miscellany

2009-09-20T14:15:00.000-07:00

In no particular order...
Japanese town logos
When money buys happiness
The blue and the green
Best tweet ever
Milky Way rising
Procedural City
The impossible art of Li Wei
Best introductory books
50 great examples of infographics
The island of Peleliu
Sorting algorithm animations
Ian's Shoelace Site
Earth Hour 2009
Uncomfortable plot summaries

Helpful links for time travelers:
Advice from Ask Metafilter
Marginal Revolution
Cheat sheet

Movin' to San Fransico!

2009-03-24T18:18:00.000-07:00

Host Master. Tim Schafer posted the Grim Fandango design document a while back, but now it's nowhere to be found..
Photos of waves
Photos of the space shuttle launch

2009-03-22T11:13:00.000-07:00

Playing Super Mario Bros. with a webcam
The work of Josh Keyes
Exploring the ruins of Detroit

2009-03-12T22:19:00.000-07:00

Engrossing story about a real-life Ocean's 11-style heist. Very cool of Wired to post it early to keep up with the news.

2009-03-10T20:43:00.000-07:00

The person who came up with this toothbrush is going to be a gazillionaire.

2009-03-04T23:37:00.000-08:00

The photo for Bliss, the default wallpaper for Windows XP, was taken right here in Sonoma Valley. I'd always assumed it was a rendering - it's absolutely been heavily post-processed anyhow. Regardless, it's a fantastic background. I used the Bliss screen saver for longer than I can remember.

2009-02-28T11:24:00.000-08:00

Fish that looks straight up through its transparent head. I stared at the picture for ten minutes before realizing that the green things are the eyes and the features in front are the nostrils. I'm still not convinced this isn't an early April Fools joke.

Mapping mutual incomprehension. When we say "that's Greek to me" most other people say "that's Chinese to me."

2009-02-20T23:25:00.000-08:00

People at work
Making a camera mockup
Animal world maps

2009-02-03T21:22:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm declaring blogging bankruptcy. Here are all the links that I've been collecting (before stopping a few months ago). That way, if I come back someday, I can start with a clean slate!

Weird words and bizarre phrases
Vehicle evolution
Flag Evolution
Mona Lisa evolution
Instant Mona Lisa
Foodscapes
Obama!
Problem Sleuth
X-rays from tape
halfbakery
CG
☃
Banksta
Castle living
Awesome library
Mario's mistake
Tilt-shift videos
Metaphors of the mind
Failure bots
Mongolia
Stunning picture
Socotra Island
Big Mac Attack
Redesigned games
Olympics infographics
World maps
Wanderlust
yugop
Go
Howl
Origamic Architecture
Robert Lang

2008-08-16T22:47:00.000-07:00

now reading: David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Three recent game obsessions: GemCraft, Bubble Tanks 2, Cave Story

An impressive, but much less engrossing game: Defender of the Favicon.

Nutraloaf - it's unconstitutionally bad!

The Big Picture is a recent addition to my daily reading. The Large Hadron Collider and Olympics Opening Ceremony galleries were especially jaw-dropping.

Another gripping New Yorker article about The Chameleon. Mark my words, this will be a movie someday.

ImportGenius grants easy access to information about the contents of every shipping container that enters the U.S. The feed at the bottom or their homepage is unexpectedly mesmerizing. Like the live feed of search queries at Google HQ (or Hot Trends), this feels like plugging into a larger collective consciousness.

Clever Jeep ad. Like indexed with pictures.

Nice gallery of unique hotel rooms.

Crossing the world on rails. Until I strike it rich, I have no choice but to live out my extravagent travel fantasies vicariously.

The weird science of stock photography. Every industry is fascinating when explained well. How It's Made really capitalizes on this. Whenever I catch that show while channel surfing, I'm instantly paralyzed until it ends.

The "waters" of the moon have the coolest names. I almost wish they'd been used on something closer to home so we could actually use them more than once a lifetime.

Joyce McKinny had her dog cloned. As a result of the subsequent publicity, she was recognized as the suspect in a 1970's British sex abduction case. The story took another turn for the strange when she was accused of having a boy commit a burglary to fund a wooden leg for her horse. It's probably best not to think to much about this.

Nobody does packaging like Japan (one two three). I have honestly purchased apples that came individually wrapped in a wrapped box in a bag in another bag.

Japan is probably also unmatched in its use of tetrapods. For some reason, I'm just longing to see ultra-slow-motion video of 1,000 of these things dropping from a plane.

Clingstone. Houses with names are so cool.

"Here's a true story about how awesome Pixar is."

2008-06-22T15:31:00.000-07:00

now reading: Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman (and other stories)

Just finished watching Randy Pausch's uplifting last lecture. He's gotten more out of life at 47 than most people ever will. It was inspiring to see him on stage just radiating joy in the face of his own mortality.

Recently I've abandoned my calculator for Google. There's nothing more convenient, especially for unit conversions (15.23 in in mm, 5 cups in liters, etc.). It even does binary! In typical Google fashion, there are also some secret hidden values, which finally makes it possible to calculate the number of horns on a unicorn baker's dozen acre in teaspoons per light year.

This discovery led to a quick side trip into humorous units of measurement. My favorite is the Sheppey, "a measure of distance equal to about 7/8 of a mile, defined as the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque."

This post about time traveling back to 1000 AD (followup) sparked some interesting discussion. I daydream about fantasies like this more than I'd care to admit. I think it would be very easy for a time traveler to "invent" Tetris, assuming the necessary electronics existed. Then again, at that point it'd probably be much easier to get rich on the stock market. What inventions had the greatest profitability-simplicity ratio? Positive global impact-obviousness ratio?

