Transportation

Eco-driving, the
social­ly accept­able in-car video game, where you do your best to make the lit­tle leaf as green as grass. If stud­ies con­tin­ue to prove that instan­ta­neous dis­play of mileage infor­ma­tion prompts dri­vers to tune their dri­ving style to max­i­mize mpg, you may be see­ing more and more of these dis­plays on your dash. Speak­ing of auto-data
tech­nol­o­gy, the boys at Cult of MAC are clear­ly not gear heads but they kind of get the point of the OBD-II read­er that Grif­fin has announced for the iPhone. I just won­der if the soft­ware (app) will be use­ful to the gear heads or only a dri­ve nice­ly pret­ty please app to make the eco-driving crowd coo. 

The Grif­fin site claims that the Car­Trip read­er will allow code check and reset. I’ll be get­ting one to test on the airbag fault light on the Rover. (Grrr.)

To atone for all the geeky green-weenie crap above, I give you: The high­lights of the 2010 British Super Bike Cham­pi­onship. 4 min­utes of thrills, chills, and a cou­ple of spills. (For­give me?) 

Science and Society

30 years of Nation­al Geo­graph­ic pic­tures by Bruce Dale. 9 min­utes of video and a ter­ri­ble pun­ning joke. 

We as a soci­ety are always rewrit­ing our past. It’s inevitable and in large part uncon­scious. But to what extent can we jus­ti­fy delib­er­ate­ly mess­ing about with the images of the past? Did the USPS real­ly need to remove the cig­a­rette from Robert John­son’s mouth? 

Art, Images, and Design

Wal­nut is love­ly. And the dark col­or goes per­fect­ly with cof­fee. Scrap lum­ber becomes some­thing use­ful and beautiful. 

An anony­mous small token of grat­i­tude and gen­eros­i­ty. Com­pli­ments on tear-off tabs. PDF to print. Bring your own sta­ple gun. 

Oooh, the roman­tic allure of the aban­doned sub­way sta­tion. The City Hall Sta­tion in NYC was opened in 1904 and closed to use in 1945. Until recent­ly the only way to get a glimpse at what is arguably the pret­ti­est of the NYC sub­way sta­tions was to sneak in. Not any­more. A recent rule change means that you can now sit tight on the Num­ber 6 as it makes it loop through the old station.

Animation

Megan Tup­per, a recent grad of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wales, has a fine sense of char­ac­ter and the com­ic impli­ca­tions of every­day life. Keys. The truth about cats. (Video 3:26)