here is a chart that i made, trying my darndest to represent the win-loss-draw relationship between the four teams in each of the eight world cup groups. if there were only three teams per group, this type of visualisation would be relatively straight forward. with four teams (and two spatial dimensions), things get a little dicey and the visualisation turns into a topological math problem. in the end, i wound up with this shield design based on a solution to a similar problem by john venn. i hope it is not overly confusing.

know your c••cuses

i’d like to send a big cyber-five to my squash coach, allan who, while getting his hoopty tuned, was able to program me a computer program which—more or less—outputs reams and reams of words which have similar letters in similar places.

now alls i need to do is befriend somebody else who can program a computer program that will add the tube-style, technicolour lines and then i will be able to retire to the south of france and take up a hobby like metal detectoring beaches for tennis bracelets and rare bottlecaps.

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pre·viously, also: i still don’t have a good name for this series. if you do, i’d love to hear from you. i mean, i’d love to hear from you anyway, though naming this series is a convenient excuse for discourse.

know your t•r•ids

know your mo•g•ls

like a crossword puzzle but for the spectrum of food

fun with authors’ names #2

what’s longer than an 8-author name chain? how bout one that goes on for ∞? and what’s longer than ∞?

3 × ∞, duh.

fun with authors’ names #1

i know, i know, i had to compromise on lewis carroll’s name, but such is the nature of the fun with authors’ names game*. (also, he was a freaky-deeky—just sayin’)

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*this game also works, though is slightly less fun, with the names of musicians and, to a lesser degree, the stars of pornographic cinema.

in hot pursuit of the most deceptively named animal

thanks to a lot of stellar comments, i have been catatonically obsessing over deceptively named animals all weekend long. i built this chart to help determine which animal is the biggest impostor on planet earth. it turns out* it’s the sea cucumber! silly sea cucumber, you’re not even in the same kingdom as the key ingredient of my tzatziki sauce.

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*unless of course, the rules of our pursuit allow us to add up the non-antness, non-lionness qualities of the antlion.

special thanks to the remarkable f+l blog for helping me rethink the size of my footnotes.

not worth your time

when i was on my daily snow jog (making my quads look like those of a thoroughbred stallion), a glint of metal from a tarnished nickel caught my eye. here’s the thing: normally raynor ganan never breaks up his workout routine for any reason, nor does he stop to retrieve anything less than a newly-minted benjamin or a hot wheels rear loading 1969 volkswagen beach bomb—but this time i paused briefly before double-timing it up a hill to make my obliques pop. i am a consumer of luxury brands like banana republic, but what would a member of the gap bourgeois or <choke> the prole navy do in a similar situation*?

i decided to try to correlate the act of retrieving a found coin with the value of one’s time. this chart is the result. the calculations are proprietary, so i cannot reveal them though i should mention that in order to determine the average time that it takes for one to bend over and retrieve a coin, i scattered a sack of pennies outside the local all-girls catholic school and filmed the result from the tinted windows of my van.

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*another metric that i have developed to help one determine one’s class is this: the next time that you are making stuffed peppers, observe the colour of the pepper that you are stuffing. if it is green, you are unfortunately a member of the lower class. if it is red, you have found yourself in the middle class. if it is yellow, you are an aristocrat like me and are thus eligible for a banana republic luxe card.

#7 of 6

i ran past a wild turkey on my run yesterday and, now that i think about it, he was definitely flirting with me. the rapscallion!

i am off to a far corner of a state known as new hampshire to roast up a ballotine known as turducken. i will return tripping on tryptophan and stuffed with stuffing sometime next week. s’long y’all.

whiskey tango foxtrot

for kicks: the next time that you are making reservations over the phone with a maître d’, why not use the unhelpful phonetic alphabet to spell your name? as my former accordion instructor points out, “efficiency is the enemy of serendipity.”

r.i.a.a. affect booger naughty our r.i.a.a. over and out.

phaeton.otf

this summer, my cyberbuddy, kevin cornell (of the superest) released phaeton, a knee-slappingly, eye-telescopingly, ear-steamingly gorgeous old-timey typeface.

i am a sucker for 1—period fonts (especially when the period is victorian or edwardian); 2—hand drawn fonts; and 3—fonts with scads of alternates, ornaments, swash capitals, and catchwords. it should therefore be little surprise that i chose phaeton to be the new official typeface of the ragbag worldwide brand. it has dethroned origami to get to this esteemed position.

update: i have just received word that origami is “doing just fine” and is living in exile in zurich.

further update: from 3rd party accounts, i have learned that origami has taken mrs eaves—the filthy harlot—as his mistress.

the flag for constructed languages

since we are on the topic of the tower of babel, i should point out that because of its association with language, the tower features prominently on the (æsthetically pleasing) flag of constructed languages. apparently, a right of passage of a fabricated language is having genesis 11:1-9 (the tower of babel section) translated into it.

while the ziggurat/devo hat icon is totally badass and the colour fills a conspicuous void of purple among flags of the world, i find it kind of ridiculous that a concept this abstract merits its own flag. where is the flag for binomial nomenclature? what colour is the flag of trigonometric functions? who gets to fly the trochaic pentameter flag?

i made this for a project in woodshop class and got a d+. major bummer!!!! i ran home and hid under a pile of blankets until it was time for dinner.

receiving robo-facials

the fact that modern day photo programs like picasa and iphoto have the ability to recognise my face gives me the heebie-jeebies. i have tried to disguise myself by: growing a beautiful mustache, wearing XL hipster glasses, and shaving off my exquisite unibrow to no avail—picasa can still somehow distinguish between me and my many handsome associates. how far would i have to go to keep these systems from recognising me? furthermore, what is the threshold of abstraction for a face to still be understood as a face? enter scott mccloud and his graphical abstraction scale from understanding comics.

before i start presenting this groundbreaking chart at siggraph, i should note that the function of facial recognition in photo programs is to help catalogue your photo database, it is NOT for helping you organize your manga collection. thus neither iphoto’s literal view of the world or picasa’s high tolerance for icon is better than the other.

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many many thanks to my taekwondo sparring partner for running this image through iphoto and reporting back the results in the scientific manner that this issue deserves.