Gear up Durhamites, The DOUGHMAN is coming on May 29, 2010.

For those of you that don’t know about the DOUGHMAN, it’s probably the coolest event you’ll ever hear about.  It’s the world’s premiere team-relay-quadrathalon-slash-eating-contest and it’s coming back to Durham for the third year after a ridiculously successful 2009 race which was featured on Man vs. Food.  This local tour-de-gastronomic-force will feature some of our favorite Durham delights like Hog Heaven, Local Yogurt, Dain’s, LocoPops, and more.  Each leg of the relay journey involves casually enjoying wolfing a meal at one of these fine establishments and then heading off on an athletic event (running, biking, ‘water activity’) and then meeting the whole team for a final dessert course and sprint to the finish line.

The DOUGHMAN is also a charity event, and has raised over $12,000 for the Durham Inner City Gardeners (DIG) through sponsorship and donations over the last two years.  This  year, SeeSaw Studio will also be a beneficiary of the event.

So why talk about this on OK Great?  Well first of all, it’s Durham, it’s awesome, and that’s just what we do here.  Secondly, last year’s poster was designed by some of the talented folks writing for this blog, and this year, we (myself and a partner) were given the unenviable task of trying to follow up their great work from last year (see above, click to embiggify).  Hopefully ya’ll like the poster, and maybe you’ll even see it around town over the next months before the big date.

If you are interested in participating, rally up a team of three of your pals, head over to www.doughman.org starting on March 1, and sign up your team.  And start training!

And if you’re not into the whole athletic side of things, but want to get involved with the whole eating delicious local food side of things, the DOUGHMAN will also be hosting their second annual Local Foods Banquet at Durham Central Park Pavilion on the Saturday evening following the race – more deets about that will be coming soon on their website.

Let’s rewind back to the year 2006, when we first got a taste of Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s brilliant flash visualization of human emotion called We Feel Fine. This thing collects around 15,000 new feelings per day, and has saved over 13 million feelings from different social media sources since 2005, forming a constantly evolving portrait of human emotion.  So with that setting the stage, Harris (Creative Eye) & Sep Kamvar (Engineering Brain) released We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion, a book with the same artistic awe and informative data visualization. I know what you are thinking. This is 2010, infographics were so 2009. Not true, fresh looking infographics never go out of style if they are done right and this book is solid. Read the rest of this entry »

Nicholas Felton.