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Future of flight, and airgraphs

One hundred years after the Wright Brothers made the first heavier-than-air controlled flight (pace Percy Pilcher) on 17 December 1903, magazines are doing "future of flight" specials:
Economist, National Geographic (stunning photos, also here), and New Scientist (reg required). The 19 Dec 1903 first flight story is corrected here.

Also, a pair of non-scientific, hand-drawn airgraphs (acceleromaps? seismographs?): an Airbus A321 takes off from Edinburgh and lands at London Heathrow. (There are tube journeys as well).

Giotto's circle wins him Lego interview

Lego HR are seemingly fans of Giotto's simple method of proving his skill:

When would-be master builders audition for Lego, they are given a pile of bricks and asked to make a perfect sphere. Then they have to turn it into a head.
[Anthony lane, Lego, in Nobody's Perfect, Picador, 2003, 598]

Becoming Homo mobilis

1998

You get your first mobile, a hefty block with solid buttons. It quickly earns its place in your left front pocket, with your door keys and spare change. You carefully and proudly put your friends’ numbers into it. When it rings you jump, and immediately answer.

1999

You can’t imagine not having it. A mobile phone rings, and (you and) everyone present looks closely at their handsets to see if the call is for them because everyone has a mobile. You all have the same ringtone: Nokia’s Grand Valse, which will be later renamed Nokia Tune. When a call comes in, it somehow takes priority over your face-to-face conversation, and the incoming double double-beep of a text message even more so.

2000

You only check your handset when you hear your ringtone. You feel a mild irritation when someone else has the same one. Novelty and TV theme tune ringtones are now so popular that one differential strategy is to go back to very old-school tones: Nokia Tune, or the one that sounds like an old phone. When you travel alone, without someone to talk to or a paper to read, you reach for your mobile to stay busy. You play a game repeatedly, occasionally glancing up to see if it’s your stop yet, hating the game, but still hitting New Game every time.

2001

Your address book is full, one-in-one-out, so you judge new contacts against the old. You get up from the table in the pub to go to the gents, and your date pulls out her mobile at once and begins texting: you feel nervous at her near-real-time commentary on the quality of your table-talk. You don’t want to feel left out back at the table, so when you return you have your mobile in hand.

2002

You switch your mobile to vibrate only, relying on a haptic response. It’s polite. When you feel the tingle, in a half-second you’re starting to grab your pocket to make sure that it really is a call, then taking the handset out to see who’s inbound. You’ve stopped taking any calls that aren’t recognised by the address book, letting them be fielded by voicemail.

2003

Your leg twitches nervously, as if your mobile’s silent alert is vibrating against it. You clap your hands over the pocket to check, but the mobile is still. Or it’s not even in your pocket. At last, your body has learned the correct response. Neurones are firing in the over-trained fast-twitch mobile fibres your thigh has grown. You have a hair-trigger response, a text dependency. The minutes and data must flow.

Pictures of Moscow metro stations

Moscow Metro photo collection; includes incredible panoramic images, of which the imperial/space age Electrozavodskaya is our favourite [via Edward Tufte]. Also: The Underground Palaces of Moscow's Metro and Going underground....

Update: 6 Feb 2004, News services are reporting a (terrorist?) explosion on a metro train in Moscow; 40 dead, 100 injured. BBC: Many dead in Moscow metro blast. The train had just left Avtozavodskaya station. And more metro station pictures here [via newthings]

London Transport Railway Track Map

See the Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines use the same tracks! Gasp as the Northern line tunnels twist back and forth over each other! London Transport Railway Track Map.

Depictions of the Tower of Babel 1150-1928

1150: Unknown, Tower of Babel, Salerno Ivory

1180: Unknown, Tower of Babel, mosaic, La Basilica di Santa Maria Nuova in Monreale

c. 1250: Unknown, The Tower of Babel (and here), c.1250, from a 13th-century Bible Historiée, or Bible picture book (French MS 5), John Rylands University Library, Manchester

1283: Cimabue (c.1240-1302), Tower of Babel, fresco in the Upper Church of the Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi, Italy

1390-1400: First Master of Bible historiale of Jean de Berry (French, Paris), The Building of the Tower of Babel , about 1390-1400, Colored washes, gold leaf, and ink on parchment, 14 7/8 x 11 3/4 in., MS. LUDWIG XIII 3, LEAF 2V, Getty Collection, Los Angeles

c. 1400-1410: Unknown, The Construction of the Tower of Babel, German, Regensburg, about 1400-1410, Tempera colors on parchment, 13 3/16 x 9 1/4 in., MS. 33, FOL. 13, Getty Collection, Los Angeles

c. 1423: MASTER of the Duke of Bedford (active 1405-1435 in Paris), Building of the Tower of Babel (and here), c. 1423, Illumination on parchment, 41x28 cm, British Library, London

