“The Jan van Eyck Akademie is an international post graduate institute for practical experiment and research in the field of visual culture. The academy combines three departments — fine art, design, and theory — as equal partners within a common programme: debate and research on the contemporary cultural condition.”

“Ant people are very good at working with detailed, factual information, and can usually remember facts well. They are also good at following directions when doing complicated work. Ants are usually fair in their dealings with others — justice is important to them. Ants are also good at seeing what is wrong with a job or a product. They are often able to tell people what they think, even if the news is unpleasant. Ant people play an important role in holding society together through good times and bad.”

Didn’t work for me but maybe it’ll work for you. “iPing is the personal notification service that will contact you, with a Ping, anytime, anywhere, and by any means you want. iPing’s unique characters provide both lifestyle and event triggered notifications to telephones, cell phones and pagers. Our proprietary technology accesses web content and delivers the alert via most personal communication devices.” Got that? It’s a Web-based reminder service that uses the phone.

Get a redirecting domain from WHATEVERYOUWANT.usuck.com. It’s free.

“Amsterdam-based designer Shigeru Watano once remarked: ‘Analytical and rational design principles govern dutch design.’ He was right. Dutch graphic design has emerged from an essentially typographic tradition and this analytical background has resulted in a clear and well organised typography — a management of the page — that is deeply concerned with visualising the hierarchies and the construction of texts.” Look around for many more texts on Bruinsma’s site.

Lots and lots of links. While you’re at it, check out this Map history/History of cartography resource, the U.S. Gazetteer Place and Zipcode Files pages and do not miss the WWWVL Cartography Resources page. Oh yeah, here’s the United States Geological Survey Topographic Maps search page.

“Traditional media won’t suffer, and some will prosper, as computer users flock to the Internet, says a report on media trends to be released Wednesday. Consumers are about to go on a media spending spree and will devote even more time to TV, music, books and movies as well as the Internet, says a five-year forecast…”

“The[se] graphs are based on an Alta Vista search for each of the terms listed on the left of the chart, directly followed by ’sucks,’ ‘rules’ or other similar words as shown at the top of each graph.”

“MP3 encoding is a complex process, and as such, MP3 encoders are complex pieces of software. There are many MP3 encoding applications, and they all function differently. They all use different methods of encoding, and all vary in quality, speed, and ease of use. But when it comes down to it, the MP3 file must sound good (that’s the whole point), but which one sounds the best? Read on, I hope you’ll find out.” Also see the MPEG Audio News page.

Continuing with yesterday’s time.gov link theme… get your “Personal World Clock” — it lets you add up to 16 cities and shows you the current time in all of them. There are a few other neat-o features here too…