I find that this graphic is rather hard to read because of that stupid squiggly yellow year-line. This would have been much better if that line was just straight and everything else bounced around it. What the heck, right? That yellow squiggly line just screws everything over. This could have been so much more awesome. See the entire graphic here.
I went to check it out last week and I was feeling a bit underwhelmed by the whole experience. The only part that was worth talking about is the amphitheater that overlooks 10th Avenue. The rest of the elevated park is kinda boring and I couldn’t help but keep thinking that I’d much rather be walking on street level.
Contrail is a concept bicycle device that attaches above the wheel of a bike and covers the bicycle wheel with a layer of chalk. The chalk then creates a trail or mark on the surface of the road, turning the bike into a sort of large drawing utensil. The concept, developed by Pepin Gelardi of Studio Gelardi focuses around the idea of safety in numbers. By using this device, bicyclists will have a clearer path on which to ride safely and out of the way of vehicular traffic. At the same time, as more bicyclists using the Contrail go over a line created by a cyclist before them, the line gets brighter allowing drivers to clearly see a marked bike path where there might be none. It’s sort of similar to what happens when a dirt path appears in a grassy field after lots of people have taken the same shortcut over a period of time.
Below are two images of what the Contrail would look like in production. The first image shows a cross-section of the unit and how it works and the second image is an early production model.
I’m not too sure about the whole “safety” part of this concept, but I do think the Contrail is a nice way to visually enhance city streets. Imagine seeing colorful lines all over the pavement instead of just regular black or grey asphalt. I’d like that very much!
Gizmodo posted a video from FanDome last week about the incredibly complicated process of placing the yellow “first down” line on a football field during live coverage of a football game. I never gave the yellow line much thought since it never seemed like it could be much more than just alignment, but as it turns out, there’s a lot of manpower and computer-power that goes into making that yellow line look as good as it does. Things like color adjustments and camera angles and alignment are just the tip of the iceberg for technical crews working to make watching football a bit easier and more understandable to the average TV viewer.
Yelena and I stood outside of the MISHKA headquarters in Brooklyn on Saturday freezing our butts off as we waited to get into the crazy sale that was going on inside. For whatever reason, the MISHKA folks were only letting in 1 or 2 people in at a time and that meant the rest of us in line had to wait up to 3 hours just to get inside.
Being the crazy troopers that we are, Yelena and I waited that long and finally got inside where we snatched up some goodies before jetting out of there to go home and warm up.
Anyway, John Prolly snapped these pics of us in line.
