Without play, there is no experimentation.

—Paul Rand

via this isn’t happiness

Chrysler Turbine Car

The fourth-generation Chrysler turbine engine ran at up to 44,500 revolutions per minute, according to the owner’s manual, and could use diesel fuel, unleaded gasoline, kerosene, JP-4 jet fuel, and even vegetable oil. The engine would run on virtually anything and the President of Mexico tested this theory by running one of the first cars–successfully–on tequila.

We like to think of electric cars and hybrid cars and cars that run on alternative fuel as new concepts but there’s been people working on these technologies for a long time.
via Good Old Valves

The car is the closest thing we will ever create to something that is alive.

—Sir William Lyons, founder of Jaguar

via Good Old Valves

This lovely old tag is from the website of Dick Sheaff and boy do I love what he does:

I have always found myself keenly interested in a seemingly endless list of vintage things, especially ephemera: stamps, postal history, trade cards, billheads, trade cards, broadsides, cartes-de-visite, stereo views, tickets, engravings, chromolithographs, early American glass, Irish blown three-mold glass, patent medicine bottles, flasks, almanacs, postcards, marbled paper, early letterpress printing, typography, books, African art, record album covers, airbrushed restaurant china, Micronesian tapa cloth . . . . I could go on and on, but you get the idea. I’ve long thought that what I’d most like to do in life, in some better world, would be to put out an ongoing series of high-quality, small publications about such things. As a graphic and publication designer with all the appropriate software, one would think I’d be in a fine position to do just that.

But it ain’t that easy. Especially in today’s publishing and economic environment, the idea of putting out a lot of
ink-on-paper is just not practical. Or even sane. Eventually I realized that what I can do–and fairly easily–is scan
the images, write the words and then simply post them online. I get it out of my system, and the material gets out there in front of the eyes of anyone who may be interested. Win win. So, here goes . . .

For years now I’ve casually collecting the same type of stuff (like the manual to my grandmother’s ’63 Ford Fairlane), although I haven’t made it as much of a focus of this site as I could.
via Still Life

Paleofuture: Tesla Predicts the Portable TV (1926)

NEW YORK, Jan 25 – (AP) – Application of radio principles will enable people by carrying a small instrument in their pockets to see distant events like the sorceress of the magic crystal fairy tales and legends, Nikola Tesla, electrical inventor, predicted today. Mr. Tesla, who on several occasion has tried to communicate with the planet Mars, made his predictions in an interview published in the current issue of Collier’s Weekly.

“We shall be able to witness the inauguration of a president, the playing of a world’s series baseball game, the havoc of an earthquake, or a battle just as though we were present,” Mr. Tesla said.

Once again, another reason for me to love Telsa. He was always overshadowed by the more popular and business-savy bully who was Thomas Edison but the dude needs credit where it’s due. I even admire him trying to contact Mars.

Frank Chimero is changing his focus from image-making to writing for his book:

A hammer has two ends: one to drive the nail, another to remove it. One can not use both ends at the same time. I believe the relationship between images and text is much like this, especially for those of us who make both. Writing and image-making intermingle and sometimes negate one another in the name of progress. For those that I know that seriously pursue both, the relationship between the word-work and the image-work is tidal. I will always make images, but for now I need to use the other end of my hammer, because there is a thorn that needs to be pried out of my side and a story that needs to be told that doesn’t leave much room for images.

Ben Brooks on breaking the monotony in life:

I am prone to falling prey to habits, just the same as everyone else. When I catch myself stuck in a habit — stuck in a routine — I pull myself back into the interesting world of spontaneous. I buy a shirt or a pair of pants that don’t blend with the rest of my clothes — that don’t fit the preconceived image of me that I store locked away in my brain. Most importantly, to me and to my life, I change up the routes I drive.

NYTimes: The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries

WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

And what about the money:

For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.

Engadget: The Daily generated 800,000 downloads, $10 million loss in first quarter of operation
I love the dichotomy between how much money the iPad has made for Apple and how much The Daily has lost.
To borrow a phrase from former Senator Ted Stevens, the iPad is not a dump truck. You’re not going to make money with mobile apps and and digital magazines if you just dump your content onto it. Even including videos and pictures doesn’t cut it.
It’s a new medium and it requires new thinking.