1525-1530: Hans Holbein The Younger (1497-1543), Tower of Babel, illustration for Martin Luther's German translation of the Bible, Basel?

c. 1563: Pieter Bruegel (1525-1569), The "Little" Tower of Babel (and here), c. 1563, Oil on panel, 60x74.5 cm, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam

1563: Pieter Bruegel (1525-1569), The Tower of Babel (and here), 1563, Oil on oak panel, 114x155 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

1563: Hendrich van der Cleve (Hendrick van Cleve III) (1525-1589), The Tower of Babel (three more by van der Cleve here), 1563

c. 1575?: Marten van Valkenborch (1535-1612), Tower of Babel (also here), or possibly Lucas van Valkenborch, c.1530-1597?

c. 1575?: Peter Balten (1525-1598), Tower of Babel, c.1575?

1604: Abel Grimmer (1570-1619), The Tower of Babel (and here), 1604

1610: Abraham Saur (1545-1593?), The Place of Babel (Die Statte Babel), woodcutting in Abraham Saur (or Sauer)'s "Theatrum Urbium", published in Munich in 1610

1627: Matthieu Merian (1593-1650), The Tower of Babel, Taken from André Parrot, The Tower of Babel [Delachaux et Niestlé, 1954]

1679: C. Decker, Turris Babel, engraving from Athanasius Kircher's (1601-80) Turris Babel

1732: Dom Augustin Calmet (1672-1757), Tower of Babel, engraving from An Historical, Critical, Geographical, Chronological, and Etymological Dictionary of the Holy Bible in three volumes (English Folio edition, 1732)

1775: Joseph Strutt, Tower of Babel, engraving from Of the Inhabitants of England, from the Arrival of the Saxons, till the Reign of Henry the Eighth. With a Short Account of the Britons, during the Government of the Romans, 2 vols. (London: Benjamin White, 1775-76).

1866: Gustave Dore (1832-1883), Tower of Babel, Genesis 11, 1866

1928: M.C. Escher (1898-1972), Tower of Babel, 1928

Also: several Towers of grammar or wisdom by van Ems (1350), Lull (1512), Vogtherr the Elder (1548), etc.
[Mostly via the excellent Virtual Babel Encyclopedia]

Underground train drawing

In which a Northern Line train on London's Underground collaborates with the artist on 4 Dec 2003 to make some drawings.

• Tufnell Park to Kentish Town and Kentish Town to Camden Town. The train is conveying the artist in a sitting position, and the direction of travel is to the left.
• Camden Town to Kentish Town and Kentish Town to Tufnell Park. The train is conveying the artist in a standing position, resulting in a looser line, and the direction of travel is to the right.

Update, 5 Jan 04: We now have another 50 or so of these drawings. Soon. (What might they be used for?)

Mobile news, various

• Cameraphones quality and intended audiences - Tom Hume says: "the important thing is that images produced by phones look good on other phones, not that they produce high quality media", but we reckon that photos taken on camphones will need to be just good enough to cover all casual/impulse use, and the market for camera-only devices will become higher-end. Also: his interesting comments on bluejacking
• How Nintendo almost beat Nokia to the gamephone - they had no equipment manufacturer. So perhaps not a problem for TTPCom's B'ngo? (TTP make handsets, silicon etc for most people except Nokia)
• Presence, privacy and mobiles: Rheingold on Location-aware devices, privacy, and UI design ("the same technology that could let you know if a good Chinese restaurant or old friend is in the vicinity could also betray your location to a totalitarian government, neighborhood spammers, and your vindictive ex-spouse") and Presence. Also: Dodgeball's concept of circles and scouts.
• Handset sales could reach 0.5bn in 2003, up 22% on 2002
• Symbian dater - share pictures, voice and video via Bluetooth [via antimega]
• Octothorpe: the story of the hash, pound, gate, square key on your phone [via metafilter]
• DoCoMo testing dual mode 3G/WLAN handsets - cf also Calypso Wireless' efforts

Design various

• Steve Jobs on design

  People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

• Poor QA turns Good Design into Bad Product - and damage from bugs persists in user behaviour
• Simple and horizontally-hierarchic menu UIs: iPod, Tivos (and many other EPGs), OS X... as discussed by Plasticbag and Russell Beattie

Haircuts of Future Vision: Future Cities

Haircuts from the left and from the right drawn at the Transport Research Group/LSE Cities' Future Vision: Future Cities conference, 6 Dec 2003. If you were there and recognise your hairdo, do, please, get in touch. Perhaps there will be more notes from this event in due course, but for now let's just say that it had some good moments, but tried to do too much.

Related: the hairlines of AIGA, from 6 Aug 2003.