After a long week, nothing says relaxing quite like seeing what the underbelly of the internet looks like (no, not that underbelly).  Most Fridays, we do the digging so you don’t have to.  So, enjoy the following links and knowing that the relentless effort it takes to uncover and save them isn’t giving you ADHD, only me.

Have you ever wondered what famous hand models actually look like beyond their hands? Wonder no more.

24 secret restaurant menus revealed.  I knew about some of the Starbucks ones, but the rest? News to me.

Over at Reddit, there is a great discussion about ‘If you were the last person on Earth, what would you do?’  I love these sort of thought exercises.

President Obama has appointed Edward Tufte “whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds.”  (If you aren’t familiar with Tufte, here’s a primer.)

Your TV, as if it wasn’t bad enough before, is slowly weakening and/or killing you.  If only Chuck Norris could be so subtle.

Books in the age of the iPad: Craig Mod’s most thoughtful, well-analyzed and beautiful essay on the future of books.

Ryan over at Signal vs. Noise talks about the two entirely different worlds that are shopping for a Palm Pixi at a Sprint store and an iPhone at an Apple store.

And finally, a bunny eats a dandelion.  If you decide to bail out before the end, well, your loss.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

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Incredible visualization of Crayola’s colors from 1903 until today, created by Weather Sealed.  All of you Edward Tufte fans should dig this.

Crayola’s Law: “The number of hues doubles every 28 years.”

(Via Neven Mrgan)

UPDATE: It seems Microsoft is trying to patent sparklines, so says Edward Tufte himself.  See here for further legal discussion.  Not as tidy as once thought.

Microsoft’s Sam Radakovitz on Excel 2010’s sparkline feature:

For Excel 2010 we’ve implemented sparklines, “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”, as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence.  Sparklines help bring meaning and context to numbers being reported and, unlike a chart, are meant to be embedded into what they are describing.

Any self-respecting data/information nerd knows how valuable sparklines are.  In my former life where displaying application performance data at dashboard and report levels was the Next Big Thing, the addition of sparklines to those dashboards and key reports were huge.

(By the way, if you’re not familiar with Edward Tufte, you should be. He’s an information design icon.)

Here’s what sparklines look like:

Incredibly information-dense graphics that tell a story otherwise impossible given the practical limits of space and reader comprehension.  I personally know a few people who will love these as much as their own children.  (Readers Chris and Larry know who they are.)

(Via Michael Tsai)