notes.husk.org
October 2010
The Beauty Of Power Lines
The broadcast of BBC Four’s Secret History of the National Grid has, as you may have noticed, regenerated my interest in electricity pylons (partly aided by Joe Moran).
In Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows Of Work, there’s an entire chapter on transmission infrastructure. In it, he mentions two notable books. One is apparently a Korean guide to pylons around the world, which, annoyingly, I have yet to track down.
However, the other, “De schoonheid van hoogspanningslijnen (in het Nederlandse landschap)”, or “The Beauty of Electricity Pylons in the Dutch Landscape”, definitely exists. Here’s an excerpt of a translation of the description:
An often heard opinion is that power lines the horizon visual pollution. The compilers of this publication believe that a conscious way of looking at other aspects of the power line to be apparent, and often there is a certain beauty. The beauty can both relate to the mast itself as the perspective effect of a beautifully designed range and how to measure the line indicates the underlying landscape. Preceded by a brief explanation about the function and typology of high-voltage lines, looks at the problems of designing a line entails.
I’d love to see a translation of the work; I suspect it’s not worth learning Dutch for by itself. It’s also great to see a re-appreciation of human creations as beauty - in the National Gallery there’s a Turner painting of Maidenhead Bridge being crossed by a steam locomotive, as well as a French picture of a railway station. More like this, please.
“We just launched a project called lanyrd, which is a play on lanyard. We partly picked the name because the domain was available, but there’s actually a big advantage to using a made-up word: it’s really easy to search for coverage and feedback on Twitter, Google Blogsearch and the like.”
—Simon Willison answering a question on Quora: Why do so many Internet sites end with the letter ‘r’ (but not ‘er’)?
“I haven’t been able to pick up a copy of the Independent’s new mini-paper, i. I do already have a big problem with it though. That name. In the age of Google, calling something by a single letter is just a pain in the bum. How are you meant to search for it?”
—
Swiss Cheese and Bullets on i. The whole thing is worth a read.
“There are a lot of Mac users who’ve never known the joy of using an Adobe software installer, but who soon will.”
—John Gruber: Apple Is No Longer Bundling Flash Player With Mac OS X. Nice dry wit there.
“[Bourne] hasn’t been to Amsterdam yet, because government-trained-killing machines pale in comparison to Dutch cyclists. They don’t call red “Amsterdam green” for nothing.”
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Rocío in Ye Olde Amsterdam. I previously wittered about Amsterdam’s cyclists.
“More people need to do stupid shit. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Don’t do it to make money. Don’t even do it to learn hip new technology X. Do it for the sake of doing something stupid.”
—Zack Holmen, author of Facelette: On TechCrunch in Three Hours and $0. Or, as I’d put it: In Praise Of Hobby Programming.
iPhoto '11 and Letterpress Printing
iPhoto 11 prints letterpress cards
Which is kind of weird.
What i think they mean is that they have a bunch of pre-letterpresed cards, printed with a design which you can slot your photo into. Your photo is then digitally printed over the top of the letterpressed card. Not sure how they could scale it otherwise…
Anyone? Bueller?
If you watch the video of the keynote, about 22 minutes in is the introduction to the letterpress feature, including the video that’s embedded in iPhoto ‘11. That shows cards which take a photo as an insert on the inside.
Still, it’s an interesting choice of addition to the things you can print from the application.
“I don’t yet have the balls to walk into an Apple store with my kitchen scale.”
—Marco Arment in a footnote about glass vs plastic screens on the 15” MacBook Pros, in his commentary on the new MacBook Air.
“I’m still bummed that I failed to talk you in to making #!/usr/bin/javascript work back then, because I think that we were still in the window where we had a shot at smothering Perl in the crib…”
—jwz in a comment on his post about JavaScript and numbers, - Every day I learn something new… and stupid.
