The Roman Catholic priest who took flight by tying himself to a chair with hundreds of helium balloons has gone missing off the coast of Brazil.
He was trying to to break a 19-hour balloon flying record to raise money for a spiritual rest stop for truckers in Paranagua according to a news report.
McCain’s Font
Can a typeface truly represent a presidential candidate? It depends on the typeface and the candidate. John McCain’s printed material relies on Optima, a modernistic sans serif designed by the German type designer Hermann Zapf in 1958 that was popular among book and magazine designers during the 1970s.
While it is not the most robust sans serif ever designed, it is not entirely neutral either. It embodies and signifies a certain spirit and attitude. And if a typeface is not just an empty vessel for meaning, but a signifier that underscores personality, then it is useful in understanding what the candidates’ respective typefaces are saying about them and their campaigns.
So, I asked various designers, design curators and critics, who get rather heated when it comes to analyzing type design, to weigh in on two questions regarding Senator McCain’s campaign logo set in a bold version of Optima: What does Optima say about John McCain? And should this, or any, candidate be judged by a typeface?
Manzanar
Bob Lefsetz’s latest on Manzanar brought back memories of a drive down the Eastern Sierra via 395 many years ago. My email to Bob:
Great right turn, one I made in 1990, when I left San Francisco and drove east to a new job in my fun MR2. I took some time on Frost’s “Road not Taken” – which indeed made all the difference.
395 has some great history, including Manzanar and The LA Department of Water & Power’s Owens Valley H2O grab. I drove East to Tahoe, then South, stopping again for a Mono Lake Sunset. Continuing on past Mammoth, I made the Manzanar stop. No one was around (this was before the National Park Service took over). Somewhere, I have some photos – I’ll have to look them up.
Driving further south, I recall the dust, where Owens Lake used to host an extensive habitat, before the water was sent to the lawns of LA.
Some vr scenes:
Virtual Guidebooks
VRMag virtual tour links
Clusty on Manzanar.
Another Round for the Guild
The Guild Inc., a Madison, Wis.-based online art retailer, has raised $2.5 million in Series C funding, according to a regulatory filing. Shareholders include Dolphin Equity Partners
The Guild, a company with many lives, must be north of $50,000,000 (!) in funds raised over the years.
Related: A Pravda View of Guild and 1/11/2006: Guild Raises another $6M.
Fascinating.
Dodge County Sunset
The “Rebirth of the Rust Belt”
CNBC video of Matthew Simmons on the “end of the Starbucks’ economy”. Bottom line, from Simmons: good for the midwest.
VR Scene: Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum
Click to view the full screen vr scene. Place your mouse inside the photo, click and pan left, right, up or down..
Bata Shoe Museum website:
Sonja Bata was born in Switzerland, where she studied architecture. In 1946 she married Thomas J. Bata, the son of a well-known Czechoslovakian shoe manufacturer who had emigrated to Canada at the beginning of World War II. His family enterprise in Czechoslovakia had been nationalized under the Communist occupation. From the beginning, Sonja Bata shared her husbandfs determination to rebuild the organization and took an active interest in what was to become a global footwear business.
Over the years, she grew increasingly fascinated by shoes, their history and the reasons why specific shapes and decorative treatments had developed in different cultures. During her travels, she realized that some traditional forms were being replaced with western shoes, reflecting changing lifestyles to some extent influenced by the production of the spreading Bata factories serving local markets.
Since the 1940s, Sonja Bata has scoured the world for footwear of every description, from the most ordinary to the most extraordinary. Her combined interest in design and shoes has led to a very personal collection, with examples from many cultures and historic periods.
This hand held vr scene was taken a few months ago while “stuck” in Toronto during a snowstorm.
Innovation lessons from Pixar: An interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird
Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton, and Allen P. Webb:
If there’s one thing successful innovators have shown over the years, it’s that great ideas come from unexpected places. Who could have predicted that bicycle mechanics would develop the airplane or that the US Department of Defense would give rise to a freewheeling communications platform like the Internet?
Senior executives looking for ideas about how to make their companies more innovative can also seek inspiration in surprising sources. Exhibit One: Brad Bird, Pixar’s two-time Oscar-winning director. Bird’s hands-on approach to fostering creativity among animators holds powerful lessons for any executive hoping to nurture innovation in teams and organizations.
Bird joined Pixar in 2000, when the company was riding high following its release of the world’s first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and the subsequent hits A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2. Concerned about complacency, senior executives Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, and John Lasseter asked Bird, whose body of work included The Iron Giant and The Simpsons, to join the company and shake things up. The veteran of Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, and FOX delivered—winning Academy Awards (best animated feature) for two groundbreaking movies, The Incredibles and Ratatouille.
Ten days before Ratatouille won its Oscar, we sat down with Bird at the Emeryville, California, campus of Pixar, which is now a subsidiary of Disney.1 Bird discussed the importance, in his work, of pushing teams beyond their comfort zones, encouraging dissent, and building morale. He also explained the value of “black sheep”—restless contributors with unconventional ideas. Although stimulating the creativity of animators might seem very different from developing new product ideas or technology breakthroughs, Bird’s anecdotes should stir the imagination of innovation-minded executives in any industry.
On Energy: “Some home truths about tomorrow”
It’s about 179 miles from Fort Worth to the campus of Texas A&M in College Station, and I drove there to speak at the Student Conference On National Affairs on Thursday, February 21. It was not lost on me that making the round trip between the Metroplex and A&M’s Memorial Student Center meant that I would use the equivalent of one barrel of oil to discuss the fallacy of America’s quest for energy independence.
My slight amusement continued when one of the first students I met had arrived late from Chicago because his luggage had been misrouted and lost by the airline. I doubted that he got the irony of how much fuel it took to bring him the 1,100 miles from Chicago to Texas to attend SCONA 53, which was titled “Creating A Sustainable Global Energy Policy.”
Simply Selfish: Ethanol or Food
My talk came after an address by the Ambassador of Azerbaijan and before talks by Mark Albers, a senior vice president of Exxon, and by Virginia Governor George Allen. I had been asked to speak that afternoon about the magic of alternative fuels’ saving the day and alleviating the current energy crisis – assuming that high price is the sole determining factor in today’s energy debate. I felt the best way to do that was to discuss the beginnings of the automotive age in both America and the world, to relate to the students and professionals attending how, in the 1920s, these exact same circumstances led to a campaign to wean the American public off of oil – and why today the debate is back, but the end results will be the same.
I usually find it best to use 4th-grade math to show the fallacy of the again-current line of thinking about alternative fuels such as ethanol. After all, most people seem shocked to learn the fact that a new 2008 Suburban, designed to run on E85 ethanol and in which the owner uses only E85 as fuel, requires four acres of farmland be dedicated to corn production to keep that one vehicle running. But it’s true: That Suburban owner may live in a beautiful home on a quarter acre in the Metroplex, but somewhere in America four acres of corn must be set aside to provide fuel for just that one SUV.