Here’s a nifty technique I’m trying: flagging visited links with a checkmark. Neat trick, but perhaps too gimmicky? I’ll see how it sits. Comments open.

Gary Lauder’s TED talk, in which he proposes a “take turns” traffic sign, is worth it for the cost analysis of how much a three-way stop costs alone. It’s also very short, even for TED, clocking in at 4:27:

Had to post this for the Deadwood connection: Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency letterhead.

The COP15 logo (United Nations Climate Change Conference) is terrific. It was built with a program that adds “dynamic, real-time movement to the logo and takes the rigid grid of the logo and animates it with a series of parameters like flocking and flow fields.” I’d embed it, but the videos look better in context.

Wow, the Litl webbook is lovely: physical and functional simplicity. Nice to see Linux under the covers of something that looks super-easy to use. Of course, it’s super-easy to use because it’s more appliance than general purpose computer, and at $700 a pop for something that does a lot less than a $700 laptop (you can get a decent one for that) they’ve set themselves a tough row to hoe. Very cool, even if I fear its doomed. Tell me when it’s $400 and I can host my own cloud. More info at the litl site.

your.flowingdata: Collect Data About Yourself via Twitter. Like Nicholas Feltron’s personal annual reports (and his related service, Daytum).

Chris Glass recreated this excellent, alternative NYC subway sign:

I will now have to watch Stefan Sagmeister’s TED Talk, “Yes, Design Can Make You Happy.”

I little aggregator-driven coincidence. Yesterday brought me the Love/Hate mirror image t-shirt, and today this U R Fantastic shirt. If $40 is a little rich for your blood and you don’t care if it’s a “limited edition”, you can go for a $20 misprint. (via josh spear)

Washington DC now has far and away the coolest quarter.

The Orbitwheel skates look like a ton of fun. Kinda like a cross between a skateboard and rollerblades. Best of both worlds, almost. Your feet are independent like rollerblades, but you can just step into them without lacing or buckling, like a skateboard. And could they be more portable? Just chuck ‘em in your backpack.

I just watched James Howard Kunstler’s TED Talk on suburbia. Grade A rant. I remember my architecture professors decrying the same stuff. Bad architecture is insidious.

Interesting article in Wired on MDM, a prop shop artists employ to turn their ideas into reality. I had no idea artists might outsource to such a high degree! I guess it seems obvious in hindsight, when you consider pieces that require heavy-duty engineering and safety considerations like Jericho:

Sometimes Schofield gets assignments that seem to defy the laws of physics. Two years ago, artist Anselm Kiefer set out to erect Jericho in the courtyard of the Royal Academy. A pair of towers would be built from concrete slabs balanced on top of each other with no supports or fasteners—and the public would be allowed to step inside the chambers at the base of each stack. Schofield worked with a structural engineer to calculate the ideal weight and pitch of the slabs, then arranged motion-sensitive lasers around the perimeter of the courtyard to detect any movement that might presage a collapse.

Inc. Magazine has a piece on Markus Frind, creator of previously mentioned dating site Plenty of Fish. Check this:

• 1.6 billion page views per month.
• $10 million / year in revenue.
• 3 employees (customer service), with Frind himself working maybe an hour a day doing the rest.
• Eight servers.

This, in spite of being anti-design:

Plenty of Fish is a designer’s nightmare; at once minimalist and inelegant, it looks like something your nephew could have made in an afternoon

… and not listening to his users:

“I don’t listen to the users,” he says. “The people who suggest things are the vocal minority who have stupid ideas that only apply to their little niches.”

