#70 — Paperclips
The fantastically difficult and time-consuming task of turning everything in the universe into paperclips.
My notifications died a death this week as ten thousand people retweeted some nice chairs. Quite bizarre. Plus I made my first ever podcast appearance, chatting to North V South about designing book covers, freelance life and carbonated gravy.
Elsewhere
- Britain From Above has over 95,000 aerial photographs dating from 1919 to 1953. Warning: this website will take up most of your day. Fascinating to see the transformation of pre- and post-war London, completely unrecognisable in places, with its slums and industrialised riverside.
- Inside the MTA transit sign shop that makes all of NYC’s subway signage. So much adhesive Helvetica. See also: Vignelli’s NYC Subway Map as a children’s book.
- “The hypothetical paperclip-making AI would foresee the fantastically difficult and time-consuming task of turning everything in the universe into paperclips and opt to self-medicate itself into no longer wanting or caring about making paperclips, instead doing whatever the AI equivalent is of sitting around on the beach all day sipping piña coladas” – The Big Lebowski theorem of machine superintelligence.
- I need to visit the library that holds the world’s rarest colours. It looks like it would smell wonderful.
- Flickr has been sold to something called “SmugMug”. Really hoping the Flickr Commons, one of the most valuable resources on the internet, is maintained. The list of institutions on there is quite staggering. It's what the internet is meant to be – knowledge and history, once confined to closed off archives, available to all.
- The new Penguin European Writers series from Viking has some lovely covers. I haven’t sunk my eyes into it yet, but Mercè Rodoreda’s Death in Spring sounds particularly wonderful.
- Amanda Weiss talks to Spine about designing a cover worthy of Beyoncé. Interesting to see how many iterations of a design it takes to come all the way back round to the first idea.
- A couple of important articles about the racial bias of photography: how photography was optimised for white skin and teaching the camera to see my skin.
- Why Blade Runner is called Blade Runner. For some reason it had never occurred to me that the title was nothing more than a couple of random words that sound nice together, a bit like Reservoir Dogs. In fact, you could swap the titles of those two films and they’d still work perfectly fine.
- How are the internal organs of a centaur arranged?
