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Happy long weekend! I hope everyone will be nice to the...

petspics — Sat, 26 May 2012 19:57:49 -0400

Happy long weekend! I hope everyone will be nice to the beaches.

WHEN SOMEONE CALLS A BLOG POST A "BLOG"

petspics — Sat, 26 May 2012 19:19:56 -0400

editorrealtalk:

Little Tokyo, I’ve missed you.

petspics — Tue, 22 May 2012 09:39:25 -0400

Little Tokyo, I’ve missed you.

In progress

petspics — Mon, 21 May 2012 22:20:58 -0400

In progress

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on..."

petspics — Mon, 21 May 2012 10:27:29 -0400

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

- CARL SAGAN (via Advice to Writers)

photojojo: Moonbow: a rainbow made by the light of the...

petspics — Mon, 07 May 2012 19:19:18 -0400

photojojo:

Moonbow: a rainbow made by the light of the moon.

Our pal Mcheung tells us all about how he shot this one this past weekend!

This weekend was the best moonbow-photographing weekend of the year!

A moonbow is essentially the same thing as a rainbow, except that it happens at night. It’s a pretty rare phenomenon that only occurs in a few places on earth.

Photos of Super Moon Rainbows

WHEN A GOOD WRITER SUBMITS A PIECE WITH DOUBLE SPACING AFTER THE PERIODS

petspics — Sat, 05 May 2012 19:13:08 -0400

editorrealtalk:

I went to a Cambodian wedding: Bright colors and beautiful...

petspics — Sat, 05 May 2012 18:14:00 -0400

I went to a Cambodian wedding:

Bright colors and beautiful textiles
The clothing! The jewelry!
Delicious Cambodian food
Great to see friends get hitched in a very meaningful ceremony
Congratulations, Sam and Will!

Nine dangerous things you were taught in school

petspics — Sat, 05 May 2012 10:40:22 -0400

Nine dangerous things you were taught in school:

1. The people in charge have all the answers.
That’s why they are so wealthy and happy and healthy and powerful—ask any teacher.

2. Learning ends when you leave the classroom.
Your fort building, trail forging, frog catching, friend making, game playing, and drawing won’t earn you any extra credit. Just watch TV.

3. The best and brightest follow the rules.
You will be rewarded for your subordination, just not as much as your superiors, who, of course, have their own rules.

4. What the books say is always true.
Now go read your creationism chapter. There will be a test.

5. There is a very clear, single path to success.
It’s called college. Everyone can join the top 1% if they do well enough in school and ignore the basic math problem inherent in that idea.

6. Behaving yourself is as important as getting good marks.
Whistle-blowing, questioning the status quo, and thinking your own thoughts are no-nos. Be quiet and get back on the assembly line.

7. Standardized tests measure your value.
By value, I’m talking about future earning potential, not anything else that might have other kinds of value.

8. Days off are always more fun than sitting in the classroom.
You are trained from a young age to base your life around dribbles of allocated vacation. Be grateful for them.

9. The purpose of your education is your future career.
And so you will be taught to be a good worker. You have to teach yourself how to be something more.

Washington DC Cherry Blossom Festival stamps — very faded pink...

petspics — Fri, 04 May 2012 22:02:53 -0400

Washington DC Cherry Blossom Festival stamps — very faded pink vs same pink in real flowers (in California).

"The amazing thing about typography is that you can go your whole life never thinking about it (or so..."

petspics — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 11:21:32 -0400

“The amazing thing about typography is that you can go your whole life never thinking about it (or so I’ve heard) yet once you begin to study it, you discover a vein of material so rich enough to mine for a lifetime. Typography is about the way we form language into pictures. It is where the literary and visual arts rub together and make sparks. And those sparks are visible to anyone who wants to see them.”

- Patrick Barber on Typographica.org (via stewf)

Amazing to see fields of this.

petspics — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 11:41:37 -0400

Amazing to see fields of this.