"Architectural designer" Eric Clough secretly built cryptic clues and objects into a New York apartment that revealed hidden messages and treasures (more pictures here). Supposedly, J.J. Abrams bought the rights for a movie adaptation. This would be an absolute dream come true for me. I spent an unhealthily large part of my childhood plugged into the old LucasArts and Sierra adventures, and I always wished I could experience something like that in Real Life. I think there could be a huge market for immersive experiences where guests hunt for treasure in puzzle-filled ruins or infiltrate a secret base while avoiding guards. There are already similar attractions in the form of the more elaborate haunted houses. The one in Japan's Fuji-Q Highland had a 1 km route through a zombie-infested hospital. Guests are given tiny flashlights and follow a dark, snaking path for about 50 minutes. There were even actors that would actually chase you through the corridors. Now being trapped in Resident Evil wasn't my idea of a good time, but I think it shows how a large-scale role-playing attraction could work with a enough visitor throughput to be profitable.

21 leaf clover!

Mesmerizing video of magnetic fields. While possibly entertaining, this is a superpower that would be highly distracting with only marginal utility.

The recent discovery of water ice on Mars has revitalized hopes for finding traces of life. Nick Bostrom argues that stumbling upon Martian fossils "would be extremely bad news for humanity." Charlie Stross offers some different perspectives.

2008-06-01T11:20:00.000-07:00

now reading: Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

All of a sudden, it struck me as very strange that I only see the back of my own head about once every few months - when I get a haircut. On the other hand, people around me see the back of my head nearly as often as the front. Come to think of it, in olden times there were probably people who went their whole lives without ever seeing their own faces. I'm also troubled by the fact that I've never seen my own scalp, which is maybe the only reason I'd ever shave my head. I mean, what if there was something weird under all that hair?

This month's National Geographic has a delightful article on psychedelic nudibranchs. It's a wonder how such a visually striking creature has gotten so little attention until now.

How we work. How we procrastinate.

This song made from fragments of the movie Alice in Wonderland has been in my head all damn week.

Some survival tips for an unplanned free fall. As much as I'm adverse to danger, some part of me secretly hopes that one of these esoteric bits of information that I'm filling my head with will come in handy some day.

Why does New York get all the cool installations? The Telectroscope is an enormous "telescope" that links New York and London through a tunnel beneath the Atlantic. It's so great that they created a story behind the device and even had a giant drill bit emerging from the ground before installing the actual Telectroscope.

Earthquake lights are mysterious glows or flashes that allegedly appear in the sky when tremors occur.

2008-05-11T15:25:00.000-07:00

If pain is the body's way of telling you something is wrong, then why does it have to hurt so much? It seems counterproductive for the body to impair its own performance or even incapacitate itself with pain. I propose shifting the entire pain range down a few dB.

Ice sphere maker.

Colossal Castle or Humble Home? Equally priced homes in different parts of the world

I should just put up a permanent link to the New Yorker. In the current issue, there's an interesting article about a chef with tongue cancer and how the experience has shaped his understanding of taste.

Another good New Yorker read on invention. The author explains that there's a certain inevitability to the discovery of big ideas. In a way, these ideas are floating out there, waiting to be found, which is why inventors and researchers have independently arrived at the telephone and evolution and the light bulb and calculus. I remember another writer arguing that if you could go back in time and save either Einstein or Shakespeare from a premature death, you should go with Shakespeare. That's because without Einstein, somebody still would have eventually discovered relativity, but without Shakespeare, we'd never have Macbeth.

And another New Yorker article on photo retoucher Pascal Dangin. I wonder if he reads PhotoshopDisasters.

A thunderstorm hits an erupting volcano in Chilé. This somehow led me to Pixdaus, which, along with FFFFOUND!, provides enough pictures for about a year's worth of wasted afternoons.

Two from Neatorama: The origin of the Nokia ringtone and a new blog of optical illusions.

I remember reading about The New York City Waterfalls a while ago. Is it just happening now, or is it annual? Having narrowly missed The Gates in Central Park, I'd really love to see this installation.

Wushu with lightsabers.

Cyberdyne is real, and they're making robots!

In case you were wondering, here's what's underneath it all.

2008-04-28T21:39:00.000-07:00

In the late 90's "pop-culture historian" Bill Geerhart wrote to infamous serial killers, posing as a friendly kid. 10-year-old Billy was thinking about dropping out of school and wanted advice. The replies range from amusing to unsettling to depressing (via Boing Boing).

Apparently, it's pretty difficult to get the Canadian Post to not deliver a letter (via Freakonomics). Though you probably couldn't get away with what you could on credit card receipts.

Jared Diamond writes in the New Yorker about New Guinea's culture of revenge wars. The matter-of-fact tone of Diamond's former guide and the absurdly convulated rules for fighting make the story read almost like a dark comedy. But then you realize that it's all real, and it's so much more disturbing. It would be easy to look down on the New Guinea Highlanders as a primitive group, but Diamond argues, just as he does so often in Guns, Germs and Steel, that there's a rational basis behind their seemingly inefficient behavior.

This Damn Interesting article about Operation Pastorius is a great reminder that the United States has always been royally screwing people over for its own interests.

I expect that we'll be eating vat-grown steaks sometime in the near future, but I really hope that the road there doesn't include brainless, quivering meat-creatures. But then again, that's probably still much less horrifying than what happens in the industry today.

KayakPaddling.net is a perfect example of how to make an interactive instruction manual. It's truly a fantastic piece of design. Now if only I had the desire to go kayaking...

It seems like whip-making would be an interesting trade to learn. I wish I'd known about this book back when I wanted to be a dashing archaeologist-adventurer. Now that there's no rush, I guess I'll just wait for the interactive flash version.

