Simian Design

These are my delicious links for August 6th through August 7th:

• Living Root Bridges – In the depths of northeastern India, in one of the wettest places on earth, bridges aren't built – they're grown.

  The living bridges of Cherrapunji, India are made from the roots of the Ficus elastica tree. This tree produces a series of secondary roots from higher up its trunk and can comfortably perch atop huge boulders along the riverbanks, or even in the middle of the rivers themselves.

• Build your own IcyBall – The Crosley IcyBall is a commercial early-twentieth century portable chemical refrigerator that runs without moving parts or electricity. Cooling is caused by the evaporation and re-adsorption of ammonia into a water-based solution, which is a spontaneous process that can be reversed by applying heat, as from a campfire.

These are my delicious links for April 20th:

• Webphemera: Franklin: The Lost State of America – What led to the creation of the State of Franklin and why isn’t around today? Even more to the point, why hasn’t anyone ever made a movie out of this strange but remarkable story? My parents would live right near the State of Franklin if it were around today.
• Amateur Snapper | 10 Top Photography Composition Rules – The only rule in photography is that there are no rules. However, there are many composition guidelines which can be applied in almost any situation, to enhance the impact of a scene. Below are ten of the most popular and most widely respected composition 'rules'.

These are my delicious links for March 31st:

• Solving a Rubiks Cube. – My sons Rubiks Cube just got all messed up. I could get the top two layers, but not the bottom one. I cheated, and found this handy reference chart online. I totally need to learn these moves.

These are my delicious links for March 24th through March 26th:

• Alpine Hut – Gorgeous 6×11 Alpine hut by OFIS Architects. The hut is situated in a small Alpine village, part of Triglav national park in Slovenia, with very strict rules of construction and architectural design. The client bought the site together with existing construction permit for the generic project. Demand was not to change construction permit but change the elements of the house to suit his family, sustainable factor and open the windows toward the views.
• Rebuilding Spotlight's Index on OS X (Manually) | Walt-O-Matic – My spotlight recently got hosed, this is a good reference on how to fix that.
• Letter from an AIG Official; The Other Side of the Story. – The resignation letter of an AIG executive explaining his point of view on the bonus furor. The proverbial other side of the story.
• Fuck That. – Russian teens have now new fun. They dare trains.
  This is needed to be done fast, because if one is appearing before the train too long before and machinist could see him and start breaking, so they run on the rails just before the train so he couldn’t start breaking and fell down on the rails, then the train moves above the person at his maximum speed, just a few inches from his head and back.
• Top 10 Time-Lapse Videos Show Nature at Work | Wired Science from Wired.com – When a phenomenon happens very slowly, viewing accelerated footage helps scientists take a step back and see the big picture: At higher speeds, things that we regard as fixed take motion — even the dullest scenes spring to life.
  Here are Wired Science's picks of the best time-lapse videos of nature at work.
• Travel photography: The Wave – Los Angeles Times – The Wave is a red-rock stunner on the border of Arizona and Utah, made of 190-million-year-old sand dunes that have turned to rock. L.A. Times photographer Spencer Weiner captured the swirling drama of this little-known formation that's accessible only on foot via a three-mile hike and highly regulated. (To apply for a permit, go to the Bureau of Land Management's Arizona Web page.)

These are my delicious links for February 11th through February 13th:

• Petzal: The Rules of Gunfighting | Field & Stream – 1. Forget about knives, bats and fists. Bring a gun. Preferably, bring at least two guns. Bring all of your friends who have guns. Bring four times the ammunition you think you could ever need.

  2. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammunition is cheap – life is expensive. If you shoot inside, buckshot is your friend. A new wall is cheap – funerals are expensive

• Star Trek Inspired Corset – Wow. Now I need myself a Capt. Kirk outfit to complete the role-playing experience this will entail. But certainly the most fun you can have playing Star Trek, I can guarantee you that.
• Shuron Eyewear – These are some eyeware frames I can get behind. There are about 5 I'm seriously looking at. The retro feel of them just appeals to me.
• Paper-Based Visualization Competition: The Winner and More … – Winners chosen for the Paper-Based Visualization. Some very nice entries, worth browsing.
• Mindfuck Movies – "Some movies inform. Some movies entertain. And some pry open your skull and punch you in the brain."
• Japanese Bladesmiths – A unique behind-the-scenes visit of the crafstmen who hammer out the best and most expensive kitchen knives in the world in the city of Sakai, Japan.
• BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | 'Arctic unicorns' in icy display – Nice video of these Narwhal. They're just odd. The BBC filmed the whales during their summer migration, as they navigated through cracks in the melting Arctic sea ice.

