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Each dot represents where 25 people of the same race live. Caucasians are shown in red; African Americans, blue; Hispanics, orange; and Asians, green.

New York City

Detroit, Michigan

IKEA has just released a baking book called “Hembakat är Bäst” (Homemade is Best). Check out these photographs of the ingredients for various recipes, shot by Carl Kleiner.

Via.

Today and Tomorrow reports a neat new stop motion animation by Dentsu London and BERG.

All the animation is done by moving an iPad through physical space. It’s pretty neat. (The start of the video through about 1:40 explains the process, followed by the animation.)

Designed by Felissimo for Social Designer this complete set of 500 colored pencils consists of 20 units, each pencil telling its own story with a unique name. You cannot buy the complete set of pencils all at once, but you can receive them over the course of 20 months. Four different display methods let you keep your pencils at hand, while being displayed either as an artwork, or kept aside as a special collection.

Via.

Bill Zeller‘s free Chrome extension graphs trends in your Gmail, using the same functionality as Gmail search. I could spend all day mining for trends in productivity, friendships, and word usage.  Here’s a nice example from my inbox:

An example anti-pattern:

Disguised Ads

Ads that are disguised as other kinds of content or navigation, in order to get users to click on them.

Image from Softpedia.com (26-July-2010)

softpedia.com is a free-to-use software download site. According to alexa.org, it’s the 356th biggest site in the world (at roughly the same ranking as bestbuy.com, slideshare.net or ikea.com). You’d hope that to get to that sort of size in today’s world, they’d have to behave responsibly. Not so. check out this download page. Can you work out which is the correct link to click to download the file? (hint: it doesn’t include the word ‘download’)

Let’s start the week by quoting a new post from Seth Godin in full.

You can add value in two ways:

• You can know the answers.
• You can offer the questions.

Relentlessly asking the right questions is a long term career, mostly because no one ever knows the right answer on a regular basis.

We might add to that list “You can wonder what the questions to answer are.”

As far as I’m concerned, we’re rarely clear on which questions are the right ones either. First thing’s first.