Still away enjoying the holidays!
Things will be back to full speed around here very soon.
Peace.

These city posters by Ork Design seem to be a pretty hot commodity right now. Each print displays the various neighborhoods that make up the city, in a rather interesting typographic layout I might add, and all are hand screened and individually numbered. The entire series includes Brooklyn, Chicago, Manhattan, San Francisco, and Boston. Hopefully we’ll see more cities added to the rotation in the near future. In the meantime, take a trip to their site to view the complete series.

A piece of New York art history popped up in a mid-conversion loft apt in SoHo a few months ago. A wall in one of its rooms features work from three legends of Hip Hop and Graffiti culture from the 80’s: Fab 5 Freddy, Futura 2000 & Jean-Michel Basquiat. Everyday, construction efforts in NY are knocking down or refurbishing old buildings and turning them into upscale apartment buildings, condos, lofts, etc. Who knows what may have already been lost. Luckily this piece is being conserved and will be shown at SoHo building’s Gallery 151, “The Wild Style Exhibit” until February 15th. Read the full story at Newsday.
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This six-sided anechoic chamber, located at Orfield Labs in Minnesota, holds a spot in the Guinness World Records as the quietest place in the world. In fact, it’s so quiet that overall the silence of the room, coupled with the sounds of your inner organs, is enough to send the toughest characters running towards the exit.

How does one achieve The Quietest Place on Earth? Start with a room within a room, within a room: the Orfield Labs six sided anechoic chamber is a small room floating in a pit on I-beams that are on top of springs. A five sided chamber of identical construction surrounds it on the edge of the pit. Both chambers are made of double wall steel-insulation-steel. The anechoic chamber was manufactured by Eckel, the largest anechoic chamber builder in the country.

Both steel chambers are held within a larger room that was built with solid one foot thick concrete walls and ceiling panels. The smaller room is filled with 3.3 feet thick fiberglass acoustic wedges. This approach led to the anechoic chamber found at Orfield Labs being measured by engineers on January 21st of 2004 at negative 9.4 dB (with A-weighting), thus earning it the title of Quietest Place on Earth. By comparison, the low threshold for human hearing is considered to be 0 dB.

[via Audio Junkies]

Remember the “Us Placers” track, featuring Lupe, Kanye, and Pharrell that dropped on the mixtape circuit a few months back? Well here’s the video to go along with it. Peep.

*flashback*

I think I must have missed the memo on fixed gear bikes being the new “It” mode of transportation for the “hypester” crowd. Seriously, they seem to be popping up everywhere these days…first this, then this, now this. Is this the next movement? We shall see.

[photo via HS]

Jay Smooth, of Ill Doctrine.com, gives us the rundown on “little haters”-those subconscious voices from within that talk us out of accomplishing our goals, and ultimately lead us into a sad state of procrastination. I think we all have our bouts with them from time to time, I know I do. My “little haters” were responsible for the rather long period of inactivity around here. I took what I thought would be a quick break to explore some new ideas (truthfully, I began to believe that things around here weren’t good enough), and *bam*, before I knew it nearly two years had gone be. Crazy. Luckily I found some inspiration in all the right places, so I decided to hop back in the Delorean and give it another go (that sounds like a corny facebook status message, right? lol). This time I’m pressing “mute” on the “little haters”.

PingMag takes a look at some of the more interesting beverage bottles that can be found across Japan. Lots of interesting, unconventional designs to be seen. It’d be great to see more companies here in the U.S. make bold statements like this with their package design (across all industries, that is). I’ve peeped a few that have made some creative moves in recent years, but for the most part it still seems to be something that only a small group of companies put the effort into.

[via PingMag]

Last month, Google officially introduced the world to Android, their soon-to-be-released mobile phone operating system that promises to revolutionize the wireless industry. Since then we haven’t had much to go on; a few demo/developer videos, loads of speculation, and now what appears to be a photo of Android installed on an actual mobile device. The photo (pictured above) was sent to Gizmodo from an anonymous reader, along with a few of his/her thoughts on their user experience thus far.

Our source, a Giz reader, had some feedback to add to the prototype, which he used for a day: Even in early form, it’s light and fast, much faster than the desktop emulator at times. And as a longtime programmer, he thinks it’s a lot more put together than Window Mobile 5 on the back side of things. It’s a prototype, so things will obviously change, but these are all great signs.

Unfortunately, we still have quite a while before we see the official Android release (late 2008 at the earliest), but stay tuned.

[via Gizmodo]

Everywhere I look these days I come across yet another magazine or blog that’s compiled some sort of year-end list highlighting their best and worst picks of 2007 (i.e. music, gadgets, ideas, etc). While many of them do have a tendency to become a little redundant after while, it’s always cool to see whether or not my “projections on cool” were on point. Today I came across yet another list, this one highlighting the Top 50 Music Videos of 2007, according to Pitchfork. They’ve picked a little bit of everything here, not just hip hop, however some of the more notable hip hop acts that made the list include: Jay-Z (Roc Boys And The Winner Is), Snoop Dogg (Sensual Seduction), and UGK ft. Outkast (Player’s Anthem). They’re a couple things missing off their list, but hey, I’ll let that ride. Also, take a look at their list of the 20 Worst Album Covers of 2007 (Common and Remy Ma make appearances here), some of their picks here are quite interesting, to say the very least.