World Airmail Links

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[transitmaps]

New Project: The New York Subway in the Style of the London Tube Map

A little while ago, someone asked me whether I had ever seen a map of the New York subway system in the style of the London Underground diagram. Rather surprisingly, I hadn’t –  so I decided to draw one up myself.

Read more about this project over on my design blog. 

[wka]

A computer can’t fill the gap created by an exhausted teacher–or an absent parent. A smartphone app can’t fix a society’s treatment of women or an overburdened police force. Telemedicine can’t help remote patients if they have no nearby hospital or clinic.  A website to report corrupt public officials will not work if no one posts on it or uses the posts to investigate.

Eric Bellman, Epic Fail: Tech Tricks Are No Fix for Developing-World Problems

[wka]

[Tony Hsieh] basically just advocates laying off the least happy 10 percent of your workforce. This is when happiness gets repositioned as a business resource, and it’s up to each of us to either invest in it or let it depreciate, and if the latter happens, you become extraneous. That attitude renders happiness into something completely joyless.

William Davies, on Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, in Your Boss Wants You to Be Happier. This Is Not a Good Thing.

[postgraphics]

The remarkable distances you can travel on a European train in less than a day

Tourists visiting Europe are often advised to travel by train rather than plane or car. Trains are considered reliable, fast and relatively cheap. But as a new research project shows, there are major differences within Europe: Whereas you can travel from London to Paris in less than four hours, traveling the same distance can last more than 22 hours in eastern Europe. Read post.

[transitmaps]

Nice little series of isochrone maps showing how far you can get by rail in a day from major European cities. The infrastructure divide between western and eastern europe is shown pretty starkly… and poor old Dublin stuck on the other side of slow ferries to England! One minor quibble is that the intensity of red used for the first two units of time on the scale are very difficult to tell apart (and they represent 2 and 6 hours respectively, so that difference is quite substantial!), but the overall effectiveness of the graphics is still quite strong.

[wka]

Photos from a trip to Barcelona; more

[transitmaps]

Neon Subway Maps by Petr Koll

Really nice work here. What I love most is that these aren’t just neon copies of the official maps (that’s London above, not really looking like Beck’s map at all) but are the artist’s own interpretation of each system. Click on the image or my source attribution below to go see all the other systems on the designer’s website – he’s made installations based on many cities, including Paris, New York, Tokyo and others.

Side note: shame on the so-called design websites that literally took every image of this project from Petr’s website and posted it on their own, giving readers little incentive to explore the original source of this remarkable work.

Source: Petr Koll’s portfolio website

[wka]

Places with interesting puzzles to solve can and will rely on your intrinsic motivation to put up with their dysfunctional and toxic environments.

Thomas Figg, Nothing is more indicative of a bullshit job than the interview

[wka]

I don't think we have even begun to understand the long-term damage the NSA has done to the US tech industry.

Bruce Schneier, Cisco Shipping Equipment to Fake Addresses to Foil NSA Interception

[wka]

When some people treat the minds of others as a resource, this is not ‘creating wealth’ — it is a transfer.

Matthew B. Crawford, The Cost of Paying Attention

[wka]

…the closer a news story adheres to the rules of narrative the more you should be suspicious that the events actually transpired as described.

Mike Pesca, transcribed by Scott Berkun

[wka]

One of the reasons that this [culture] has proved so unbelievably difficult to change is that the winners of the system are the breadwinners who saw very little of their children. It's an identity-threat situation; they have an incredible amount invested in proving that's the only way to be a professional. Because, if it isn't, why did they do it? How come they don't know their children?

Joan C. Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law, quoted in Rebecca J. Rosen's The Hidden Cost of a Flexible Job

[wka]

In the de­vel­oped world, I sus­pect that shit­ty man­age­ment is a lead­ing cause  —  possibly the lead­ing cause  —  of hu­man suf­fer­ing.

Tim Bray, End of 2014

[wka]

Nostalgia Train ride in animated GIF form, featuring flickering lights and a bouncy ride

[wka]

Assume that anything we learn about what the NSA does today is a preview of what cybercriminals are going to do in six months to two years. That the NSA chooses to exploit the vulnerabilities it finds, rather than fix them, puts us all at risk.

Bruce Schneier, NSA Hacking of Cell Phone Networks

[wka]

…as long as countries are battling it out in cyberspace, some of us will be targets and the rest of us might be unlucky enough to be sitting in the blast radius.

Bruce Schneier, Corporate Abuse of Our Data

[wka]

Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate.

David Dunning (yes, that David Dunning), We Are All Confident Idiots

[wka]

“The more socially oblivious technologists don’t even think to try and understand people who aren’t like them, and often fail to notice that they don’t work well with people who aren’t exactly like them.”

Ann Friedman, Etsy’s Trying to Fix Tech’s Women Problem. Why Aren’t You?