Catnip Magazine

Now available as prints at Zazzle, a series of arcade game propaganda posters for Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Frogger and Joust (above) by illustrator Steve Thomas. [via SuperPunch]

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Berkeley math professor Edward Frenkel collaborated with a French filmmaker to create an erotic short film called Rites d’Amour et de Maths; in it, a doomed mathematician discovers the formula for love and tattoos it on his lover’s belly. It’s an homage to Japanese writer Yukio Mishima’s movie Yukoku and his subsequent seppuku suicide.

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Thinking about going digging for gold in the dumpsters around your town? Start with the FAQ at Dumpsterworld, the online community for skip-spelunkers:

There’s many reasons that perfectly good things go in the garbage. One of the biggest reasons is business practice. Remember that businesses are there to make profit. Goods that are overproduced, don’t sell, need repair, or take too much space and maintainence, are unprofitable to keep. It can also be unprofitable to sell them below cost or give them away free, so they go to waste. Wasting goods helps retailers profit if people might otherwise pay for new ones, and producers profit when more get made.

Waste is a regular result of doing business. Consider how the government props up agriculture and stops it from having a depression, in years when the grain market is saturated. It buys excess grain from farmers, takes it off the market, and lets it rot in warehouses. Farmers still get paid for it, and then they can sell their regular supply without the price dropping below cost. In our system, competing suppliers are always producing more stuff than they can sell, and the excess goes to waste.

Business policies enforce waste. Department stores toss products for cosmetic damage or an open package. Offices toss equipment when they upgrade. A college might toss last year’s furniture for new, because it has to spend money so next year’s budget doesn’t drop. Groceries toss sealed containers of food when it expires. Expiration dates are planned for selling, keeping in mind that a consumer will have days or weeks more for use of the goods.

Relative worth is another reason why good things go in the trash. Wants, needs, and usability change between people. John Moneybags dumps his sofa because it doesn’t match the wallpaper, Jane Englishmajor trashes a pile of books because they’re too bulky to carry home for the summer, and Joe Bluecollar throws out his TV because he doesn’t have time to fix a bad wire.

Welcome to DumpsterWorld. (via Beyond the Beyond!)

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Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead, and Griffith’s Observatory, has 40 important tips for cartoonists. There’s good advice here for any kind of writer or creative person.

Cartooning Advice: Zippy’s Bill Griffith gives his Top 40 List on Creating Comics

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I think it’s possible today to run a news organization — up to the point of publishing — from the cloud, changing not only the production process of news but also its culture. John Paton, CEO of Journal Register, is about to prove it with his Ben Franklin Project.

John and I were sitting in my CUNY office as he told me about the technology he’s saddled with at this orphaned newspaper company where he just took the helm. He used a term I swear I hadn’t heard in well more than a decade: “VDT.” That stand for “video display terminal,” the old, dumb box that was wired into newspaper mainframes. I was talking with a bunch of young journalists shortly afterwards and they’d never heard of VDTs (though they thought it could be cured with a shot). Well, Paton still has VDTs.

And so, as he was talking about having to buy new computers, I took to the whiteboard and drew out how I think a news(paper) can be produced from WordPress, Google Docs, and Flickr (or their equivalents). We’ll get to the other functions shortly.

This up-in-the-air production is made possible by Paton’s edict at JRC (as he dictated at ImpreMedia before) that digital comes first, print last. If print comes first, newspaper people will worry about H&J (hyphenation & justification — that is, fitting text to finite holes in print designs). That dictated their process.

But not JRC. By putting print at the end of the line, production for paper won’t dictate the rest of the line. So now a reporter can start blogging at the beginning of a story. And that makes a profound shift in the culture of news: it opens up the process to the public. “Here’s what I think I’ll work on,” the reporter says to the community she covers. “Good idea? Is there something else you think I should do instead? What’s the best use of my time? What do you want me to find out for you? If I do this story, what questions do you have? What do you know? Whom should I call?” As the process continues, the reporter can share what she learns — and doesn’t learn — and the community can help fill in blanks and make the reporting better.

At some point in this process, the reporter likely will write what we’d still recognize as an article. Indeed, writing it before publication opens the possibility of the community still helping by correcting and enhancing.

Then a print editor can grab the story and fit it for print. No longer a big deal.

At the same time, the reporter and editor can ask the community for photos to illustrate the story. They can be shared via Flickr. When it’s time to print, an editor can copy the high-resolution version of an image. If the photographer chooses, he can make the photo available under Creative Commons. If the paper chooses to (as Bild does in Germany), it can pay. That’s up to them. The taking of photos can become competitive: a reader says “I can beat that.”

There are still bureaucratic details that must be handled: schedules of stories, who’s working on what, and so on. Google Docs is perfect for that. My CUNY colleague Jeremy Caplan showed our faculty how much more Docs can do: enabling reporters to, for example, graph data and create their own illustrations. Docs can be used to publish documents to the web.

From these three streams, content can come to a print editor — who is now, remember, at the end of the line — to fill the paper (which my friend and fellow JRC advisor Jay Rosen points out, is the most expensive space). The readers can even help the editor decide what deserves ink.

Note the profound cultural shift this new process brings to a news organization. Rather than doing everything we do and then sharing it with the public — and allowing them to comment on (or snark at) our work — we become transparent, we view news as a process instead of a product, and we open up our process to constructive collaboration with the community we serve. Hallelujah.

The rest of the process of publishing a newspaper is more complicated — at least to me, as I don’t know the tools. I’m not sure all that can be done with free tools but I’ll bet it can all be done in the cloud. At a Salesforce.com event last week, I talked with an exec who said that his service can be used to handle ad order entry. Other systems can handle business tracking, payroll, H&R, and such. I don’t think JRC needs to be dogmatic about living in the cloud but I do think it can avoid huge expense of buying and integrating new systems and hardware.

All this is why I’m delighting in advising JRC and Paton. They are going to try to do the things I’ve been wanting to see news(papers) do — I’ve been writing about this since at least 2005 — the things that tradition and fear prevented other papers from doing. They’re not alone. AnnArbor.com (which I also advised) is entirely on Movable Type. Online news organizations, of course, operate on blogs. But here’s the chance to jump a newspaper company from the past — from the age of VDTs and discs — to the future. I can’t wait to watch and help.

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Curious about how to create iPad apps? In NYC or San Francisco this week? The iPad dev camp is the place to be – 3 days of hacking together something from nothing for the hottest device/platform on earth right now. Yeah, i’ll be there! – Sean

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“Photoshop: Worth the upgrade” http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/12/photoshop.first.look.wired/index.html

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Our love of Emily Richmond’s quest to sail around the world runs deep. I interviewed her for our inaugural podcast, and I never tire of sharing the romance of her project’s rewards. For $15 Emily offered a Polaroid taken at some point during her two-year solo journey around the world — a reward that I instantly backed.

We mention all of this because Emily has been posting a gallery of Polaroids she has been taking during the trip and they are amazing:

Emily recently launched a second Kickstarter project, where she’s again offering Polaroids from her trip. If you like what you see here, be sure to visit her project.

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PING: Inventors Wanted. Cool Tools Provided.

Tinkerers can expand beyond the garage at TechShops, a chain of workshops full of equipment too expensive for most hobbyists.

http://s.nyt.com/u/_NK

Get The New York Times on your iPhone for free by visiting http://itunes.com/apps/nytimes

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