XKCD updated his famous Online Communities map (the first one was released in 2007). Tumblr appears North of the Photoblogs island, in the Sea of Opinions. About this map:
Communities rise and fall, and total membership numbers are no longer a good measure of a community’s current size and health. This updated map uses size to represent total social activity in a community ― that is, how much talking, playing, sharing, or other socializing happens there. This meant some comparing of apples and oranges, but I did my best and tried to be consistent.
Estimates are based on the best numbers I could find, but involved a great deal of guesswork, statistical inference, random sampling, nonrandom sampling, a 20,000-cell spreadsheet, emailing, cajoling, tea-leaf reading, goat sacrifices, and gut instinct (i.e. making things up).
Sources of data include Google and Bing, Wikipedia, Alexa, Big-Boards.com, StumbleUpon, Wordpress, Askimet, every website statistics page I could find, press releases, news articles, and individual site employees. Tanks in particular to folks at Last.fm, LiveJournal, Reddit, and The New York Times, as well as sysadmins at a number of sites who shared statistics on condition of anonymity.
• Oct 06, 2010 link notes [via] tagged: art technology design poster data visualization map representation social community Internet statistics illustrator XKCD humor Tumblr census
…meanwhile, my work will continue to appear weekly in the observer for david mitchell’s column - here is this week’s illustration, out on sunday.
Here’s the related Observer’s article.
• Oct 03, 2010 link notes [via] tagged: art illustration illustrator student education grades university customer product humor critic decadence
David Foldvari was born in Budapest, Hungary, but has lived in the UK for the last 20 years. His work often tackles issues of alienation, identity and belonging, formed by a preoccupation with his eastern European roots, combined with his experience of growing up in the UK.
David’s work is bold, darkly humorous and often political in tone, his considered and energetic draftsmanship having led to a prolific output both personally and commercially. Some of his previous clients include the New York Times, Greenpeace, Random House, Penguin Books, Dazed & Confused and Island Records. (Bigactive.com)
Visit David Foldvari’s blog. Some of his artwork can be purchase over at the Product of God online gallery.
• Oct 02, 2010 link notes reblogged from buddybradleyblog [via] tagged: BW academia art blackboard class course humor illustration illustrator professor science student teacher teaching theory university Foldvari
Hark! A Vagrant! is an comic series by Kate Beaton:
Kate Beaton was born in Nova Scotia, took a history degree in New Brunswick, paid it off in Alberta, worked in a museum in British Columbia, then came to Ontario to draw pictures. (About)
Kate owns a degree in History and Anthropology from Mount Allison University.
• Sep 28, 2010 link notes reblogged from chasingthales [via] tagged: Kepler Tycho art astronomy comic earth geocentrism heliocentrism history humor illustration illustrator model paradigm representation revolution science scientific revolution sun Hark A Vagrant
If you mouse over the comic over at XKCD website, you get this comment:
‘Fucking ineffable’ sounds like someone remembering how to do self-censorship halfway through a phrase
• Sep 27, 2010 link notes [via] tagged: art comic illustration illustrator humor obscenity curse Google censorship language English expression ineffable incommunicability communication
Tumblr queue down again

Tumblr queue is broken again. It’s behaving erratically in many different ways. 1) It will not respect the chosen interval of publication (every 12 hours in my case). 2) It sometime refuses to publish a post. 3) Or on the contrary, as it happened a couple of times before, it will publish every post in queue at once. 4) Worst of all, yesterday it quite surprisingly deleted one of my queued post : it hasn’t been published, nor can it be found in my draft, simply gone. I wrote Tumblr support about it : they acknowledged the problems and let me know, as they did before, that their
“developers are aware of the queue issues and will fix them as soon as they can”.
Maybe Tumblr’s staff put this bug in a queue for it to be fixed later. Uh-oh… Meanwhile, I propose a more accurate rendition of the options in the Tumblr queue.
• Sep 20, 2010 link notes [via] tagged: problem bug queue Tumblr Tumblr's queue humor
About The Burt Britton Collection of artists’ self-portraits:
Picking up a bartending shift at the Village Vanguard, the famous New York jazz joint where he usually worked the door, Burt Britton found himself alone at last-call with just one final patron, Norman Mailer. After pouring the esteemed author a final drink, the question was put to Burt, “What do you want from me, Kid?” Exasperated at the end of the long shift, Burt inexplicably responded, “draw me your self-portrait,” handed him a piece of folded paper, and that, simply put, is how it all began.
That night in the mid-Sixties Mailer produced and gave to Britton an amazing object of self-expression, the first of hundreds to come, a self-portrait of the author more revealing than 1000 words. Inspired by Mailer’s product, Britton started to collect. Still at the Vanguard, he gathered self-portraits by Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock after landmark 1966 concerts, he even got a portrait from a New York high-school basketball phenomenon, Lew Alcindor, later the champion Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Moving to the legendary Strand bookstore in about 1968, Britton encountered novelists, poets, journalists, and critics, both the highly regarded and those just starting out. He would respectfully ask local and visiting literary luminaries such as Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Jorge Luis Borges to add their self-portrait to his album with the same democratic spirit that he offered the young John Irving, just months away from the fame that came with The World According to Garp. (Bloomsbury’s auction catalogue : PDF)
Bloomsbury’s catalogue contains every items in the Burt Britton Collection along with details and explanations about the Collection in general and some specific explanations about each self-portrait as well. Alternatively, one can browse the collection over at the Bloomsbury Auctions official website. Back in 2009, there was a story about this collection in The New York Times: “Self-Portraits Speak More Than Words” by James Barron, September 23th, 2009.
Previously on Skandalon : Don DeLillo
• Sep 18, 2010 link notes reblogged from leugenio [via] tagged: art illustration self-portrait collection DeLillo author book artist ressource humor critic punk
― How come suddenly you’re an expert on women? ― I’ve got seven wives. How many you’ve got? ― So why aren’t you at home with your seven wives? ― I know how to marry them. Nobody knows how to live with them. ― So why did you marry them for? ― Shee-shee… someday I have to tell you the facts of life. |
• Sep 02, 2010 link notes tagged: art movie film cinema fact life women marriage humor
In the 50s and 60s, as the whole ‘Mad Men’ advertising agency era was booming, no one came close to Gescheidt for innovative photography, and he created numerous campaigns, magazine, book, and album covers. His images often both flattered and mocked American sensibilities, and his ’30 Ways To Stop Smoking’ series from 1964 remains a landmark in satirical conceptual photography. (Field Of Vision: Alfred Gescheidt)
• Aug 29, 2010 link notes tagged: art photograph photographer photomontage montage manipulation simulacrum representation smoke smoking cigarette propaganda humor isolation
The purpose of science is to get paid for doing fun stuff if you’re not a good enough programmer to write computer games for a living (Schulman et al. 1991). Nominally, science involves discovering something new about the universe, but this is not really necessary. What is really necessary is a grant. In order to obtain a grant, your application must state that the research will discover something incredibly fundamental. The grant agency must also believe that you are the best person to do this particular research, so you should cite yourself both early (Schulman 1994) and often (Schulman et al. 1993c). |
About Improbable Research:
>Improbable research is research that makes people laugh and then think. Improbable Research is the name of our organization. We collect (and sometimes conduct) improbable research. We publish a magazine called the Annals of Improbable Research, and we administer the Ig Nobel Prizes.
First spotted via Neatorama.
• Aug 26, 2010 link notes tagged: science communication research academia paper publication humor how-to knowledge grant


