I stumbled across this poem by Stéphane Mallarmé recently…

...and was impressed that the innovative layout was created back in the 19th century.

Some digging reveals Mallarmé was a French poet who often used interesting layouts and “typographical idiosyncrasies” as part of his poems. His style wound up greatly influencing how words were displayed in poetry and beyond.

His fin-de-siècle style anticipates many of the fusions between poetry and the other arts that were to blossom in the Dadaist, Surrealist, and Futurist schools, where the tension between the words themselves and the way they were displayed on the page was explored. But whereas most of this latter work was concerned principally with form, Mallarmé’s work was more generally concerned with the interplay of style and content. This is particularly evident in the highly innovative Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (‘A roll of the dice will never abolish chance’) of 1897, his last major poem [above].

.Mac

Neat feature of .Mac web mail: Each line item in the inbox has a little reply icon. You can click that to send a quick reply. Just type text and hit Send. No need to bother with the to, from, subject fields…just type the reply and go.

Twitter

Twitter elicits better support queries with specific entry fields for “This is what I DID,” “This is what I EXPECTED to happen,” and “This is what ACTUALLY happened.”

Swerve Festival

This Swerve Festival screens has cool background images in the top, left, lower-left and lower-right corners. Along with the centered content, they give the page a neat, sorta old-fashioned picture-frame quality.

Detour is a look at Moleskine notebooks by an international collection of artists, designers, architects, illustrators, and writers. This video shows designer Paula Scher’s notebook, which is filled with funky fonts:

More of the notebooks online at these sites: London Detour and New York Detour.

Related: Picasso, Paula Scher, and the lifetime behind every second [SvN]

We’ve previously mentioned Ask The Wizard, the biz advice blog of FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo, but it’s worth another mention for its wise and winning posts. Aspiring entrepreneurs should listen up.

Too Many Companies? explains why Dick feels there’s a 90% chance the initial business model is wrong. The solution? You’ve just got to start peddling and see what happens.

On a psychological level, I think a lot of people confuse fear of failure with not having enough confidence in the ultimate success of their idea. They thus conclude that they aren’t confident enough in their idea or their strategy because it seems to have holes and flaws for which they don’t have answers. This is a tremendous mistake. While I won’t pretend to speak for the entrepreneurs I mentioned above, I bet if you asked them if they were confident on day 1 that they had a winner with each of their previous successes, they would look at you sideways and say “of course not”. Speaking for myself, I can say that my cofounders and I try to find a market opportunity that seems like it will need to be addressed and for which we think we have some angle and then we just pull out shovels and start digging and figure other things out as we go.

Personally, I know going into any new company that there is a 90% chance we have the business model wrong on day 1. I also know that I have a historically poor track record for understanding what will and won’t attract customers or defeat competition (I didn’t get Twitter when Obvious Corp first launched it without an “e” in the name, I thought eBay would be out of business in six months after Amazon launched auctions, and I was certain Netscape would crush Microsoft in the browser wars because Netscape was more nimble). But the opposite of ‘fear of failure’ isn’t confidence. The opposite of ‘fear of failure’ is just not bothering to think about failure (BIG difference between this and thinking about risk profile for your idea/company)...

The key is to just get on the bike, and the key to getting on the bike is not the confidence in knowing you will be successful if you do x,y,z. The key to getting on the bike is to stop thinking about “there are a bunch of reasons i might fall off” and just hop on and peddle the damned thing. You can pick up a map, a tire pump, and better footwear along the way.

Metcheck

Melissa Fehr writes: I always use Metcheck.com as my preferred weather site (better than the BBC and all the American sites combined) and I discovered a new feature today that’s so practical that I thought I’d send it over to you. It’s their BBQ forecast, which checks the temperature, cloud cover, and precipitation for the next few days and tells you the likelihood of having a good BBQ (with a nice option to email invites around to your friends, with helpful suggestions like “bring loads of beer”).

Prime Time Window Cleaning

Prime Time Window Cleaning has a nifty quote calculator built right into the sidebar.

Bike shed – a discussion that pointlessly dwells on details and wastes time

Example: Someone posts a variation on a screen and one person offers .02 on the copy, another wants the header color changed, another wants a different image used, etc. Too many chefs on something that doesn’t even matter much.

It’s something we have to watch for in our Campfire chat room where it’s easy to have pile-ons that don’t really accomplish much. Someone has to blow the whistle every once in a while and say, “Is this conversation really helping?” Calling out “Bike shed” is a quick way to do that.

About the term
Poul-Henning Kamp used the term in “A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass…” and gives credit to C. Northcote Parkinson, a management guru who compared building an atomic power plant to building a bike shed. Kamp’s summary:

Anyone can build [a bike shed] over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is here.

More Parkinson wisdom
Parkinson is also the namesake of Parkinson’s law: “work expands to fill the time available.” He observed that the total of those employed inside a bureaucracy rose by 5-7% per year “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.”

Some more interesting quotes from C. Northcote Parkinson:

Delay is the deadliest form of denial.

Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.

Expenditures rise to meet income.

The Law of Triviality… briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.

When any organizational entity expands beyond 21 members, the real power will be in some smaller body.

Men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.

The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.

Billy Collins action poetry: Former Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, reads his poetry with accompanying animations. Forgetfulness is a good one to start with.

South Parkers animate words of religious expert and philosopher Alan Watts:

Trey Parker, one of the creators of South Park, was raised in Colorado, where his father attempted to teach him Buddhism. Now, years later, Parker and his animation pal Matt Stone have brought to life the teachings of Alan Watts, the comparative religion expert and philosopher. Under the FurryCarlos Productions banner, the two tapped South Park animators Chris Brion and Todd Benson to keyframe three of Watts’ recordings…

Related: Animation of a Samuel L. Jackson Pulp Fiction speech in type

Radio Lab (iTunes podcast link) is what you’d get if you put Freakonomics, Malcolm Gladwell, and This American Life in a blender.

Each episode of the folksy science show is “a patchwork of people, sounds, stories and experiences centered around One Big Idea.” The banter between hosts Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich can be slightly grating at times, but, overall, they do a great job of boiling down complex subjects and keeping things interesting. The way they use sound is intriguing too.

A few recent episodes:

Time
Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire,” and it’s as close a definition as we have. But maybe if we slow time down enough, or speed it up enough, we can unlock its secrets. On this week’s Radio Lab, we’re using our hour to try and do just that.

Emergence
What happens when there is no leader? Starlings, bees, and ants manage just fine. In fact, they form staggeringly complicated societies, all without a Toscanini to conduct them into harmony. How? That’s our question this hour. We gaze down at the bottom-up logic of cities, Google, even our very own brains. Featured: author Steven Johnson, fire-flyologists John and Elizabeth Buck, biologist E.O. Wilson, Ant expert Debra Gordon, mathematician Steve Strogatz, economist James Surowiecki, and neurologists Oliver Sacks and Christof Koch.

Morality
Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? We peer inside the brains of people contemplating moral dilemmas, watch chimps at a primate research center share blackberries, observe a playgroup of 3 year-olds fighting over toys, and tour the country’s first penitentiary, Eastern State Prison. Also: the story of land grabbing, indentured servitude and slum lording in the fourth grade.

More show descriptions at the Radio Lab archive. If you’re a pop science fan, check it out.

When he was 14, Malawian inventor William Kamkwamba built his family an electricity-generating windmill using spare parts and plans he found in a library book.

Patrick Roy writes, “I’ve been working with Transmit for a couple of days now. Excellent ftp client for OS X. Today I noticed a neat feature with the file / directory date. The format changes dynamically according to the space available.”