Shane Glines is an illustrator and animator with an astonishingly fabulous retro style, simple and playful, with strong lines and color. Love love love his stuff. His web site is awesome; he has a couple books out (S Curves and The Lily and Flinch Sketchbook, and he runs a subscription site of his and others’ illustrations called Cartoon Retro. Warning: he draws naked girls a lot.

(I got it from Drawn! The Illustration Blog.)

NameVoyager: a baby name wizard

This is a totally fascinating bit of information visualization, from iVillage. Enter letters and it shows you names starting with those letters, plus the popularity of those names in the US. from the 1880′s to 2005. I’ve been using it to come up with character names in short stories.

Now this is one neato map. Its a breakdown of the regional term for a sweet carbonated beverage across the united states, based on actual survey data submitted to www.popvssoda.com. Click a state for raw data.

What I find especially interesting about this is that although I knew soda vs. pop vs. coke was regional, I didn’t realize how incredibly distinctly regional it was. Some of these dividing lines are really stark, for reasons I cannot begin to imagine. Why is is soda in eastern PA and pop in western with a near perfect dividing line between the two? Ditto California and Oregon? What is with that big blotch of soda in St. Louis? And just what precisely does “other” mean?

Where I come from, its “soda.”

(I got it from Slashfood

There’s a big stink right now in San Francisco about putting a suicide barrier up on the Golden Gate Bridge. Some 1200 people have jumped off the bridge since it opened in 1937. The notion is that the bridge itself is an attraction to suicidal people in the same way that the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower used to be; put up a barrier (basically: a big fence) and you remove the temptation. The argument against the barrier is that the bridge itself and the view from the bridge are amongst the most beautiful in the world and a barrier would destroy both the aesthetic of the bridge and that of the view. (and if you’ve ever tried to see Paris or New York through the big steel grates they’ve got up on the Eiffel and the Empire State now, you might be inclined to agree with that argument).

A few weeks back the SF Chronicle published this interesting infographic about the location of suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge. Things I learned from this map:

• There are more sad people in San Francisco than in Marin. Either that or suicidal Marinites like to take a long walk before jumping.
• People like to center their suicides between the two bridge towers.
• If you are going to jump off the bridge, you do not bring your bicycle. (the bike lane is on the west (ocean) side of the bridge).
• Jumping over land: very unpopular, but for some of the very sad San Franciscans laziness apparently wins out. (“walk all the way out to the middle of the bridge? hell no!”)

Personally I think the whole issue could be solved with giant nets underneath the bridge. Catch the jumpers in the nets and then let them sit there overnight in the notoriously horrible golden gate wind and reconsider that whole bridge idea. Bet the Golden Gate stops being so attractive real fast.

THE ZOOMQUILT, a collaborative art project. Whoa. (sound of head exploding)

Check out this great (albeit kind of graphic) poster for a bike messenger hallowen ride out of NYC. Warning: a tad graphic. The artist is Ulgalde, who does weird Giger-like otherworldly-like sketches. Cool stuff.

(I got it from Velorution.)

This guy is collecting vintage bicycle chainring designs and getting a full-sleeve tattoo of them on his arm. I had no idea there were so many different kinds of chainring, or that they were so pretty. Very cool.

(I got it from Velorution.)

I have a lot of respect for people who can present technical information visually in an interesting way. I can do the writing, but visual design is not my strong point — not just graphic design, site design, but information design (its a different thing). So when I come across something like Mark Lentczner’s Periodic Table of Perl Operators (PDF) I just sit and gaze in awe. Wow. Its just awesome. (of course you have to understand something about Perl to know WHY its awesome, but trust me, it is).

I look at a set of Perl operators and I think in terms of a table; to come up with this kind of organization and layout requires some kind of sense of spacial multidimensional thought that I just don’t have. Totally fascinating. Plus, the column labels are really funny. (via rc3.org Daily

Back when I was a goth I had a real thing for cemetery sculpture: for angels draped in despair on headstones, etc. I had a photograph of a cemetery angel on my home page for a long time. I even wrote angsty fiction about it (you cannot be a goth unless you write angsty fiction.*)

This is a really beautiful collection of cemetery art and sculpture from around the world.

*I am JOKING. Do NOT send me hate mail.