We are all familiar with Blackle, the site that duplicates Google but with a black screen that purports to be environmentally beneficial because it takes energy to light up a pixel.
My engineering grad student cousin did the math and came up with an interesting result:
- Assuming the electricity came from burning coal (the worst way possible!):
- Approximately 8 tonnes of CO2 / kW-year is released from generation of the electricity
- Blackle has saved 91 grams of greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet
- “CDM Gold Standard” carbon offsets cost approximately $34 / tonne
- Using the $500 spent on hosting, 14.7 tonnes of CO2 could have been offset/removed.
Amnesty International's waterboarding video
The centrepiece of their “unsubscribe me from the war on terror” campaign. Horrifying.
A letter from PEN to Tesco, requesting that the grocers don't send a journalist to prison
In Thailand, the store is relying on an archaic “criminal libel” law to put a Thai journalist at risk for hard time and a £16.6 million fine for a story criticising the chain’s dominance of the Thai food sector. Some background here.
Henry Blodget writes in the Silicon Alley Insider about the ad revenue transfer from newspapers to online. Figuring that the US newspaper advertising pool is $42 billion, here is where he guesses that it will go by 2017:
Surviving newspapers: $10 billion (25%)
Magazines: $0
TV: $0
Outdoor: $2 billion (5%)
Digital: $30 billion (70%)
The Times’ Paris correspondent on my second-favourite car.
Eight beauitful ampersands by Hoefler & Frere-Jones.
George Lois’ 60s Esquire covers were “‘pictorial Zolas’ — you know, ‘J’accuse.’ ”
A short profile of the designer who helped change the magazine covers from a tease to a statement in itself.
Vienna’s excellent Architekturzentrum will be hosting a new photography show, opening this Wednesday, April 24, called Sinai Hotels.
With images by Sabine Haubitz and Stefanie Zoche of Haubitz+Zoche, the show looks at “the concrete skeletons of five-star hotel complexes” abandoned on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
They are resorts that never quite happened, then, with names like Sultan’s Palace and the Magic Life Imperial. This makes them “monuments to failed investment.”
As one would expect, an interesting discussion with NYTimes.com design director Khoi Vinh
We pay a lot of attention to how people use our content online. That is, not just how they read it, but how they make use of it: how they might scan the page haphazardly rather than diligently reading from top to bottom; what parts of the page they look to first and last; what they expect to change from visit to visit; which visual cues are meaningful for them and which design flourishes they find useless.
This is what differentiates the NYTimes from your local crap newspaper website.
Vinh was also involved in the design of TheOnion.com, which has the aim to be a fake news website that is designed straighter than any straight news website. Here’s a good story on his technique.
As determined by graphic designers interviewed in this NY Times piece.
And in the comments, McCain the candidate uses McCain foods logo.