Artist and writer Johnny Strategy takes a sobering look at the island nation’s preparedness for any potential crises of the undead.

On the one hand, Japan offers relative safety in that its reserves of zombie-sustaining resources are scarce: “With a cremation rate of 99.85% (2008 data), Japan and their corpse count, or lack thereof, would seem an ideal place to to ride out a plague of the undead.” On the other hand, the country’s geographic characteristics are fraught with post-apocalyptic risk: “Densely populated urban areas serve as ideal feeding grounds. And very little land to actually run to, coupled with the likely probability that other countries would deny you entry due to fear of contamination, certainly raises questions…”

Also included are some fascinating thoughts on the contrast between Eastern and Western zombies. Read more here.

Like a lot of New Yorkers I’m proud of the fact that, by walking or taking the subway almost everywhere, I consume far less gasoline than many residents of other cities. But this article suggests that smugness is not well-founded, as it’s also apparent that I’m probably generating much more non-recyclable waste than I could be. New York ranks sixteenth among twenty-seven cities in Siemens AG’ Green Cities Index and currently recycles just 15% of waste collected by the sanitation department, down from 23% a decade ago.

Numbers aside, the reporter’s own tally of non-recyclable waste products she collected after a week of take-out dining is sobering, and sadly familiar:

“I ended up with three plastic yogurt containers, a paper salad box, a paper cereal bowl, two Styrofoam plates, one plastic salad-dressing container and seven plastic food containers — the rigid ones with snap-on lids. Also, five plastic cups (each with a plastic straw), a paper cup with a plastic lid, a plastic water bottle and a plain old paper cup (it held milk for my cereal). Also, one plastic fork, one plastic knife and two compostable plastic spoons, which I threw out rather than composting.”

Read the full article here.

In the past I’ve written about my daughter’s fondness for my iPhone and how it makes a great toy for her, aside from the fact that it’s way too expensive and delicate to be treated as a toy. It’s no surprise that she feels the same way about my iPad, which is similarly perfect for her yet not perfect for us to give to her.

Griffin Technology and Crayola have a solution: their Trace & Draw “is both protective case and art table in one.”

Its “shatter-resistant” polycarbonate shell snaps onto an iPad 2, and a free app lets the kids trace and interact with Crayola-provided content. If nothing else, it makes for a kid-friendly case, which I welcome. I only wish it fit the original iPad model as well, since I still have one of those and I’m not quite ready to hand over my still-pretty-new iPad 2 to a two year-old. Find out more here.

The former securities analyst and now Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker (sometimes known as “The Queen of the Net”) just delivered her annual PowerPoint of Internet mega-trends at the Web 2.0 Summit. You can see it here. As usual, it’s amazing and not to be missed. Here’s my favorite slide:

This graph shows the first six quarters of iPad shipments, in blue, in comparison to the first six quarters of shipments for the iPhone and the iPod. This is staggering, and it plays in very nicely with a comment that Apple CEO Tim Cook made during the Q & A portion of today’s quarterly earnings report. I’ve typeset the quote really big so it can’t be missed.

Get ready.

I wrote about the Italian magazine Intelligence in Lifestyle back in December of last year and I’ve gotten to know its art director, Francesco Franchi, since then. He’s incredibly talented. The magazine now has a new masthead courtesy of the famous type designer Christian Schwartz of Commercial Type, which, if you ask me, makes for the very definition of an embarrassment of riches.

Francesco has posted samples from the magazine in this Flickr set for everyone to marvel over.

“Everything about your life is exciting. To everyone.” A spot-on spoof of mobile apps shot in a weekend my friend Alex Cornell. The video is so polished, I almost believed it was a real product. Visit Jotly.co to see for yourself.

Next Wednesday evening I’m going to be appearing at the headquarters of Daylife, a cloud publishing startup here in New York City founded by friend and (if you can believe it) high school classmate Upendra Shardanand. The event is part of the company’s “Nightlife@Daylife” series, in which they periodically bring in guest speakers for discussions on interesting topics.