  The team believes this aerial footage, which forms part of the BBC Natural History Unit's new series Nature's Great Events, is the first of its kind.

• A House that Takes Outside/Inside to the Extreme | Design & Innovation … – I like this (in the proper climate). California architects of the 1970s were a big force in popularizing the idea of indoor/outdoor living, with houses that featured huge patios and glass-walled living rooms. But a new villa in Germany pushes the idea to its logical extreme.
• Phantom Corsair from 1938 – Boing Boing – Wow. Why don't they build cars like this? This is super-mega-fantatically-awesome. Seriously. Build this and jetpacks, so I can die happy.
• Surprising stories behind 20 Muppet characters – CNN.com – Fascinating. Did you know Oscar the Grouch was originally an alarming shade of orange. In Pakistan, his name is Akhtar and he lives in an oil barrel. In Turkey, he is Kirpik and lives in a basket. And in Israel, it's not Oscar at all — it's his cousin, Moishe Oofnik, who lives in an old car.

These are my delicious links for February 4th through February 5th:

• A Snake of Unusual Size – Neatorama – HOLY CRAP BATMAN! This snake, this monster measured 42 feet long, weighed about 2,500 lbs., and slithered through the rainforests 60 million years ago devouring crocodiles.
• Great retro Helvetica ad from Linotype – This is fantastic.
• Monks in Space (an Aliens3 movie that never was) – There were many iterations of the Alien 3 script. One of the more exotic ones was the Vincent Ward & John Fasano "monks in space" script, illustrated here. Looks fantastic.
• Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites – A great list of ways to address some of the pain points of building and maintaining a modern website.
  List is split this into two sections. The first he calls “below the line,” which are more system level (some things straddle the line) The second section, which he calls “above the line” are common application level components that typically depend on one or more of the components above.

These are my delicious links for February 4th:

• Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering – Comic book lettering has some grammatical and aesthetic traditions that are quite unique. What follows is a list that every letterer eventually commits to his/her own mental reference file.

These are my delicious links for January 19th through January 20th:

• How to Design the Perfect List – Lists are a beautiful way to display content and information in a very easy to scan, easy to read method. Lists are found on most blogs to list posts, comments, tags, or links. In this post we will be exploring the modern practices of lists as an element of web design and they will be showing you how to design better lists to add to the overall design of your site.
• Slave reunion photo from 1916 – Wow. This is a photo from 1916 of 4 former slaves. They're all over 100 years old. James Madison was president when they were born, and America was 36 years old. And here they are in a relatively "modern" photo. I'm blown away.
• Harry Eng – Master Bottle Filler – One evening Harry was in a London hotel and decided to visit the Puzzle Museum the next morning. When he and his friends had finished their bottle of wine, he took the bottle up to his room. He then filled it with a book of matches, menu, and the pack of cards as a gift for us. This is a particular favorite as he assured us that the only tools he had were a pencil and rubber bands.
• The Sexy Curls jQuery Plugin by Elliott Kember – You know that page-curl effect you get sometimes on sites? This is how to do it with jQuery. Not bad.
• Coaches view of Madison Square Garden – Rangers Coach Tom Renney describes the view form behind the bench at Madison Square Garden.
• Stainless steel teeth – John Gilpin makes himself some stainless steel teeth. Quite amazing.

These are my delicious links for December 23rd:

• 5 Amazing Blue Holes [pics] – These are gorgeous. I'd go diving in them, no problem. But it'd be more of the straight-down and up affair. I don't like a rock ceiling above my head when diving, so I'd avoid venturing out much.

  Gorgeous shots though.

• A Closer Look At the Blueprint CSS Framework – NETTUTS – I don't use Blueprint, nor do I think I fully support these types of frameworks. I think there is a lot of overhead.

  What I do like a great deal is the move towards a standard grid-based layout. What I want is just some standard numbers (960, 12, etc) and some options to implement it.

  But this is a good starting point for those learning about grids.

These are my delicious links for November 13th:

• 12 Principles For Keeping Your Code Clean – The advantages of clean, semantic HTML are many, yet so many websites suffer from poorly written markup.

  Let’s take a look at some poorly written HTML, discuss its problems, and then whip it into shape!

• Image Resizing – Interestingly (and not surprisingly), browsers differ in rendering images at non-native sizes, with some providing noticeably better results than others. Internet Explorer 6 in particular looked to be the least smooth when scaling images down, but some interesting workarounds are available.