The History of Typography (slyt)

The NSA/DEA police state tango (salon)

At this point, there are a lot more questions than answers about what Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Hanni Fakhoury has dubbed the DEA’s “intelligence laundering” operation. Here are three big ones: How far does all this go? Where does it stop? And why doesn’t the general public seem to give a damn? 

Comedians in cars getting coffee, wherein Jerry Seinfeld does whats on the tin.

What was the location for Hopper's Nighthawks at the Diner painting?
This guy may have found it.

My friends and I who are building websites — we’re kids! We’re kids playing around with tools given to us by adults. In decreasing order of adultness, and leaving out an awful lot, I’m talking about things such as: the Von Neumann stored program computing architecture; the transistor; high-throughput fibre-optic cables; the Unix operating system; the sci-fi-ish cloud computing platform; the web browser; the iPhone; the open source movement; Ruby on Rails; the Stack Overflow Q&A site for programmers; on and on, all the way down to the code that my slightly-more-adult co-workers write for my benefit.

Are coders worth it? (Aeon)

WWD Co. Novelty Catalog

Never Underestimate the Value of a Paint Tube (Smithsonian)

Old punk flyers (tumblr)

Any baseball is beautiful (design observer)

Electric Banana- Masters of Psychedelic Art

Mug shot paintings by Mary Gibney

AMOK, the new album from Atoms for Peace  (Thom Yorke, Flea, joey Waronker, Mauro Refosco) is streaming in its entirety at the band's site.

A visual history of Corvette logos [part1] [part2]
(Via Core77)

Mars colony program lands first investors
Managing the selection process could prove challenging, as Mars One anticipates receiving hundreds of thousands of applications from people interested in becoming Mars colonists.

Mars One plans to launch a series of robotic missions between 2016 and 2020 that will build an outpost on the Red Planet. The first four astronauts will arrive in 2023, and more will touch down every two years after that. There are no plans to return these interplanetary pioneers to Earth.

Message in a binary bottle
Notes from game developers hidden in ROM, found later (sometimes much later) by curious fans armed with diasassemblers.

Gold, Golden, Gilded, Glittering (believermag)
Representations of value, or the unexpected double history of banking and the art world.

If Mars had oceans it would look like this (theatlantic)

Metal Robots - Compressorhead: Ace of Spades (youtube)

The full workout of all that may be some years further out, but the blowout will commence in 2013. The glue that held these markets together was faith that they meant something -- and that faith has been pissed away by fools in high places who drained all the honesty out of them. It was a classic case out of the Joseph Tainter playbook: diminishing returns of ever-increasing complexity addressed with ever-more layers of complexity, larded with systematic lying based on mystifying, opaque jargon, sanctioned statistical misreporting, felonious cronyism, and scuttling of the rule of law. In short, the markets have been taken over in effect by a criminal racketeering syndicate. In doing this, so much resilience has been removed from these market structures that they are riddled with rot, like a mansion infested with carpenter ants. In other words, borrowing a term from Taleb, they are hopelessly fragile. Any little vibration could reduce the whole creaking arrangement into a heap of rubble and ashes. There's plenty of vibration available out there. Events are humming.

James Howard Kunstler predicts 2013

The New York Knicks logo that should have been