Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m a freak about typography. I love well used type. Okay, I’ll admit it. I am also a transportation freak. I love a beautifully designed transit system. While I’m confessing, I’ll admit it: I almost changed my undergraduate major to graphic design and urban planning. Maybe if they had had a joint program…

Well, today I got the closest thing: Paul Shaw’s AIGA article on the history of typography and the NYC subway system. Entitled The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway, Shaw blends a beautiful history of fonts, signs, and the complicated birth of the modern NYC subway system.

There is a commonly held belief that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway system, a belief reinforced by Helvetica, Gary Hustwit’s popular 2007 documentary about the typeface. But it is not true—or rather, it is only somewhat true. Helvetica is the official typeface of the MTA today, but it was not the typeface specified by Unimark International when it created a new signage system at the end of the 1960s. Why was Helvetica not chosen originally? What was chosen in its place? Why is Helvetica used now, and when did the changeover occur? To answer those questions this essay explores several important histories: of the New York City subway system, transportation signage in the 1960s, Unimark International and, of course, Helvetica.

It’s been a long day - you enjoy a treat. Read it here.

As frequent readers know, the New Media team at gnovis kicked off the academic year with a four part series on why we blog. The perspectives were each interesting and provocative, and certainly worth revisiting.

These types of belly-gazing blog posts are common around the web. However, following a link from Steve today, I was surprised to see this conversation in in the Atlantic as well.

Andrew Sullivan (of the Atlantic and on his blog The Daily Dish) has written a compelling piece that situates the act of writing a blog post next to more formal writing. I have been a fan of Andrew Sullivan’s writing since I first read Love Undetectable in high school, and was delighted to see that same prose here. Starting with antiquity and moving forward to Montaigne, he attempts to represent the very ethos of blogging:

To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger will notice this almost immediately upon starting. Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does. They will send links, stories, and facts, challenging the blogger’s view of the world, sometimes outright refuting it, but more frequently adding context and nuance and complexity to an idea. The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it. He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.

While in the gnovis peice I argued that a personal obligation to participate in a community was my reason for blogging, I have to admit that it is a dynamic community that may constantly be reshaped by the items to which I can only hope I add “nuance and complexity”.

This is just rediculous. I was watching Colbert last night when Steven talked about a cat in Japan that had been appointed station manager. What next? Tourists, of course.

According to this post at Japan Probe:

Little Tama has proven to be incredibly popular, drawing tourists to Wakayama and generating healthy revenue for the Wakayama Electric Railway

Apparently Tama has made so much money that they even gave him an office. You’ve got to check this out:

Is there a dark side of email? I couple weeks ago I posted the following on Twitter:

Apparently the answer is yes.

Is there a solution? Brett sent me an email a couple days back. All it contained was a link to one of Google’s new projects: “Mail Goggles”

According to Gmail’s blog,

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?

But as TechCrunch points out, it is far from fool-proof:

There are two problems with the product. First, I hate math. Second, if I want to send a drunken email, and all that’s standing between me and success are a few math problems, I’m gonna go find that calculator.

And of course what about Twitter, IM, or the infamous drunk Facebook wall posting? In the meantime Brett, I resent the insinuation that I am bad at math.

Also known as things I am a bit embarrassed to admit I haven’t gotten around to yet.

Back in 2005, when I first started coming to D.C. for business, I was a power-tourist. Each day I would finish with my work obligations around 3:30 and then book-it over to the Mall to get in a museum. This of course didn’t always work.

Funny story: One afternoon after having spent most of the previous night preparing for that day at work, my touristy dedication had me at the Hirshorn viewing art. Intrigued by the video exhibit downstairs, I walked in, sat down, and was happy to be off my feet. Next thing I knew a security guard was roughly poking me.

“Museum’s closed,” he said. Through the mix of exhaustion and confusion, I suddenly realized that this poking, so anachronistic in the moment, could only mean that I had fallen asleep. Asleep, in a suit, sitting on a bench in the dark. Lovely. Rushing past the guard, I quickly excused myself, still trying to reorient myself to the circumstances.

When I moved to D.C. I fully intended to spend every weekend at the Smithsonians. “One a week,” I told myself. I am sure many people have this ambition, and like many of the same, I am sure we never quite make it. Well, with the prospect of moving on for that Ph.D. I decided that to start this academic year I should make a list of all those things I have been meaning to do, but haven’t quite gotten around to. So without further ado, in no particular order, my top ten: (more…)

My friend Tim from Utah has been visiting this week. Last night in the midst of John Stewart, he asked the following question: “How do you think history will treat President Bush?”

Compared to my Media and Politics focused peers at CCT I am a totally poli-wuss. All the same we compared notes, exchanged ideas, and then quickly agreed that we had no idea. Will history blame Bush for the last 8 year or will he fade into presidential obscurity over time?

