Chicago used to use an extensive series of small underground trains for transport between large downtown buildings.

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Here’s a road which had been cut with grooves in order to create musical notes. It’s reminiscent of a very late-night (possibly slightly drunken) conversation I had several years ago with a musician friend about outlandish possible ways of distributing his music. They’ve actually done it.

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Paradoxes of Creative People

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Flow fame writes a piece on creative types and their many paradoxes.

Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead. Yet there are good reasons why this should be so. These individuals are well aware that they stand, in Newton’s words, “on the shoulders of giants.” Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective. They’re also aware of the role that luck played in their own achievements

Giant Cow Heads Found in Abandoned Building

Maybe it’s a sign that my “real life” commitments getting the best of me since I keep linking to Walking Turcott Yards instead of writing my own stuff, but I really liked this post about some old advertising icons that were discovered somewhere unexpected.

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Redefining Waiting

A neat little story about how a landlord stopped complaints about elevator wait times by installing mirrors, which proved distracting enough to keep people occupied.

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A Year of Heavy Losses

The New York times has a little interactive chart showing which American financial companies have lost what over the last few days.

Shepard Fairy Style Dion Poster

Jack Dylan has his own version of the famous poster. I don’t agree with this sentiment, but it seems a whole lot of people aren’t Dion fans.

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Humans Matter Less

Creator of The Wire, David Simon, gives a lengthy lecture on some of his beliefs that influenced the best show on television in a long time.

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Movie Credits History

A peek into how the movie industry has changed via its credits.

The Book Vase

I can’t imagine this is durable or easy to clean, but it looks neat.

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Swipe Keyboard

It’s little wonder that making an efficient and accurate keyboard on a small mobile device is very, very difficult. Here is a video of one which looks promising. These devices need everything they can get.

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The CO2 output of Concrete

Concrete is responsible for 7-10% of CO2 emissions worldwide, making it the biggest climate change culprit outside of transportation and electricity-generation.

An oft-neglected environmental problem is the CO2 created by cement production. This article outlines the problems and some possible solutions.

Athens Olympic Venues Unused

Living in a former Olympic City with an unused main stadium we only managed to pay off two years ago (the Montreal Olympics were in ‘76) I’m not at all surprised to see this video showing the unused state of the venues from the Athens Olympics. There’s something about the Olympics that seems to make architects think they can just drop their stadiums and athletic facilities in the middle of a field of concrete with no regard for how they’ll be used for the decades after the games. There’s little wonder that they’re often abandoned and somewhat depressing as soon as all the crowds leave.

The planning committees should have retrofits in mind when they build the facilities to keep them functional when they’re done with - including covering up some of that ugly and barren concrete with something practical.

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Elevator Group Behavior

A classic clip from Candid Camera which shows just how easy it is to get people to bend to group behavior.

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HP Packages New Laptops in Messenger Bags

A simple solution to reducing packaging, so long as those messenger bags are at least somewhat decent in quality.

My Photos of Port in the City

Yesterday, Montreal’s port had an open house. There were tours by train, bus and boat which carried visitors into the heart of the city’s port operations. It was great to see the inner workings of a system which is easy to take for granted. We saw ocean-going freighters being unloaded, and the much smaller lake-going ships readying themselves to take cargo to the great-lake cities of Toronto, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Thunder Bay.

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Time Fountain

A relatively simple little fountain that ingeniously seems to bend time.

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Zoom into Concrete

A powers of 10 style video that shows the structures of concrete in great detail, down to a molecular level. Like the original poster, I would love to see this done for other materials.

10 Beautiful Data Visualizations

Some of these are great, but some are pretty purely aesthetic.

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Smashing Telly

A great site of well-curated documentaries, most of them full length. Recently featured: Air Guitar Nation, The Vice Guide to North Korea, Saul Bass, and a documentary about Stanley Kubrick. Of course there’s lots more too.

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Thoughts on Seeing Leonard Cohen Live

Sean of Said the Gramophone with his first article for McSweeney’s - a very Montreal-y take on one of Montreal’s favourite musicians.

Analog Letter

A neat little idea of sending a letter rolled-up inside an analog cassette. Cute.

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10 Things You Shouldn’t Buy New

A very quick guide of things that make more sense financially to buy used. I would also expand “office furniture” to include home furnishings as well. There is a lot of low-quality furniture out there, but the old stuff is often the best.

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Church Windows Help Purify the Air

Gold used in old church windows helps purify the air when exposed to sunlight.

“For centuries people appreciated only the beautiful works of art, and long life of the colors, but little did they realise that these works of art are also, in modern language, photocatalytic air purifier with nanostructured gold catalyst,” Professor Zhu said.

Prints by Bree,ree

I just spent about 30 minutes going through this guy’s prints. They’re great.

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The Largest Police have Ever Seen

The worst kind of crime hits my home province.

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The Bitter End

Anyone in Montréal over the fall should check out Dan Beirne (of Said the Gramophone fame) in his new improvised “sitcom” The Bitter End. I’ve not seen it live yet, but I have seen this funny preview on their blog (where they also hope to be posting every single episode).

Ignore That Logo Under the Tape

Apparently the authorities in Beijing are banning all corporate logos in the olympic venues, except for those of the official sponsors. This means that all sinks, toilets, fire extinguishers, security systems etc. have ugly bits of white tape on them.

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Shipping Container Hotel

A hotel made from stacked shipping containers, which comes out looking like a somewhat conventional hotel. It was apparently much cheaper, faster, and caused less waste on site.

Unfortunately, however, the shipping containers, which form the rooms, are put together in China and shipped halfway around the world. So basically they’ve figured out how to outsource the construction of buildings.

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Amazing Shadow Performance

Looks like it’s from the Conan O’Brien show, but I don’t know anything about this.