2008-04-20T21:39:00.000-07:00

I'm currently working through the Planet Earth series, which consists exclusively of jaw-dropping footage but jumps around a bit too much for my taste. If I had an HDTV, though, I'd probably be watching the series right now and deep into the night before eventually collapsing of exhaustion. On an HDTV, I can watch baseball for hours on end. Anyhow, Earth-Touch is another great resource for nature lovers that hosts short HD clips of all sorts of animals and environments. It's like having little windows into all parts of the world, but presumably less smelly.

On other planets, the most common plants could be red, blue, or even black. Think about it.

8-bit Yamanote Line! I watched the whole damn thing. I regret nothing.

Time is a harsh mistress.

When should the Wandering Jew start worrying about sleeping with his own descendants? The answers are absurdly detailed and esoteric.

2008-04-14T21:07:00.000-07:00

now reading: R.K. Narayan, Malgudi Days

Interesting New Yorker article about.. elevators (supplementary video). It strikes a great balance by weaving a true story with a fascinating inside look at the industry. According to the author, the door-close button in any modern elevator has no effect, which took me a while to accept as truth. I'm surprised, however, that some people think crosswalk buttons have no effect as well. Not only does it make the light change faster, the walk signal won't even come on at most intersections unless you press the button. Is that different outside of California?

Another long but worthwhile read - NY Times article on cellphones spreading in the Third World. They also published a nice complementary article in January - The Afterlife of Cellphones.

The world is running out of helium!? I'm no expert, but isn't running out of an element kind of a big deal?

Complex results from small amounts of data:
Super Mario in 14kB of Javascript
20-second clarinet solo in 1KB
Complex patterns that come out of Conway's Game of Life
The Demoscene - minute-plus animations (some with soundtracks!) generated with 64KB or less
Some demos are as small as 256 bytes

This post was inspired by this month's Seed, which has an interview with fractal pioneer Benoît Mandelbrot. I thought fractals were only good for generating pretty pictures until I heard a lecture about the coastline paradox. It seems only fitting that the deeper one digs into the field of fractals, the more interesting it gets. And if not from the pretty pictures, the names alone would be enough to draw anyone in. Who can resist terms like Cantor Dust, Sierpiński Carpet, and Menger Sponge? Especially when it's a Level 3 Menger Sponge!

2008-04-08T21:46:00.000-07:00

currently reading: Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners

Not only has the Olympic torch become a lightning rod for anti-China criticism, when it's all over, the relay will have produced 5,500 tons of carbon emissions. But all controversy aside, the torch itself is certainly a work of art that can be appreciated on its own. I'd love to visit a gallery of past torches, but I guess it's only possible in digital form for now. Howstuffworks also has a page on, well, how the torch works.

How It's Made videos are my new time waster du jour. At five minutes each, they're great spontaneous diversions, though it's hard to watch just one.

Proof that YouTube comments are the dregs of the internet (via Waxy).

Recently took a flight on Virgin America, which had too much fluff for my taste. Does anyone really want to text chat with strangers on the plane? I was delighted, however, to find a small selection of TED Talks on the entertainment system. I've yet to see one that wasn't utterly fascinating.

Creative bar codes.

The Monty Hall Problem has a simple, perfectly good explanation, but it still feels like a paradox no matter how many times I read it. The same subtle pitfall that makes the Monty Hall Problem so counter-intuitive has also crept up in some famous psychology experiments.

Functional geographies - France, Taiwan. What are some other countries with useful shapes? The Chile lockpick?

Extreme papercut art. These would go much faster on a LaserCAMM.

I feel that the term "love letter" makes no sense when it is used in the phrase "a love letter to fans."

MySong generates an accompaniment to a vocal melody (via Futurismic). Luckily, it doesn't work on the fly, which is why you're not living in a musical right now.

I had no idea that Jack Handey is a real person. Deep Thoughts is absolutely timeless, but the official site is annoying, so get them in text form here. Handey has also written several New Yorker articles (via Metafilter).

2008-03-31T23:41:00.000-07:00

I'm such a sucker for pretty clocks.

The Yellow Drum Machine wanders around, looking for objects to drum on. When it finds something that gives a good sound, it composes a little song. It's incredibly near-sighted and has trouble navigating around, which somehow makes it so much more adorable.

That's right, I said "adorable." Let me offset that with this clip of someone shooting flying cars with a rocket launcher.

Google Maps as a magazine navigator. Google Maps as a geo-novel.

Matt Frondorf drove from the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge, snapping one picture each mile of the way. Here's a trip in the opposite direction, but as a time-lapse video.

A gallery of some unique intersections and terrible traffic jams.

Plate tectonics! Why is it that subjects that were so boring in school are suddenly interesting now?

2008-03-22T17:31:00.000-07:00

The mantis shrimp is the only animal on Earth that can see circular polarized light. Their eyes contain all sorts of weird structures that let them perceive over 100,000 colors - 10 times more than humans can see. According to a researcher, "They're enchantingly violent. They catch other animals by either spearing it through the heart or smashing it to pieces. Unlike most predators that grab prey, these pummel it and destroy it. When they interact with each other over a burrow, they use their armored front appendages and smash each other on the face. Whenever they get into any type of situation, they smash things. You can't pick these up. They're really great animals to have around."

I've always had a soft spot for products and stores with ridiculous names. Lame puns, nonsensical word choice - the absurder the better! So I wish I hadn't seen this list of Onomastic Sobriquets in the Food and Beverage Industry, because now I feel compelled to visit them all.

Some time ago a nearby sushi restaurant was rechristened "Chocolate Chocolate Sushi." Recently, the name changed again to "Tofu House and Chocolate Chocolate Sushi," with the "sushi" written so small as to be nearly invisible from the street. It's certainly memorable, but that particular combination of words doesn't seem like the product of a sane mind.

