s all for now folks. Until next time.

In dedication to this fact, here are a collection of links I’ve saved during my travel down the tubes of the information highway.

Book Inscriptions – Dedicated to the little notes left behind on the inside jacket of a book. Happy, sad, funny or humiliating, these are certainly unique.

Don’t Even Reply (Emails from an Asshole) – It is exactly what it proclaims to be and won’t let you down.

Passive-Aggressive Notes - This little gem of a website collects those artifacts of human frailty that lead to the politely non-confrontational yet perfectly clear message of a passive-aggressive note.

Very Short Stories – A collection of six word stories at Wired inspired by a Hemingway story. Some excellent stories there. They did however leave out Bill O’s masterpiece of brevity, “Fuck it, I’ll do it Live.”

Shit My Dad Says – Linked to often elsewhere, it’s still worth checking out.

One Sentence Stories – A collection of true stories, told in one sentence.

That’s all for now. Until next time.

- David Byrne on Cities (The Cities Anthem)

- Recycled Houses Slideshow

- Casual Near-Death Photography

- Johnny Utah Goes for Meatball Subs

• Goths in Hot Weather
• Gazprom’s Rock Epic
• Abandoned Theaters
• Headless Horseman
• WWIII Tweet Propaganda

In the spirit of my undernourished post supply and likewise lack of series updates, I naturally introduce a newly syndicated series of posts pertaining to things too amazing to be fiction. Like J Peterman of the brand and of Elaine’s workplace. More interesting however is the Fear and Loathing Board Game  structured around the contents of Raul Duke’s traveling briefcase.

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Board Game (via BoingBoing)
• J. Peterman on Twitter — further reading:Larry King on Twitter
• A Library Obsession Gone Awesome