Professor's blog

Yes, haydesigner, I'm looking at you...

There are reasons I live in Des Moines and the people are a large part of it. So when a neighborhood guy like Ed Boesen decides to take his own life it is a shock to the entire community. The Boesen family owns one of the largest family-run florist in the country and are an integral part of the Beaverdale neighborhood where they were all born and raised. The family, and Ed in particular, has given so much back to the community they love that his absence will be evident for many years. Ed lived around the corner and his brother Frank lives two doors down from me.

Ed married his high school sweetheart - she a cheerleader and he the football player. He also left four children, six siblings and his mother.

All suicides raise the same questions of why and Ed's case is no different. He always seemed like the happy-go-lucky kind of guy but we all know now that there were deeper issues we could not see. 43 years old is entirely too young.

R.I.P Ed

Radiohead on the cutting edge, again. A video that was created with lasers - no video or still cameras.

Just what kind of "Pharmacy" is this anyway?

For more interesting logos go to The Phallic Logo Awards. The Bellwether logo is particularly interesting.

Des Moines has seen massive amounts of rain the past month with even more precipitation to our north. The results are flooded streams and rivers and evacuations of some heavily populated areas. The map below shows the evacuation areas in blue. This is supposedly the 500 year flood plain. Then again who is going to be around long enough to call someone on it?

"Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest." -- Mark Twain

"Ten Thousand Cents" is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously.

Cool concept and execution.

This is good but will it have an impact? Article.

Talk about timely...

Just a bit late...

Four hundred years after it put Galileo on trial for heresy the Vatican is to complete its rehabilitation of the great scientist by erecting a statue of him inside the Vatican walls.

Full article here.

“You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbour’s wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos,” Bishop Gianfranco Girotti said.

Full article here.

I always thought we played with Play-Doh in spite of its smell, not because of it.