A surprisingly large number of celebrities turn out to answer the age-old question: Who would win in a fight - a minotaur with a trident or a centaur with a crossbow?

Prince Rupert's Drops are raindrop-shaped pieces of glass that can withstand hammer blows on the fat end but explode when the tail is even slightly damaged.

Posts from the International Association of Time Travelers forum (via Kottke).

Find out what happens when George Clooney Googles George Clooney. Also, some deleted scenes here. A while back, the cast of Ocean's Thirteen gave an entertaining interview in Time.

I don't actively follow celebrity news (never watching TV helps), but George Clooney always comes across as a pretty well-adjusted guy, especially considering his positive involvement in politics.. Natalie Portman is another celebrity who handles her position well, and she gets some great coverage in a recent NY Times article about stars promoting various causes. It's indescribably cool to read that Portman is an avid supporter of microfinance (maybe even cooler than the fact that she wrote a paper titled "Frontal Lobe Activation during Object Permanence: Data from Near-Infrared Spectroscopy"). The same issue has several other articles worth reading about philanthropy and organizations working for social change.

Speaking of microfinance, Kiva is the first organization that's ever gotten it right. The idea is that our economy works because of loans. Loans enable us to start businesses, buy property, and basically build a functioning society. But HALF OF THE WORLD live on less than $2 a day and have no borrowing power whatsoever. These people are born into extreme poverty and live day to day. That's why in most of the world, people who are poor stay poor. And since the poor are unable to create new businesses and the infrastructure for a healthy economy, countries that are poor stay poor as well. Kiva fixes this by putting money directly into the hands of those who need it - entrepreneurs in the Third World. The organization has a list of people asking for a specific amount for a specific reason (i.e. woman in Ecuador wants $800 to start a music shop). Any visitor to Kiva's website can then lend money to these people. The loans are gradually paid back, and the lenders receive news about the borrower's business. A few hundred dollars isn't much, but it lets even the poorest people bootstrap themselves out of poverty and stay that way.

Kiva is part of a new wave of social entrepreneurs who are making huge innovations in helping the poor. Philanthropists have been throwing money at Africa for years with very little effect. Most of it disappears down a black hole of corrupted officials. Some of it might actually reach those who need it, but it's like giving a man a fish instead of teaching him how to fish. These countries need to develop infrastructures that are sustainable - economies that can grow without constant cash infusions from richer nations. And to do that, we need to start getting smart about how we approach social change.

Kiva hits on two major ideas. The first is that the poor should not be treated as beggars. By receiving loans rather than donations, borrowers maintain their dignity and gain a huge sense of empowerment. They realize that they can actively improve their lives, which just doesn't happen with free handouts. And just because these people are poor doesn't mean they're not trustworthy or economically savvy. In fact, Kiva loans are just as (if not more) likely to be paid back than any other loan you can think of.

The other idea is that the key to eliminating poverty is giving the poor a way to generate wealth. Providing health care and education (two focuses of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) only aims to alleviate the symptoms of poverty. If you give the poor a way to make money, that money will go straight to improving health and education. These people are just as rational as you or I. It's been shown time and time again that once the poor are making enough to survive comfortably, they will start using their additional income to send their kids to school and buy better food. And when enough people reach this level, you can easily imagine how a formerly impoverished country starts to turn itself around as a whole.

But it's not like we have this whole poverty thing solved. It is exciting, though, that we're starting to apply our creativity and resources to the problem in new and better ways. We sent ourselves to the moon and created the internet and make amazing advancements on a daily basis. There's no reason why we can't apply our skills toward solving the problems of the Third World. Paul Polak, founder of IDE, points out that "a billion customers in the world are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house.” What could an army of engineers do about that? And not just engineers. Kiva, after all, was started by a business major. What could we do if we brought our economics and business and other knowhow to bear?

Of course, it's never that simple. Many smart people have been tackling the issues for years. I fully agree with Polak that we need nothing less than a revolution in education. We need to learn how to design products and services and solutions that will make lasting changes. And that means designing for the true needs of the end users, rather than what we think they want. Polak, with his background as a psychiatrist, is a pioneer in this way. He understands that to design a water pump you have to go out to the fields and talk to ten, a hundred, five hundred farmers before figuring out what that pump needs to be. A traditional engineer would design a super-strong machine that lasts a decade and pumps a massive amount of water. But it will cost a thousand times more than any $1 a day farmer could ever afford. Polak's pump breaks down and moves far less water, but it's ultra-cheap. A farmer on the lowest rung of the economic ladder could buy this pump, double or triple his income for the year before it disintegrates, then use the money to buy two new pumps while expanding his field. Designing for a customer like this is worlds apart from designing for, say, the U.S. market. In Burma, the price of a few screws could make or break a product, and such radically different priorities require a radically new approach to the way we design.

The other major hurdle is sustainability. Polak often says that that "the world's cleverest designers... cater to the globe's richest 10 percent, creating items like wine labels, couture, and Maseratis." Much of that is simply because you can only make a tiny fraction of a traditional salary when doing development work. The answer for this goes back to treating the people we're trying to help as customers, rather than beggars. IDE Bangladesh and Myanmar, for example, sell water pumps for a profit and spend money on marketing, even commissioning locally-produced movies to help sell their products. While this may seem counter-intuitive, having a sustainable business model is the right way to effect lasting change. There's no way to pump enough money into an impoverished country to lift it out of poverty. Instead, we need to stoke the country's economic engine, and it'll do the rest of the work itself. Economic principles work the same way over there as they do here - people spend money, it goes back to fuel more growth, and so on. While the margins are obviously different there than they are in the First World, Myanmar alone is a market of over 55 million, and that's a huge number to multiply with. Unfortunately, the numbers don't work out to be high enough to attract the amount of talent that the industry could use -- yet.