I’ll be interviewed on stage by another friend, Daylife Chief Product Officer and serial entrepreneur Marc Hedlund. The topic will be tablets and the iPad, keying off many of the ideas I’ve touched on in past blog posts, including one I wrote in August: “What Comes After Reading on iPad.” This might include some hints as to what I’ve been working on all year.

You need a ticket to the event, but luckily they’re free and there are a few left at this EventBrite page. Please come by if you can, and if you do, please say hello.

A short but effective blog post about how the barriers to entry have been dramatically lowered for startups in recent years. Its basic message comports nicely with my own thoughts on why there’s never been a better time for designers to start new businesses outside of the services industry. Read the full blog post over here.

I know nothing about this project, except that this artist/model-maker is Japanese and apparently prolific. This Flickr set includes seventy-five of the artist’s delightful, caricature-esque models of what seem to be real people.

Oh wait, here’s the artist’s profile page over at his rep’s Web site. If you want to take a closer look at the models, see them all here.

I’ve been working on a project that’s required me to full immerse myself in the world of gradients, textures and making user interface widgets look shiny, chiseled and/or chunky, so this was a refreshing reminder that 8-bit art is still wonderful.

They’re a little steep at US$16, but it’s nice to know they’re out there.

If you stash your iPhone by your bed at night, here’s a handy way to keep it charged and functional: designery home products vendor Areaware sells Alarm Dock, a clever holder of sorts that displays the phone horizontally in a familiar presentation. The company even has a companion app that displays the time just like a clock radio.

The product copy says, “The Alarm Dock uses a nostalgic product language to meet the progressively thin and disappearing profiles of consumer electronics. It is at once a critique and an accommodation to new technology.” Uh, yeah. Anyway, I bought one for my girlfriend, and I’m happy to report that it’s a substantial object, meaning the wood (real beechwood) is solid and of sufficient weight to keep it from being easily yanked by the cord. Buy it here.

Earlier this afternoon I posted this on Twitter and it proved pretty popular, so I thought it worth posting it here too: Gawker has an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming biography of Steve Jobs that gives some background on how Jobs came to choose this uniform. Read the article here.

I figured posting it here would also give me an opportunity to reprint one of my favorite quotes from David Byrne: “People will you remember you better if you always wear the same outfit.” I’ve always liked that one.

It looks like I’m going to write about every project that John Hilgart turns out. I’ve already written a few times about his 4CP and Comic Book Cartography blogs, and now he has a new one, mining similar territory: Supertype! features big, beautiful scans of old comic book mastheads.

Though I was familiar with a handful of these already, the scale of each image makes me appreciate the hand-lettered quality of the logos and lettering in a whole new way. Browse them all here.

Just released today, Verb is a new instant messaging app for iOS that improves greatly on AIM for iPad and AIM for iPhone. It’s significantly more elegant, but even better it’s a multi-platform client much like Adium, one of my all-time favorite programs, which means it works with Google Chat and Facebook as well as AIM.

In spite of all the alternatives and its diminishing cool, I still rely heavily on instant messaging, so I was happy to see this released. Plus, today only, Verb is just US$0.99, which is a bargain for a universal-class app; Verb runs on both iPhone and iPad. Find out more here.

When I was starting out as a designer all I wanted to do was sit at my Mac and do design all day and ignore everything else about the messy world of business. In a way I’m still a little like that, but somehow I got to this point in my career where I’m building my second company and spending more of my time, energy and passion on the mechanics of business than I ever have before. And it’s been incredibly fun.

This coming Thursday I’m going to be talking about that journey as well as sharing some thoughts about design entrepreneurship in general. I’ll be doing this as part of Tech@NYU’s Startup Week here in New York City, and I’ll be appearing onstage with the amazing Ben Pieratt, designer extraordinaire and founder of Svpply. The event was announced this past week but it was sold out before I could even blog about it. Thankfully, the folks at Tech@NYU found a bigger venue, so they’ve just opened up a whole new set of seats. You can get your ticket here.

(By the way, people have been asking if the talk will be recorded or streamed. Currently there are no plans to do that, sadly.)