Perhaps the greatest sentence of all time:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

22 years ago today President Reagan took some time out of his busy schedule to celebrate the value of farm-raised catfish. With a proclamation declaring that “More and more Americans are discovering a uniquely American food delicacy — farm-raised catfish,” Reagan encouraged people to celebrate National Catfish Day by calling “upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.”

Does anyone have any fond memories of the great Catfish Day Ceremony in the town square?

If you were paying very very close attention to the blog a couple of days ago you would have noticed a disastrous “useful posters” post titled “A YouTube VacuumTube HowTube” concerning the history of the manufacture and use of vacuum tubes.

Writing the post got me thinking about the uses of new media (Twitter, TV, The Radio) as tools for the organization and suppression of revolution and large scale political upheaval. So, I started editing the post, first changing the title to “Before the revolution was twittered, it was televised. Before that it was radioed.” I quickly realized, however, that in order to write a post about the history of technology, media and revolution, you need to know a little bit about the intertwined histories of technology media, and revolution.

I’m suffering from the same syndrome with this weeks map of the week, which features an icon designed by Gerd Arntz as part of his large collection in line with Otto Neurath’s ideas regarding the possibility of a universal symbolic language that would help to provide an educated framework for revolution for the illiterate masses of central and eastern Europe. But, while I’d like to know more about this kind of thing, I don’t have the knowledge to make any kind of informed argument at this time. The map of the week is already late, so I’ll just refer you to an Interview with Gerd Arntz by Djoeke Veeninga, VPRO, August 6th, 1976. and some of Otto Neurath’s writings and other information regarding Isotype.

As we haven’t been getting many real comments lately, I’ve been reading the spam comments with relish and mustard. The best one so far: “Gr8 post. Thanks for posting. Information is useful.” You know what, I mostly agree, which is why some information in the comment would have been useful.

So that this post isn’t a total waste of time… If you are looking for information, particularly of the quantitative, graphable, chartable, datariffic variety, you may want to check out the new “Wolfram Alpha” search engine, which is designed to:

“make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.”

To be totally honest, I haven’t had much luck with it, but geographers of all stripes might find it useful. It does, after all, help you gather information. Information, as we learned today, is useful.

Brent’s little post about bigfoots in Oregon sent me on my own quixotic google books quest.  Little did I know that I would discover the origins of the panopticon buried in a 1964 edition of Popular Mechanics, though even in its early stages it was a tool of power-knowledge with undertones of sexuality (sexism).

Camera Sees All Sides at Once

“Picasso-like photographs of large objects are now possible with a camera that takes periphery pictures–photographs that record 360 degrees of any cylindrical subject, including heads of pretty girls.

Although such weird pictures are possible, the camera was designed primarily for serious scientific purposes…Called a periphery camera because it takes a continuous photograph of the outer periphery of the subject”

Are you designing your own poster this summer? Do you dream of the day that you can design a poster to present at a conference instead of giving a talk? Do you remember the good old days when you had to draw your scientific posters by hand? Do you wonder what your data would look like as a graph? Then this useful poster is for you: Tips for designing scientific posters. From flickr.

After the release of our summer mix we were feeling pretty proud of ourselves, but we were promptly humbled by this weeks map of the week, and by the general wonder of the website that presented it. This is the 4th of 6 images presented on the blog “but does it float.”. The images are accompanied only by the heading: “Reader, if I have put a pause here, and that I continued the story of the man with a lone shirt, because he had only one body at any one time, I would like to know what you would think? That I lost myself in an “impasse” à la Voltaire, or vulgarly a cul-de-sac, from which I don’t know how to leave.”

To which we add:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

We are proud to introduce this years summer mix, the lazy student edition.
You can either stream the mix by pressing the play button below or you can download the zip file that contains all of the mp3s. We took our inspiration this year from a fine batch of papers that were dropped into our mailbox at the tail end of the semester. Each was similar, but in a different font, organized slightly differently, printed on different sized paper, one had even been translated into a different language. When we flew our students up to our home offices in the frigid north, they each told us that they did their own work. They simply considered changing the fonts “work.”

1. Gone Daddy Gone (Violent Femmes Cover) – Gnarls Barkley
2. Paper Planes (M.I.A. Cover) – Panda Riot
3. Blake’s Got a New Face (Vampire Weekend Cover) – The Mystery Jets
4. What a Wonderful World (Louis Armstrong Cover) – The Ramones
5. Mrs. Robinson (Simon and Garfunkle Cover) – The Lemonheads
6. Ms. Jackson (Outkast Cover) – The Vines
7. You Can Call Me Al (Paul Simon Cover) – Jens Lekman
8. Nowhere Man (The Beatles Cover) – of Montreal
9. I See a Darkness (Johnny Cash Cover) – Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy
10. Against All Odds (Phil Collins Cover) – The Postal Service
11. I’m Good, I’m Gone (Lykke Li Cover) – Friendly Fires
12. Thriller (Michael Jackson Cover) – Ben Gibbard

Here are all the files in a single .zip file.

With a title like that.  This map needs no commentary, but over at the British Library they have a zoomable map that might help all you all navigate the fine city of London Town.  Which is famous.

Well, perhaps a little commentary is in order. The map was made in 1593, but was published (and presumably still useful) in 1653. Does London really change that slowly? I haven’t been there since 1996, but perhaps I always assumed my London A-Z would be pretty out of date by now. Perhaps I was wrong. Who needs Google Street View.