Rambles at starchamber.com

Mark Simonson is a type designer. I enjoy reading his blog and have found a number of fun typophilic web publications through his site. I was tickled by his wicked punning in this compact piece. I Rotis for Typophile a few years back… I Meta man once. I said, “Avenir seen you somewhere before?” He [...]

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Many years ago I came across an article by William Langewiesche in The Atlantic called The Shipbreakers. It contained amazing pictures and an equally remarkable story about the process by which ships are broken down and sold for scrap steel in a place called Alang, India. This is what Alang looks like from space. The [...]

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YouTube is filled with music. There are instructional videos, performance videos, and people simply practicing or showing off in front of their cameras. Find a piece you like and, from the comfort of your own home, you can play with them in a virtual jam session. Ophir Kutiel, an Israeli musician, was doing exactly this [...]

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Planes don’t need pilots. At least not the kind that have to sit inside the plane. For several years now, any observer of military aviation could see that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were going to change combat in the same way that carrier-based aircraft changed naval warfare in the years before World War II. Then [...]

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I know that every one of you has your own version of this story, but listen to this. I’m going car camping with my family next week. I bought a new tent. See: Now where should we go? I don’t really care… it’s going to be a low key trip to someplace not too far [...]

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Question: What’s this a picture of? Answer: it’s a rocket trying to fit in at a lightning rod party. Real answer: it’s the SpaceX Falcon 9, the biggest rocket ever made by a private company on its own dime. Big enough to carry humans into orbit, she’s down at Cape Canaveral waiting for her debut [...]

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Last year I was talking about Forvo, a nifty pronunciation site. Via Steve Crandall’s blog (can you pronounce açaí?), I just learned about a related site called inogolo. But inogolo, which derives its name from a Latinate construction meaning “not butchered”, is specifically targeted at English pronunciations. As site owner Stuart Yoder puts it: “The [...]

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When I was a kid, we subscribed to Scientific American, and it was big fun for me to work through the articles. I didn’t always understand what was going on, but it was clear that the articles were important and written by the people doing the work. Over the past decade of bookstore browsing, I’ve [...]

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