Things are still pretty bleak in far too much of the world. But we're moving in the right direction. I'm sure there's a much better future in store.

2008-03-16T16:01:00.000-07:00

currently reading: Avram Davidson, Rogue Dragon

All the water and air on Earth gathered into spheres on the planet's surface. Seem surprisingly small at first, but it makes sense if you consider the fact that the bottom of the ocean and the edge of space are only a few miles apart.

Animated timeline of human migration. We wandered around for over 100,000 years before inventing agriculture. From that point, it was basically the blink of an eye before we were sitting at computers writing blogs. Makes talk of the next singularity seem somewhat more believable. Similar animation of the history of religion.

360-degree videos have arrived! Each frame is like one of those Quicktime VR panoramas, which are still a good cure for a case of wanderlust. Some of other good sources of immersive media: Arounder, Panoramas.dk, WHTour, Tokyo VR Project, and Brovision.

This water-powered outpost makes me want to take up kayaking.

One instantly noticeable thing about Taiwan traffic (aside from the terrifying state of anarchy) is that traffic and crosswalk signals have countdown timers. Installed to improve safety, the timers were actually found to increase the number of accidents. I saw a similar article about a study that showed red light cameras also increase accidents (people slam on brakes to avoid running yellows and get rear-ended). I tried looking for the specific article, but couldn't find it in the mountain of relevant links. Humans just weren't meant to control giant hunks of steel moving at high speeds. The sooner we have robots behind the wheel, the better!

Kinetic sculptures. The last one (by Theo Jansen) is completely wind-powered.

Fun POV video. Light drawings are a great way to spend a lazy evening.

Bouncing liquid.

Karate chop in slow motion. Apparently, everything turns into jelly when you slow it down enough. Some more videos here and here.

2008-03-09T15:41:00.000-07:00

Recently, many publications have been taking a look at the melting of the Arctic and the impending rush for newly accessible land. This account in Foreign Affairs is one of the best I've seen so far. The Northwest Passage is opening, fish are moving north, and Greenland is seeing a farming boom. There are tumultuous times ahead.

Another undeniable, frightening trend is the drying of the West. The development of the western U.S. was made possible only by an abnormal period of wet climate. And this period has come to an end. I think it won't be too long before we start to see northward human migrations. Canada is looking more appealing by the minute.

Last week engineers released a massive torrent of water into the Grand Canyon (video) in an attempt to restore the ecosystem. I can just imagine the survivors of the apocalypse coming across that headline on a decaying newspaper unearthed from the rubble of our civilization.

Why does one molecule smell of spearmint when its mirror image smells of caraway? Smell is a weird, weird sense. Fragrances and flavors are some of the hardest sensations to describe, since the sheer variety of nuances simply outstrips our everyday vocabularies. Instead, those in the industry use a different "vocabulary" based on referencing other smells and tastes. That's why you see wine descriptions that talk about hints of chocolate and oaky notes. They never made sense to me until fairly recently, because even if you understand the words, you don't really understand them in the olfactory context until you've actually experienced them.

I previously wrote about reusing tiles in video games to save memory. This comic points out that the clouds and bushes in SMB are actually the same! I feel so simultaneously impressed and cheated.

A 3D graphics engine written in Excel.

A German art group has programmed a robotic arm to "handwrite" a Martin Luther bible. I once saw a neat demo of two Comau robot arms. One held a whiteboard, and another used a dry-erase marker to repeatedly write and erase the company's name. The arm with the whiteboard then started to rotate and translate in space, while the other arm moved with it, continuing to write and erase without missing a beat. Mathematically, it was just a simple coordinate transform, but the effect was amazing. Anyhow, bible-writer 2.0 should dance like that as it writes!

Neatorama has a nice gallery of bridges. Make sure to check out the links to other galleries at the bottom.

The "art island" of Naoshima (flickr gallery) hosts a number of contemporary art museums. I'd love to head out there with a suitcase of books and just lose myself for a month.

Japanese scientists were able to capture the entire birth of a traffic jam on video. Traffic is really the result of one thing: tailgating. When somebody taps on the brakes, the person behind has to brake harder, because he or she is too close. This continues down the line until the braking force becomes high enough to completely stop a car. That's why traffic can grind to a standstill for no apparent reason. But it only takes a few good drivers to smooth out the flow. Clive Thompson writes about an engineer who realized he could "eat" traffic waves by trailing the car in front of him by so much that he never had to stop. This effect can also be seen in studies that show how just a few cars with adaptive cruise control improve overall traffic. There's absolutely no reason why we can't avoid congestion with good driving practices, which is what makes stopping on the freeway so infuriating. Driving schools need to wise up and start teaching people how to not drive like idiots.

In 1984 NASA launched a giant cylinder covered with 86 panels of different materials to measure the long-term effects of exposure to space. I'm not sure what happened to it when it came back, but they could've put it straight into an art museum.

NIGHT Windows is my favorite gallery of Japan photography. Amazingly, most of the pictures are completely devoid of people, which really captures the lonely feel of a Tokyo night. If you're looking for more, The Night views of Seto has some great nighttime panoramas.

