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NOTCOT.ORG Your lovely places 502 - Hung Out to Dry: A Taxonomy of City Blocks | Strange Maps Kublai Khan had noticed that Marco Polo's cities resembled one another, as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements. In an urbanist twist to the Tales of the Thousand and One Nights, Polo the Venetian regales Khan the Mongolian with glimpses of some fabulous cities in the latter's huge empire. The stories, collected in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, oscillate between truth and fiction. Each of Polo's cities displays one unique, defining feature. Imagined cities built from the fragments of real ones: something similar is happening in Tout bien rangé, a cartography-based artwork by French artist Armelle Caron. The transformational process involved is threefold: the city on map A is deconstructed, its blocks are classified for size and shape, then reassembled in rows, arranged by type, on map B. In what the artist herself calls Anagrammes graphiques de plans de villes, Caron strips cities of their spatial context.

What are you lookin’ at? Cool Sites To Feed Your Photo Fetish | MakeUseOf readers are a discerning bunch. While its true that I say this to flatter you it may very well be true, and so it is only fitting that this site now sports a fresh new look. Your aesthetic curiosity now whetted by the new MakeUseOf, where do you turn to for supplementary visual pleasure? This post has two goals in mind: first, it lists a few interesting sources, some that offer photographs that are simply beautiful or quirky, while others are pertinent to events or offer cultural insights. Before we proceed, a word of caution: while the sites mentioned here are both interesting and artistic, be warned that not all the content on them may be safe for work. Flickr’s “Last 7 Days Interesting” Set It would be sacrilege to speak of photography on the internet without mentioning Flickr, and some might contend (though I do not) that the list can even end right here. DeviantART DeviantART is an old (and favourite) name for chronic wallpaper hunters and admirers of digital art.

Ballajack Stanford School of Engineering - Stanford Engineering Everywhere Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Information wants to be f Never before in history have people paid as much for information as they do today. I’m guessing that by the time you reached the end of that sentence, you found yourself ROFLAO. I mean, WTF, this the Era of Abundance, isn’t it? The Age of Free. Digital manna rains from the heavens. Sorry, sucker. Do the math. -Internet service -Cable TV service -Cellular telephone service (voice, data, messaging) -Landline telephone service -Satellite radio -Netflix -Wi-Fi hotspots -TiVO -Other information services So what’s the total? The reason we fork out all that dough is (I’m going to whisper the rest of this sentence) because we place a high monetary value on the content we receive as a result of those subscriptions and fees. Now somebody remind me how we all came to think that information wants to be free. It’s a strange world we live in. Somebody’s got a good thing going. UPDATE: Alan Jacobs, over at Text Patterns, adds an interesting gloss to this post:

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