Hoefler & Frere-Jones' Typography.com compares and contrasts the new line of UK coinage with the new U.S. five dollar bill. The implication that for $525 million and 2,500 people, the U.S. is getting a worse deal than British public are ignores the fact that the the Royal Mint got the benefit of approximately 500 entrants (per the Royal Mint's Competition site) and only has to pay a very small fraction of them (presuming they're paying the winner and a subset of the invited artists).

The striking new designs, selected from an open competition that attracted four thousand entries, are the work of a 26-year old graphic designer named Matthew Dent. They are Mr. Dent's first foray into currency design.

That sounds a lot like spec work.

Moreover, Hoefler & Frere-Jones is only giving one side of the numbers. For starters, all 2,500 employees they say the U.S Mint has aren't all working over engraving stations (and apparently sucking). Just as the 915 employees of the Royal Mint didn't judge the coin competition.

Looking at budget figures from each mint's respective 2006 report, the Royal Mint [pdf] had sales of $228 million with an operating loss of about $4 million. The U.S. Mint [pdf] had $1 billion in sales with $85 million of profit.

Sure, the UK coins are handsome, but budget and employment figures aren't the cause or fault for pretty or ugly money. The agencies themselves aren't far apart when each country's population (60 million vs. 301 million) is taken into account. Wait, actually the U.S. has one mint employee per 120,400 residents, the UK one for every 65,000 or so.

H&FJ's take seems like a one-sided anti-bureaucratic cheap shot that misses another way to frame it: The Royal Mint didn't have one employee out of 915 they wanted to design their money.

A few days later than I wanted to put this together, but so it goes.

• Finding WWII aircraft crash sites in the Himalayas, with recovery to follow. [1]
• What makes a perfect president: Media and politics in creating the presidency as an American myth [1]
• The suit from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill Case may get closure before the Supreme Court
• South Korea is sending their first astronaut into space in April. So, that means the national dish, kimchi, goes to space, too.
• New Yorker talks about six words

1. Disclosure

Corrupt Tree/RTP f/8 @ 1/160 sec

f_4_t and I hit the second NC Science Blogging conference at Sigma Xi in RTP on Jan. 19. Divided into three breakout sessions, ample social/networking time and then two whole conference sessions.

I've posted a photoset from the day and an earlier lab tour at the EPA.

The fourth Krispy Kreme Challenge, NC State's growing tradition, was yesterday. Bell Tower to Krispy Kreme, eat a dozen donuts, then run back (four miles) in an hour. The prize? A green t-shirt and money raised for the NC Children's Hospital.

My Sunday reading habit is to work through the N&O in print and Washington Post and New York Times. Between Twitter, email newsletters and RSS feeds from the later two publications, I'll easily open about 20 browser tabs.

• "We're servants of our overload [1]" N&O ideas columnist J. Pedar Zane writes about the decline of capital 'R' Reading:

  Start with books. Recent surveys show that fewer than half of all Americans read at least one work of fiction for pleasure each year. The decline is especially pronounced among teenagers. Many factors have contributed to the trend, but the rise of the Internet is clearly a chief culprit.

  ...

  My guess is that the average American reads more words in a week than our ancestors read in a month. It's just that we're not reading books.

  Steve Jobs says the number is around 40 percent. But where is that figure coming from?

• Half of Japan's top ten bestsellers started off as cellphone novels.
• The New York Times on the NFL's "air it out" 2007 season:

  This was the year of the pass, when 3 yards and a cloud of dust gave way to the three-step drop. In one game of their undefeated season, the Patriots, who until this season featured a balanced offense, ran only twice in the first half. Seven quarterbacks threw for more than 4,000 yards this season, more than ever before, and two of them — New England's Tom Brady and Green Bay's Brett Favre — take their teams into Sunday’s conference championship games as favorites.

  Bill Walsh's legacy, perhaps? Remember when the 49ers lined up with Joe Montana [2] under center and had Jerry Rice, John Taylor, Roger Craig, Tom Rathman and Brent Jones and they could all catch passes?

• The Senate is considering legislation that would force the FDA to require special labeling for cloned food. Short of that, consumer groups want allowance for labeling food as "clone-free." Interestingly, the Washington Post article says the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture has to help get cloned food to market.

1. Disclosure
2. Though Joe Cool is dear to the hearts of every 49ers fan, I liked Steve Young better, possibly because I remember more of watching Young play than Montana.

Khoi Vinh on trying to hold onto (or worse, recapture) "the cool:"

Any time a media outlet publicly declares its intention to reach a younger demographic, chances are good that the results will make me cringe.

He's talking about NPR's Bryant Park Project, and how surprising it is that it doesn't include "jargon, zany sound effects or comedic narrative." He could be talking about newspapers, television or movies. I've read or seen too many horrible examples of 40-something suburban writing about 20-something urban trends.

Mostly, what (most) everyone comes up with is dumbing things down for a "younger" audience, adding a laugh track and calling it done. How insulting.

Stripped/Raleigh f/8 @ 1/160 sec

Posted 10 more images in the Whitaker Park set.

609 Wayne Drive/Raleigh f/8 @ 1/100 sec

The apartments I spent my first four-ish years in Raleigh at, Whitaker Park are halfway demolished as new $700,000 homes go up. Up and down Anderson Drive, on the other side of Fallon Park, several teardowns. Now, Pine Drive and Oxford look like they're next.

From the article:

Most supporters of teardowns cite increasing property values as a positive outcome. But experts say the impact on values of existing homes is not clear.

A study at the University of Illinois at Chicago found values of existing properties near a teardown dropped by as much as 24 percent following construction of a large new house in a village near Chicago.