One thing that's often said of Japanese culture is that it's so alien from that of the West. I think this especially stands out when examining Japanese mythology. Pop culture has familiarized us with the gods and creatures of Greek and Norse myth. Tolkien has taught us all about trolls and dwarves and dragons. Everyone's heard more than a few fairy tales. Basically, you can travel any Western country and not be too surprised at the fables you hear. But Japan has a completely different set of legends that really have no counterparts in our culture. The creatures of Japanese myth are so wildly inventive that the only way to describe them is "alien." Just take a look through the (beautifully illustrated) Obakemono Project to get a sense. You'll also know what I'm talking about if you've seen Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, Heisei Tanuki Gassen Pon Poko, or, to a lesser degree, Paprika (with its recurring parade sequence). Some of my favorite concepts - objects with souls and animals that become shapeshifters when they reach a certain age. A fox that lives to a hundred can transform into a human and grows an extra tail for each passing century. I love detailed, completely arbitrary rules like that.

The Kuchisake Onna is an ancient Japanese legend that became a modern urban one.

2008-03-04T20:35:00.000-08:00

currently reading: Gene Wolfe, Storeys from the Old Hotel

826 National is a non-profit that teaches kids creative writing. Each chapter features a themed store straight out of childhood fantasies complete with an assortment of fake products. Among these are the Pirate Shop, The Echo Park Time Travel Mart, Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co., Brooklyn Superhero Supply, The Monster Union, and The Boring Store (a spy shop). We need more organizations like this in the world!

30 creative bookshelf designs. Allow me to add the staircase shelves and the bookseat.

Organizing books by color. Looks amazing, but it'd probably be maddening in practice.

When I visited London, one of my favorite places ended being the British Library. Right as you enter, there's this giant wall o' books that contains the entire collection of King George III. Aside from the hugely impressive collection of books, the architecture was also rather stunning. It seems like every great city always has a great library. I'm looking forward to checking out this collection of library photography the next time I'm at a book store. Slate has this slide show of some newer buildings, and Deputy Dog has also pointed out these two unique libraries.

This book store in a converted Dominican church won an architecture interiors prize. Everything about it just looks so right. Kids Republic is a rainbow colored book store in China.

The top five most stolen books are apparently used like a form of underworld currency.

2008-02-27T23:13:00.000-08:00

Man, getting a Netflix subscription was like turning on a faucet I never knew I had. And the faucet spews movies. There goes everything I wanted to accomplish this year.

I saw 300 a few days ago, which definitely works much better as a comic than a movie. Even with the new subplot, there's really not much more than an hour of material there. It was interesting poring over the movie's Wikipedia page and IMDB trivia, though. It's surprising that some of the very modern-sounding one-liners can actually be attributed to historical figures. And I was tickled by the statistic that the word "Sparta" (and its derivatives) was used 0.62 times a minute. I wonder how that compares to the typical Smurf conversation.

The armadillo girdled lizard is my new favorite reptile. Sorry, turtles hibernating in refrigerator!

There are some fantastic posters at History Shots. If they weren't so absurdly expensive, I'd stick one right on my bathroom door. It'd probably take a year to read the whole thing.

Well, spring is definitely here, as evidenced by the birds nesting in my planters, making it so I can't water any of the flowers, resulting in their untimely withering deaths. Oh, the irony. Anyhow, at least I'm glad I don't live in icy Portland, Oregon, where friction no longer exists. See more cars crunching together in this Russian tunnel.

People counting cash in different countries (via Gigazine). I guarantee that every counting method besides the one that you use yourself will appear incredibly strange and non-intuitive. Is it just money that's counted differently? Or just things that come in sheet form? From now on, I'm going to make it a point to count money like the locals do whenever I travel.

2008-02-24T22:19:00.000-08:00

Spent a gorgeous President's Day weekend in Yosemite. The weather was perfect, and we practically had the whole valley to ourselves. Winter is definitely the time to go! Incidentally, I finally caved and got a Netflix account after getting back. I took advantage of the streaming video feature and saw a lot of old films that I'd always been meaning to rent. One of these movies was The Shining, which I'm glad I watched after getting back. Coincidentally, the interiors of the Overlook were based on Yosemite's Ahwahnee Hotel.

I'm also glad I read this after the trip. The Enigma of Amigara Fault is a short manga about mysterious holes that appear in a cliff after an earthquake. The shape of each one perfectly matches the outline of a specific individual who is then drawn to the hole and compelled to enter. The idea is so disturbingly creepy that it's worth looking over the weak ending.

Time Guardians. These would go well with a few chicken wire ghosts.

Hedgehog grater. Hedgehog paperclip holder.

Pictures of the abandoned Detroit School Book Depository.

Drawings of weird letter-shaped rooms. Here's the whole neighborhood.

1000 villagers on an island, 900 with brown eyes, 100 with blue. Anyone who learns their own eye color must commit suicide. One day, an outsider visits the island and mentions to the entire tribe that some of them have blue eyes. What happens? The answer is that 100 days later all the blue-eyed villagers commit suicide. Wikipedia also weighs in.

Drivey is a minimalist driving simulator that makes a great screen saver. Another one of my favorites is Holding Pattern, which shows the landscape drifting by through an airplane window. I wish they hadn't put pictures of people in some of the views though. Given the choice, I'm sure that most people would rather not have to look over someone's lap to see outside the plane.

2008-02-13T22:57:00.000-08:00

currently reading: Jim Steinmeyer, Art and Artifice

Space has a smell!? Apparently, it's that of "pleasant welding fumes." Well, I'm glad we finally got that answered. I'd also like to know what DNA tastes like. If you just had a big ol' spoonful of double-helixy goodness. Somebody should get cracking on that.

I actually don't dislike the smell of welding, though I have had several traumatic experiences associated with it. Aside from setting my pants on fire twice, I've also nearly formatted my brain by hitting the trigger with my mask up. When they say "don't look at the spark!" maaaaan, they aren't kidding! It was probably the only time I've ever experienced being completely stunned. My vision wasn't affected so much, but my mind went totally blank for a few seconds. I just froze, completely aware that I was spacing out, but unable to do anything about it. It was like someone hit the pause button on the universe.

