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POPSMapping Kerouac: The Grammatical Artwork of Stefanie Posavec Posavec dissects every word, phrase, sentence, and subject of Kerouac's On the Road to invent new ways of looking at the familiar masterpiece. The diagrams make for beautiful art in their own right. (See source for high-res pictures.) In her structure analysis, each chapter explodes in a color-coded starburst of topical breakdowns. At a glance, you can see Kerouac's focus wander from the sketches of local life in the beginning, to depictions of work and travel in the middle, with women and the subject of love dominating the latter chapters. The comparative sentence diagrams are what really drew me in. It's fascinating to behold an entire literary work all at once on one page. What's more, Kerouac's casual prose style can be differentiated immediately from the stately, grandiose writing of Faulkner, not to mention the terse, claustrophobic style of Orwell's fiction. Literary reductionism at its most fun and beautiful.
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POPSOn Architecture and Elegance bridge is endowed with a subcategory of beauty we can refer to as elegance, a quality present whenever a work of architecture succeeds in carrying out an act of resistance—holding, spanning, sheltering—with grace and economy as well as strength; when it has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted. From philosophical historian Alain de Botton's inimitable The Architecture of Happiness , itself a paradigmatic illustration of the aesthetic elegance of well-engineered minimalism (be it architectural or textual). The NYRB's synopsis of de Botton's work makes note of this: The simplicity of his writing is not the product of a simple mind.... In The Consolations of Philosophy (2000) he remarked that "there are...no legitimate reasons why books in the humanities should be difficult or boring; wisdom does not require a specialized vocabulary or syntax."
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POPSThe Physics of Dance Notes from a presentation by physics professor George Gollin on the physical laws which every ballet dancer must eventually master, whether explicitly aware of them or not. It must be noted that professor Kenneth Laws has written three books on the physics of dance and just had an interesting interview with Studio 360 on the subject.
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POPSTypographical Artwork of Tauba Auerbach Following in the footsteps of Douglas Hofstadter and Scott Kim, Auerbach explores the interplay between the form and content of the English alphabet to create novel insights into our everyday written symbology.
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POPSMath Behind Ancient Islamic Tile Patterns Decoded When Peter J. Lu traveled to Uzbekistan, he had no idea of the mathematical journey that he was about to embark on as well. See the full research article as published in Science . It's a wonderful example of original, multidisciplinary academic research bridging history and mathematics that happens to force us to re-think the sophistication of ancient geometrical knowledge. When Lu looked at photographs of Islamic buildings, he found that he could break the patterns on their surfaces up into the same shapes, even though the shapes often weren't immediately visible. "I couldn't sleep for days," he said. "I skipped Christmas break to work on it."
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POPSThe Best Artwork of Carl Spitzweg I love the sense of lighting and physicality in his paintings. Carl Spitzweg is regarded as the master of small-scale genre painting, in which he was fond of depicting—with a fine, ambiguous sense of humor—anecdotal scenes of narrow-minded bourgeois life in the so-called “good old days.” ( 1 )
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POPSCandid NYC Subway Turnstile Photos UPDATE: Darn, the site didn't clip as well as I was hoping. But it's still worth seeing. See main site for high-resolution photos . Fascinating installation by NYC photographer, Bill Sullivan, who frames the wonder that is human variety in everyday — yet unexpected — locations. (Love the guy with the BMX wheels in his hands.) (Via kottke .)
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POPSArt of the Tetrahedron, Revisited Wonderfully angular sculptures. And what an inspiring story! Until age 50, Silverman had been a highly successful surgeon, practicing medicine with considerable enthusiasm and skill. Then he encountered an ailing colleague near death, who advised Silverman that if there were anything he might really want to do, then he ought to do it right away, before the chance slips away. The encounter changed Silverman's life. He returned to interests that had captured his attention when he was a teenager. He had visited museums to gaze at statues, and he had tried his hand at carving wood. Later, when studying medicine at Tulane University, he had met a sculpture teacher who had invited him to classes and taught him to see, in the artistic sense.
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POPSThe Exanding Mathematical Universe of Spidrons A field of triangles crumples and twists into a wavy crystalline sea. A crystal ball sprouts spiraling, labyrinthine passages. Faceted bricks stack snugly into a tidy, compact structure. Underlying each of these objects is a remarkable geometric shape made up of a sequence of triangles—a spiral polygon that resembles a seahorse's tail. The result is beautiful to behold.
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POPSComic-Blogging Beirut Mazen Kerbaj is a Lebanese-born artist comic-blogging the aerial bombardment from his home in Beirut. Every day he uploads a new sketch or commentary to his blog , assuming electricity and internet are working that day. His arresting style and somewhat fatalistic mood make for a strikingly personal look into the war. I clipped a few of his best drawings.
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