Nostalgia

petspics — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 20:47:00 -0400

Today I ended up in a cluster of mom-and-pop stores that all touted a beige-and-brown color scheme and signage standardized with off-the-shelf yellow letters. Besides the wooden beams that I liked, the rest of it was really far away from my personal design taste — yet, I was entranced.

Growing up in the Bay Area, I constantly saw a color palette of neutrals and buildings with wooden beams painted brown. Signage and the general typography landscape were generally naive. Set everything off with pops of green and purple from the municipal landscaping, and the result is something very comfortable and suburban. (Ask anyone who grew up in the south bay about PW Market on Homestead or the Longs Drugs on Stevens Creek, and he’ll know what I mean.)

The homey look from the stores today brought me back to 1992. Despite the lack of design, I can’t deny that there is some sort of charm in that aesthetic. I have no idea how these stores escaped the modern-day blitzkrieg of mega-mall monolithic signage and cacophony of glossy colors. I was completely fascinated. This is the type of thing that’s too subtle for most people to care about, much less remember (I don’t blame them), and will probably be gone in another year or so.

So, after three years of on-and-off attempts, I finally learned...

petspics — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 01:09:00 -0400

So, after three years of on-and-off attempts, I finally learned to knit.

The older I get, the more it seems true that some things just take their own time. Knitting and crochet were no exception. I started both crafts with a lot of hope but was met with frustration and failure. Sometimes, you can’t force something when it is not ready. You have to learn to give up and to start again when the time is right.

All of my knitting projects have been horrendous, but suddenly one turned out pretty great.

jtotheizzoe: Girls in STEM It’s not a secret that women (and...

petspics — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 19:10:00 -0400

jtotheizzoe:

Girls in STEM
It’s not a secret that women (and pretty much any minority group) have uphill battle after uphill battle facing them when it comes to succeeding in math, science and engineering fields. Some of these are explicit (like the tilted playing field of the tenure system, which could take 100 years to level out), and some are more obscured (like the quiet social pressures that push them away from science). But what is clear is that it does not have to be the case.

I was really struck by this infographic’s ability to capture how quickly and precipitously women drop out of many fields of science once social pressures begin to take over.

I hope that projects like ScienceCheerleader, IAmScience, DoubleXScience and This Is What A Scientist Looks Like (<- bonus points if you can find me on that one) can continue to make this image a relic of the past and not a picture of the future.

(ᔥ EngineeringDegree.net, click here for enlargification)

It’s not really spring until the weather is better, right?

petspics — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:00:06 -0400

It’s not really spring until the weather is better, right?

I recently found a kaleidoscope I owned when I was between 8 and...

petspics — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:00:05 -0400

I recently found a kaleidoscope I owned when I was between 8 and 10. Fun again after 20 years!

Rat icon! This has been in my head for the last few days;...

petspics — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 19:14:00 -0400

Rat icon! This has been in my head for the last few days; finally drew it.

doctorswithoutborders: In honor of the one year anniversary of...

petspics — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:04:00 -0400

doctorswithoutborders:

In honor of the one year anniversary of the earthquake and its results in Northeastern Japan, we’ll be posting a series of photographs from MSF’s work during the crisis in 2011.

“MSF doctors treat an elderly patient in Minami Sanriku, in Miyagi prefecture, northeast Japan.”

Photo:© Giulio Di Sturco VII Mentor

My entry for the Spoonflower robot cheater quilt fabric contest...

petspics — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:39:34 -0500

My entry for the Spoonflower robot cheater quilt fabric contest — what a mouthful! Voting has commenced, but Spoonflower’s UI is so confusing that I must warn you: It might get confusing! Basically all entries are randomly spread across eight pages. Click to highlight your selection(s), and you have a chance to give them a final review after the last page, before casting them in.

The design of this was sort of a challenge because I am not a quilter. Since it is a cheater quilt, I went for an unusual block pattern that would be hard to cut in real life (have you ever tried cutting circles out of fabric with a lame wrist?).