The new IKEA ad is pretty nifty! I like the old 360-degree spinning ones more, though (one two).

A few weeks ago, I saw a Japanese show about fish tank decorators. One guy made incredible terrestrial-looking landscapes using all sorts of grasses and shrubs that happen to grow just fine underwater. I'm not sure if it's the same guy, but here's a gallery of some similarly jaw-droppingly gorgeous tanks. I was inspired and promptly visited every fish shop in the area before becoming discouraged by my lack of money and ability and slinking back home. I spent the rest of the day watching TV and gorging on tangerines.

The most surprising part of the BBC's Life After People is how quickly all evidence of human civilization would disappear after everyone vanishes. On a geologic time scale, after just an instant there'd be absolutely no record that we'd developed intelligence, culture, technology... Maybe it's not so crazy to look for dinosaur relics on the moon. After all, it's quite possible that intelligent beings have evolved and become extinct in the past, only to be lost in the mists of time. Perhaps the longest-surviving remnants of the human race will be our vehicles on the moon or our probes drifting in space.

I was going to somehow tie that into these pictures of things embedded in asphalt. But hey, it's late, and I'm going on vacation tomorrow!

2008-02-11T23:26:00.000-08:00

I'm very curious about the miracle fruit, which supposedly makes sour and bitter foods taste sweet for as long as two hours after you've eaten it. It would be absolutely mind-blowing to bite into a lemon and have it taste like lemonade!

Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2007 (2006 here).

Maps of undersea internet cables.

2008-02-07T21:53:00.000-08:00

Evolution of tech company logos. There's clearly a trend toward more iconic logos, but the older ones are certainly more fun to look at. I'd take wizened dinosaur fish and 1,000-armed flaming deities over plain text any day.

This story about an iMac and bumbling Danish police benefits a lot from being a contemporary of Zoolander.

Recruit has a pretty neat advertisement that's a lot like the recent Jumper commercials. But instead of a kid teleporting through commercials, it's a fat guy running through the web. I'm not going to try to explain it further, just take a look here.

Very well-executed ads for an Olympic sponsor. Too bad we don't really have morphing T1000 athletes to compete for our amusement.

The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" aka "trash vortex" is a giant "'plastic soup' of waste" twice the size of the continental US. I'll bet reporters live for this kind of article. It's not every day you get to think of as many possible ways to describe a "slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water." I had fun just typing that!

Legend has it that occasionally a large group of rats will fuse together into a giant entity known as a rat king. Oh man, I wish stuff like this actually happened in real life. Well.. maybe not this one. But something similarly cool with less vermin.

I lost a couple of hours today to The Powder Game, an updated version of the venerable Falling Sand Game. As with Line Rider, looks like there are many talented fans out there with a lot of free time.

2008-02-06T21:29:00.001-08:00

Fascinating conversation in this month's Seed between writer Will Self and anthropologist Spencer Wells. Wells throws out the fact that, based on DNA analysis, we now know that humans "nearly went extinct about 70,000 years ago. We dropped down to 2,000 people."

Moof! Sigh.. I really want a dogcow. Might be willing to settle for a pandog, though.

Groundhog Day is one of my favorite movies ever. It's strange that a movie that repeats the same scenes over and over is so infinitely rewatchable. According to this account, Phil relives February 2nd for at least four years. The screenwriter Danny Rubin reveals on his blog that it was actually ten years, though he likes to imagine it was 10,000.

If Osama's only 6 degrees away, why can't we find him? Aside from the fact that the last few degrees probably wouldn't be too cooperative, it turns out the research that originated the famous 6 degrees of separation concept was flawed. The theory actually doesn't hold up to close scrutiny.

One magnetic curtain, one rocking bed, add to cart.

My coworker recently introduced me to the interrobang. This has just supplanted the upside-down question mark as my favorite punctuation symbol. Alt+8253, if your font supports it. Also see the interrobang's other unpopular friends, the sarcasm mark and irony mark (zing!).

2008-02-04T21:06:00.000-08:00

When did this happen? I was searching for hamburg steak recipes and got a website with a Japanese URL.

This still impresses me to no end: "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

Arnold weighs in on the age-old vampire vs. werewolf question. I just realized that I have his autograph.. on my diploma.

People who are really good at stuff:
Speed climbing
Cup stacking
Tetris
Stamping
Dice stacking
Pen spinning

and my personal favorite: drawing a perfect circle

Some of the most memorable internet videos have been those of people demonstrating superhuman talent in pastimes that nobody even knew existed. One great example of this is video game speed runs, which really started to gain momentum with Quake Done Quick and eventually spread to just about every game ever made. There are even runs of user-created levels, like Kaizo Mario World (more here). One player even overlaid 134 attempts at stage one, creating a sort of many-worlds interpretation of the Mario universe (several links pilfered from Metafilter). Reminds me of the movie Next with Nicolas Cage (which I only saw because I was trapped on a long United flight). It's fun to imagine that all the deaths that occur in a game fade away like collapsing quantum states, and the path that's left in the end is a perfect string of just the successes that took place. After all, it wouldn't make sense for the hero to fall down a bottomless pit, right?