Can’t judge a book by its cover, though. It’s no accident his site runs on eight machines instead of 80:

…cleaning up other people’s messes taught Frind how to quickly simplify complex code. In his spare time, he started working on a piece of software that was designed to find prime numbers in arithmetic progression. The topic, a perennial challenge in mathematics because it requires lots of computing power, had been discussed in one of his classes, and Frind thought it would be a fun way to learn how to sharpen his skills. He finished the hobby project in 2002, and, two years later, his program discovered a string of 23 prime numbers, the longest ever. (Frind’s record has since been surpassed, but not before it was cited by UCLA mathematician and Fields Medal winner Terence Tao.) “It was just a way of teaching myself something,” Frind says. “I was learning how to make the computer as fast as possible.”

Impressive, odd fellow. Some kind of savant. I don’t know what kind (certainly not the idiot kind, though).

This couldn’t be much cooler, Josh Silver has come up with an approach to mass-produce glasses for the poor in developing nations, no optician required. Genius.

Great cover on Carrie Fisher’s memoir, Wishful Drinking:

Markus Frind is the CEO of Plentyoffish.com, a dating site. I just read on his blog that his site is #13 in the US (according to hitwise). I wouldn’t necessarily find this noteworthy, except for two things.

First, PoF keeps appearing on my radar. A couple years ago it was when Scoble noted that the site was wildly successful despite being ugly:

At the Northern Voice conference I met Markus Frind, founder of Plentyoffish.com. He’s Google’s #1 Adsense user in Canada. His site is pulling in more than $10,000 per day from Google, he told me, and has millions of passionate users. Tens of millions of page views EVERY DAY. Whew!

What’s the secret to his success? Ugly design. I call it “anti-marketing design.”

(The design hasn’t improved much since, and is still a poster child, along with craigslist, for the anti-design movement.)

Then, a couple weeks ago, PoF popped up in my aggregator again, this time when Jeff Atwood noted that the site serves up all this traffic on just a handful of servers.

Second, Frind pretty much runs the show himself. From his post above:

I still haven’t hired a tech guy to watch over the servers, that will be the first thing i’ll do in 2009, getting tired of running every aspect of the site except customer service myself!

So if we take the hitwise numbers at face value (and I don’t know anything about them), they put these entities in the upper echelon: MySpace, Yahoo!, Google, eBay, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and… Markus Frind. Impressive.

Joseph Sullivan at The Book Design Review picks his favorite book covers of 2008. The Obsession cover needs a closer look to fully appreciate.

You've got to be kidding me. Nike Mercurial Vapor SL cleats, $400:

Defying science and expectations, Nike's newest creation is crafted almost entirely of carbon fiber. Carbon fiber, that revolutionary material used in jets, offers unbelievable strength with incredible lightness. It took Nike three years to design and produce this incredible version of the Vapor. The outsole plate is seven layers of carbon composite material interwoven with TPU and polyurethane. This eliminates the lasting board and puts the foot closer to the ground for a smooth feel. A reinforcing rib offers support. The cleats and stud tips are injected molded to the plate for a strong, single outsole piece, which creates incredible durability. An internal heel cradle keeps your foot securely in place. The upper is the first boot to have a molded carbon fiber upper for an incredible performance and feel. UPPER: Carbon fiber. Internal carbon fiber chassis creates instant acceleration. OUTSOLE: Carbon fiber outsole with injected bladed studs for durability and stability on firm, natural surfaces. WEIGHT: (6.7 oz.) Made in Italy.

What part of the cleats is the "lasting board", and why is it good it was eliminated? I'm looking at the cleats I own now, and I don't see much in the way of extraneous parts. I've never once said, "Man, the lasting board is really weighing me down. When is some ingenious designer going to come up with a way of eliminating it?"

I will concede, though, that 6.7 oz. is a VERY light cleat.

Extreme... beds?

Design blogs have the best gift guides:

• Core77's 77 Design Gifts Under $77
• Inhabitat's Cheap Gifts Under $30
• Josh Spear's "holiday"-tagged posts

Wow, this is a shockingly bad logo:

As a friend noted, do I really want the new direction for my health care to be backwards? And doesn't it look more like CJIIP rather than CDHP?

On the other hand, maybe the backwards bit is appropriate.