Rikenography

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:

Hello folks. Here’s another edition of links. This time I’m focusing less on any subject and will just share things I’ve have interested me recently. First comes a pretty cool but obscure article by a Japanese reporter about the mysteries surrounding Tokyo’s underground tunnels. Part conspiracy theory, part investigative journalism, it is a thoroughly interesting read.

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.