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.

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.

The Economist: “Plenty of university graduates are working in low-skilled jobs” Sept. 8th, 2010

Young people often worry whether the qualification for which they are studying will stand them in good stead in the workplace. According to the OECD, college and university leavers are better placed in the labour market than their less educated peers, but this advantage is not even in all countries. Young graduates living in Spain are particularly likely to end up taking low-skilled work, while those in Luxembourg rarely take anything other than a graduate job. American and British students appear to have the biggest incentive to study: British graduates aged 25-34 earn $57,000 on average. Their Swedish peers earn $37,400.

Domic Davies is responsible for the photographies displayed in the famous Big Fat Cookbook:

In this enormous, beautiful book, we hear the full story of the meteoric rise of Heston Blumenthal and The Fat Duck, birthplace of snail porridge and bacon-and-egg ice cream, and encounter the passion, perfection and weird science behind the man and the restaurant.

Heston Blumenthal is widely acknowledged to be a genius, and The Fat Duck has twice been voted the Best Restaurant in the World by a peer group of top chefs. But he is entirely self-taught, and the story of his restaurant has broken every rule in the book. His success has been borne out of his pure obsession, endless invention and a childish curiosity into how things work – whether it’s how smell affects taste, what different flavours mean to us on a biological level, or how temperature is distributed in the centre of a soufflé. (from the editor’s website)

See more excerpt from the book over at Daily Icon. Visit The Fat Duck official website (before being a book, it’s a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in the UK). Learn more about chef Heston Blumenthal on Wikipedia. If you can’t afford the full version of this book (it sells at around 150$ dollars on Amazon) don’t worry : there’s a lowered-price edition of it, selling at around 30$:

The cookbook hailed by the Los Angeles Times as a “showstopper” and by Jeffrey Steingarten of Vogue as “the most glorious spectacle of the season…like no other book I have seen in the past twenty years” is now available in a reduced-price edition. With a reduced trim size but an identical interior, this lavishly illustrated, stunningly designed, and gorgeously photographed masterpiece takes you inside the head of maverick restaurateur Heston Blumenthal. Separated into three sections (History; Recipes; Science), the book chronicles Blumenthal’s improbable rise to fame and, for the first time, offers a mouth-watering and eye-popping selection of recipes from his award-winning restaurant. He also explains the science behind his culinary masterpieces, the technology and implements that make his alchemical dishes come to life. Designed by acclaimed artist Dave McKean—and filled with photographs by Dominic Davies—this artfully rendered celebration of one of the world’s most innovative and renowned chefs is a foodie’s dream. (Amazon)

In any case, be sure to take a look at the Big Fat Undertaking blog: someone actually attempting to do more with this book than looking at the picture.

In Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet—scientists, inventors, and accomplished cooks in their own right—have created a six-volume 2,400-page set that reveals science-inspired techniques for preparing food that ranges from the otherworldly to the sublime. The authors—and their 20-person team at The Cooking Lab—have achieved astounding new flavors and textures by using tools such as water baths, homogenizers, centrifuges, and ingredients such as hydrocolloids, emulsifiers, and enzymes. It is a work destined to reinvent cooking. (About)

Download a 20 pages preview of the book (PDF). Learn more about the authors (Myhrvold was the first chief technology officer at Microsoft : check his wikipedia page). The 6 volumes are all sold together. They can be pre-ordered on Amazon for a meer 500$

Check the original post over at Ulrich’s website 3 Ton Gallery. Eric Ulrich is an artist and designer living in San Francisco. (About)

About this project:

Often love affairs are instable, fleeting and unpredictable. It seems emotions change in a chaotic way. On this assumptions some mathematicians recently modeled a love relationship in terms of dynamic system. One of the case study of this kind of works is Jules et Jim, the autobiographical novel of Henri Pierre Roché and his cinematographic version by François Truffaut. The main psycho-physical features of the three characters and their long and turbulent triadic relationship have been synthesized in a mathematical model enlightening the relationship as a real chaotic system.

Since we strongly agree with Kurt Richardson that «there exists an infinitude of equally valid, non-overlapping, potentially contradictory descriptions» for any complex system. And there is «the need for synthesizing a wide variety of perspectives in an effort to better understand the problem at hand, and how we might collectively act to solve it» and we strongly agree with Paul Cilliers that when: «dealing with complexity there are simultaneous roles for the natural and the human sciences, for both mathematics and imagination», we asked our student to model the Jules, Jim and Catherine System form their point of view, using the designer visual attitude, to better understand it. (Density Design: “Jules et Jim” by Donato Ricci, January 23rd, 2009)

About Density Design:

Density Design is a research and teaching program. Born as a laboratory course in the final year of the Master Degree in Communication Design at the Politecnico di Milano, it develops into a research group. Using complexity as a keyword to understand reality, combining it with a continuous research for information aesthetics and representation, DensityDesign explores the emergent relationships among communication design, information visualization and complex systems. (more)

At first, I found those visualizations much more confusing than the film. Thus, the problem of modeling or representing : a guy (Henri Pierre Roché) lived his life, tried to understand it, to make some sense out of what he experienced. He than tried to create a model so that he could explain what he thought he knew about his life to other : a novel was born our of this effort. Truffaut read the novel, he experienced it and tried to make sense of the story he read, maybe using his own experiences. Than, he proposed himself to show what he thought and felt by the means of movie making, BW film, Cinemascope ratio, fixed frame, voice over reading, music, etc. Finally, design students watch the film (I don’t know if they read the book) and tried to visually represent in a static form, using science and imagination, the way they felt about the film, the way they understand it. It’s a big challenge, to say the least.

Metropolis: All New Restauration ― Behin The Scenes

Seldom has the rediscovery of a cache of lost footage ignited widespread curiosity as did the announcement, in July 2008, that an essentially complete copy of Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS had been found. (more)

About Steven Smith;

“Hatched in the distant galaxy, Long Island, Steve used to bullseye womp rats in his T-16. Steve traveled to Central New York where he studied illustration. After receiving his Associates degree from MVCC, Steve departed to the island of Manhattan where he is now being trained under the high council of the School of Visual Arts. Awaiting battle Steve has sharpened his knowledge in the force and can finish the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs, and grows stronger by the day. That’s no moon. That’s Steven Smith.”