Beautiful spirals

Here

If you could design a city

There’s an old joke that you know you're in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it's the other way around you're in hell. In an attempt to conjure up a perfect city, I imagine a place that is a mash-up of the best qualities of a host of cities. The permutations are endless. Maybe I'd take the nightlife of New York in a setting like Sydney's with bars like those in Barcelona and cuisine from Singapore served in outdoor restaurants like those in Mexico City. Or I could layer the sense of humor in Spain over the civic accommodation and elegance of Kyoto. Of course, it's not really possible to cherry pick like this—mainly because a city's qualities cannot thrive out of context. A place's cuisine and architecture and language are all somehow interwoven. But one can dream.

- More from Gabriel Byrne here.

Think even smaller

50 years of the Mini

The Great American Novel

A tour de force in modern American literature. If you read one novel in your life time, make it this one, because, it's like crazy, man.

More hip cat masterpieces at Flickr.

Book Mobile

The icing on the cake is the wheel. For $2127,00, this should be motorized. I want it anyway.

Hydrological Playground

Have fun. Pump water. What a good idea.

NYC Subway Map redesign

More here.

Japanese textile art

The translation of the word, “Kimono,” (literally, “the thing worn”) does not come close to expressing the actual beauty of the garment itself. From the 8th through the 12th centuries, the Kimono achieved its status as the official costume of Japan. Continue.

Eee Eff Gee

Calligraphy is the art of decorative handwriting. From a formal point of view we are talking about decorative ways of representing the ideas of glyphs that we have in our mind. This same idea can be translated to the domain of computation, the result is what I call computational calligraphies. More.

Fun for kids and kid-like adults.