Blogless

This 2011 calendar has over 50 “connect the dots” puzzles which, dots properly connected, reveal famous pieces of art from Jan van Eyck to Damien Hirst.

This is great.

Check out this strange and interesting furniture by Fabien Cappello (via). It’s made out of timber harvested from Christmas trees discarded on the streets of London. He even used the needles to make a compressed board material.

I quote:

One of the major themes for 2010 was using data not just for analysis or business intelligence, but for telling stories. People are starting to make use of the data (especially government-related) that was released in 2009, and there was a lot more data made available this year (with plenty more to come).

A couple of my favorites.

Driving Shifts Into Reverse

Hannah Fairfield, former editor for The New York Times, and now graphics director for The Washington Post, had a look at gas prices versus miles driven per capita. The chart could’ve easily been an x-y scatterplot, but the extra step was taken to connect the dots so to speak. Points were ordered by time, and turns were clearly explained graphically.

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

This weekender by Matt McKeon of the IBM Visual Communication Lab explored the changes of Facebook privacy policies over the years. It came right after Facebook had made another update to push for a more public profile. Click on the interactive, and see what becomes public and how many people can see your postings.

Good stuff! Check out the rest here.

Some of these simple desktops are quite nice. A couple of choice numbers:

Let’s Bowl!

Block

Helpful for those with Desktopitis.

I’m uncertain how I feel about this.

On one hand, creating a file format is an intriguing way to shape behavior and potentially help save the environment.

If you received a WWF attachment, would you think it was smart or smug?

But to look at it another way, I wonder if this isn’t a heavy-handed approach. WWF’s are essentially copy-protected files (printing being one kind of copying)– something I’m not happy with in any form. Moreover, you can already do this with PDF’s, so it’s a bit redundant –not to mention a little ostentatious– to invent a strongly-branded “green” format just for this purpose.

I wonder about the ethics of crippling a file intended for someone else. Shouldn’t people be allowed to make choices about what to do with their information? Taking away the option seems to be making a big assumption about personal responsibility, even if it is for the greater good.

Hat tip to Core77 for the story.