Imagine my delight when I found the following clip this morning. Perhaps our problem was with the term “presidential”.

After a week in my new favorite city Chicago (move over Bangkok; check out pictures here and here, and videos here), I am playing that catch up game. My inbox is overflowing and the unread count on my Google Reader is making me question the darker side of RSS. One thing that didn’t change? Twitter. It is still down.

After endlessly defending Twitter to friends, and even giving Twitter kudos during their iPhone 2.0 related downtime, I am beginning to wonder if we shouldn’t be looking at other options.

The reason? No Instant Messenger tweeting. Even more frustrating than the intermittent inability to see who has replied to your tweets (the whole point, no?), the inability for me to submit tweets via IM is killing me. To top things off, my Facebook status/Twitter syncer of choice accesses the service via IM. I have no Facebook status!

I started tweeting via IM as to not add one more web2.0 obligation, but now the overhead of sharing trivial thought is less than trivial. Where does that leave me? Well, relentlessly checking the Twitter Status blog, which unfortunately seems to be as limited as Twitter’s 140 character tweets. It is a fate worse than… well, getting work done.

There is an interesting upside to the twitter-verse having some unexpected time on its hands. No, I am not talking about the temporary demise of Twitter-log Blog entries and repetitive stress thumb injuries. I am talking about a return to fan art! Right in the middle of an “I hate Twitter” fit, I ran across this:

Yes, this is a 3D creation of the twitter image I posted about a couple weeks ago. Apparertly the image was originally created by the Australian illustrator Yiying Lu. I had been pondering the meaning of the image, but Lu’s title of ‘Lifting up a Dreamer’ seems to suggest that Twitter is the whale, and that we are the tweeter struggling to lift it to greater heights. What do they dream about? An IPO? More servers? A t-shirt deal? Who knows, but it seems that even when it is down, people just can’t bring themselves to hate on Twitter.

June 17th will be a great day for internet culture, and no, I am not talking about Firefox 3 (although, go pledge, vote, download, rejoice, etc, and do it today – we are trying to set a world record here!).

No, instead I am talking about animals of a less fiery nature: The 2008 World’s Ugliest Dog Competition.

When doing my research on LOLCats (see gnovis for the result), the topic of the “anti-LOLcat” came up often. These are images that mock the nature of LOLcats, and they are quite funny:

That said, can they compare with this?

Many people asked me why LOLDogs aren’t as popular as LOLCats, and I have never had a good answer. This competition, however, sheds a little light. As Steve said, maybe dogs just need their own thing, and that we should start a new trend: the PIMMDog (aka, Puking in My Mouth Dog). This said right after “How are they alive?”

I think my vote is leaning towards “Elwood.” He/She/It(?) is last year’s winner, but I think this might be a case of an oldie being a goody… or something like that.

Today is the last day to vote, so while you are waiting for your 4th copy of Firefox to download, take a walk over and give these puppies some love. Just don’t get too close.

What makes an academic blog “academic”?

Tonight’s thoughts are brought to you via a post by Ashley over at gnovis on the topic of information overload and blogging. We can all relate to Ashley’s thoughts. You fire up your blog, you throw your thoughts out into the interwebs, and before you know it you are part of a “revolutionary cultural movement” that seems sometimes to be moving, well, nowhere. You are latest victim of that increasingly popular topic: information overload (See Robot Foot and the recent NYT article).

Ashley confessed that the internet had become “something that has stopped [her] own creativity.” But where Ashley has started a new blog project as an answer to information overload, Brad, gnovis’ editor, posted a comment stating that he felt like the standards we set for posts have turned blogging into something of a chore. I can certainly relate to that. A little blog deamon sits on my shoulder all of the time, reminding me that “someone else has probably covered it.” That is probably true in the world of tech, and certainly in politics. Put the two together… and, well, pack your bags and go home. (Today I wanted to write about the DC Twitter feud, only to find that the Huffington Post had already got it, and, err, that it was 2 months old).

But what about academia? Ashley’s post, and Brad’s comment stirred some thoughts that have been lurking in an unpublished format, somewhere in my brain for several months now. Simply asked, what makes a blog “academic”? Compared to the rest of the blog-o-sphere, is academia a different beast? Does it exist outside of the information stream that can overload us? After all, it isn’t as driven by the news.

And so, Ashley, Brad (anyone!) I have a question: How high is the “bar” for an “academic blog”? (more…)

Apparently HappyCat and I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER have combined forces and entered new mediums.

Announcing the I Can Has Cheezburger? LOLcat Colleckshun!

To be released in time for Xmas, this seems like the perfect gift to further confuse my parents about my higher education track.