Building more valuable homes does boost the property tax base and can also benefit other property values by making a location more desirable, said James W. Hughes, dean of the school of planning and public policy at Rutgers University.

But a teardown also could hurt the value of the house next door, he added. As buyers eye properties only for the land, the houses themselves become a nuisance that has to be torn down. On Raleigh's Overbrook Drive, a half-acre lot is on the market for $499,000 -- $40,000 more than it sold for in June with a house on it.

The Triangle has a lot of growth issues to address. Infrastructure upgrades, water, mass-transit, schools. Add housing to the list. I'm fairly biased in what I would like to see, houses that fit the character of their neighborhoods rather than seeing castle after castle go up. Ugly castles, at that.

Take a book name, combine with band name. Here's what I came up with in a few minutes:

• Snow Patrol Crash
• The Hunt for Simply Red October
• Barry White Oleander
• About a Badly Drawn Boy
• Cat on a Hot Hot Heat Roof
• I'm OK, You're OK, Go (edit: someone already had this one)

Core/Chicago f/9 @ 1/125 sec

f_4_t and I were in Chicago over the weekend for my cousin Jackie's wedding. As per custom, I've started a city photo set on Flickr. Right now, it's all Sears Tower-related, but I'll have more from around downtown, the Art Institute and Millennium Park in the coming days.

My phone died (well, rather, failed to have infinite battery life) Monday night and therefore, missed three phone calls from the Raleigh Police Department. They were able to go out Monday night, pay a call upon the hopefully bruised-shinned fellow and put him in custody.

So, Tuesday afternoon when I realized I had a number of messages waiting, I called back and headed downtown with f_4_t to pick up the bike. It was still in good condition. Oddly, I don't think the guy ever bothered to hook the front brake back up. I'd disconnected it last Sunday after our last ride to get it onto the roof rack. The seat quick release is a bit out of whack, but that was actually something I was going to ask REI about when I took it in for a tune-up. Other than that, it's fine. Picking it up involved other people arrange for paperwork to be done or look things up.

Back in March, I had a great opportunity to buy a mountain bike at REI. f_4_t's preferred mode of cycling is that involving lots of whoopdy-dos and dirt. And since for the first few months of our relationship, she'd been a sport and kept up with me on her mountain bike while we were on the Greenway or road-riding, I figured I'd give true off-road riding a shot.

It came that my REI dividend, the member discount and a great price combined to get me a K2 for cheap. We hadn't taken the bikes out a lot, but some and I was really liking mtn. biking, looking forward to getting down to Harris Lake for rides. A friend was telling us about a great trail up near Roxboro that sounded nice.

Unfortunately, I currently can't pursue those rides since we noticed last Thursday that we'd had a break-in either the previous night or early in the morning. Seems someone saw fit to break into the storage shed attached to the house and purloin my bike.

As previously noted, I spent a few hours Saturday at BarCampRDU. I hit six sessions and feel all were in some way valuable.

• Camping in 10 slides
• GTD (David Allen's Getting Things Done)
• Test Driven Development
• Limits of Technology
• Open services
• Network-centric Advocacy

Write-ups of each based on my notes are below the cut. (NB: I'll try and fix the internal links for LJ)

Reading about Science Foo Camp on Daring Fireball led me to the link about Foo Camp. Seeing as I was at BarCampRDU earlier today and not fully aware of the origin of the term, I clicked more.

I'll work at webifying my outline from the session tomorrow.

Mark Andrews/BarCampRDU f/4 @ 1/160 sec

Sessions going on now. Wiki. On twitter.

I don't really keep-up with podcasts, or lately, my RSS feeds and friends list, but when I have taken the time to catch up on a couple of podcasts, I find two music-related podcasts compelling tonics to the general pap of modern music:

NPR's All Songs Considered.

Bob Boilen directs All Things Considered. As part of the show, he's responsible for the bumps between stories NPR calls "Musical Interludes." He's also the host of the podcast/streaming only NPR show, All Songs Considered. The show has two sides. First, a generally weekly podcast that Boilen curates more than anything. In roughly half-an-hour, he'll run through six or seven songs, talk about what an artist is doing and why he's putting it in the show.

f_4_t and I are signed up for BarCampRDU.

f_4_t is still on pager duty and normally, that means avoiding things like movies. Well, that went out the window tonight, with Ratatouille.

I knew in the first few minutes from the smile that affixed itself that this would be a film I gushed about. Great story, great plot and not one thing about the film felt out of place or forced. It never felt slow. Most importantly, it was fun.

Some small things I liked:

• Brief reference to Good Fellas
• When Colette is illuminated in sunlight, her white chef's jacket has the highlights blown out.
• The spacing in the cobbles along the Seine. As I saw it, I imagined that, yes, Pixar went to Paris and looked at cobblestones, among other things.
• Anton Ego's typewriter

Definitely one I'd like to see again. A definite purchase when the DVD comes out.

Trailers:

• Daddy Day Camp: Looks like crap
• Underdog: Looks less like crap
• Wall-E: The 30-second teaser trailer was enough to have me hooked for next summer.

f_4_t and I have back-to-back pager weeks, which means two weeks of trying to not get cabin fever but also not making firm plans, seeing movies in the theaters or dining at fancy restaurants. She's taken to calling it something along the lines of "Life on the 10-minute leash." Staying close to wi-fi is high value.

Aside from carrying a low level of stress at perhaps being awoken at 3 a.m. by a customer who's forgotten their FTP password, the pager itself gets spam. Far more spam than actual pages. Everything from classic OEM software (Corel seems popular) to libido enhancers to some 419 spam.

So, while we were sitting at last night's Raleigh Flickr meet, a spam page came in. Software. In the reading I created Photoshop Cialis. Tagline: "When your photos come in a little limp."