In college, music and rhythm games were just getting popular, and I got sucked in by one called Beatmania. I eventually got to a level where I realized that I could've learned a real instrument with all that time I'd spent playing. Instead, I just had some useless skills at punching buttons in time to simulate music. I experienced a huge bout of gamer regret and took a long hiatus from gaming. But I still kept an eye on how the industry was progressing, and I eventually started to watch speed runs of new games, since I didn't own the consoles that could run them. It felt like I was somehow saving time, since I could watch someone blaze through all the stages in a few minutes and be satisfied without having to slog through them myself. Of course, that certainly didn't make too much sense. A few years later, I finally came to terms with my hobby and learned that life's not just about gaining "useful" skills or always having to do something "meaningful." Sometimes, we need to appreciate the "subtle pleasures of wasting time." Arguments like "are games art?" aside, when it comes down to it, games are fun, and there's certainly value in being able to kick back and enjoy a few moments of simple amusement. After all, even pastimes that are more universally respected have more or less the same results. After my breakup with Beatmania, I actually did manage to teach myself guitar, and the equation was still time and money in, pleasure out. Would have been much different if it had been Guitar Hero instead?

2008-01-30T21:58:00.000-08:00

Like the previously posted monster sketches, Yeon Doo Jung takes children's drawings and ups the fidelity, in this case by taking photographs. You can see his work at Wonderland (via Metafilter).

In the UK, people are combining photos and banknotes. In Japan, they're folding Turban Noguchi. And I thought money was just for buying stuff.

This juxtaposition of street maps is a striking composition. Each city exudes so much character from just a small slice of its layout. This site does the same for subways.

Vladstudio has a very pretty collection of desktop wallpapers. I was particularly captivated by this world map with the land as oceans and the oceans as land. I could spend hours daydreaming about this imaginary planet. When I was a kid, I used to wander around the house with a mirror under my nose, imagining what it'd be like if everything were suddenly inverted. It's completely different, but I somehow got the exact same feeling from this map.

2008-01-27T21:32:00.000-08:00

This picture of shadows gave me vertigo for a minute when I first saw it. It's a lot like the National Geographic photo of the camels.

Annie Leibovitz does another round of celebrities as Disney characters. Even though I'm not a particular fan of any of the celebrities photographed, it's still exciting to see the characters portrayed by real people. Disney's been going downhill for a long time now, but my childhood memories, and the fact that the company still manages to produce a few flashes of greatness now and then, will probably keep me a fan for life. It's really a heartbreaking relationship, though, especially since Disney misses so many opportunities, despite having many people within the company who could really turn things around. I have my fingers crossed that someday the folks behind Re-Imagineering will be running the show. EPCOT Central can be brought on to consult.

Books correlated to SAT scores. I think the creator has his head on straight about the conclusions that can be drawn from these charts (not many). But still, he sure is inviting a lot of flames with the title of the website.

Averaging several photos of a single person makes face-recognition software perform better. That's a really good idea. Why didn't someone think of it sooner? There's not much else to say about that.

Overcoming Bias has been temporarily replaced with an automated quote-posting machine. It's put up a ton of thought-provoking and/or amusing quotes from a huge range of sources. They're up to 9, but it's not too late to catch up with pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. Incidentally, here's a New Yorker article about one of the most quotable Americans ever, Ben Franklin (even if he was often misinterpreted).

Gapminder is an amazing tool for comparing the populations and GDP's of countries over time (via Think or Thwim). Worldmapper, which resizes countries based on a variety of metrics like carbon emissions, is also food for thought.

It's striking how much of an impact these visualizations make considering how often we're beaten over the head with the statistics on which they're based. It just goes to show how bad humans are at wrapping their brains around large numbers. In high school, I participated in a competition that was all about estimating huge quantities. For instance, approximately how many ping pong balls would it take to fill up the sun? How many Chevy Impalas would fit end-to-end between the Earth and the Moon? You only had to guess the unit and power of ten, but I don't think I came close on a single question. What does it mean to have a hundred billion pennies? I'd have no idea unless I actually saw it. Clive Thompson hits it right on the head when he points to our inability to understand large numbers as a major source of our humanitarian problems. "We'll donate thousands of dollars to bring a single African war orphan to the US for lifesaving surgery, but we don't offer much money or political pressure to stop widespread genocides in Rwanda or Darfur." We're outraged when a serial killer murders five people, but our eyes glaze over when we hear about the millions starving to death all over the world. The examples are endless. At least humanitarian groups are starting to catch on to this phenomenon and developing materials like The Miniature Earth that make large-scale, global problems much easier to grasp.

I suppose many of the same things can be said of government spending, with billion-dollar budgets and TRILLION-dollar deficits. As far as most people are concerned, any unit above a million is just another term for "really big."

An economist's take on altruism.

Understanding the economies of scale can also result in huge profits. UPS saved three million gallons of gas by using routing software to reduce the number of left turns taken by their trucks.

2008-01-24T21:15:00.000-08:00

Understanding art for geeks. I didn't want to laugh at these, but I couldn't help it. I guess that also describes the entire lolcats experience.

You know how your voice sounds different to you than it does to others? I think it'd be neat to have a device that would let you hear how someone's internal voice sounds.

The flight traffic above North America is so dense that you can see the shape of the continent just by looking at the airplanes. The video comes from Aaron Koblin, whose homepage, along with other sites like Flight Explorer, shows just how congested the skies have become. In fact, there are so many planes flying around that their contrails are having a significant effect on global weather. Interestingly, scientists have theorized about this for a long time, but it wasn't until 9-11 that they actually got a chance to make direct observations.

I took one of those arbitrary job tests in high school, and it told me that I should be an air traffic controller (or a park ranger). Anyhow, I used to think that air traffic was like juggling flaming chainsaws - a sort of organized chaos like you see in the oft-linked video of FedEx planes dealing with a thunderstorm. So it was interesting to see that, at least across the Atlantic, there's actually a huge virtual highway, complete with eastbound and westbound lanes. After taking the job test, one of my classmates was basically told, "you are impatient with stupid people - you should be an engineer." I'm not sure why that's stuck with me for so long, but ever since then I've been trying to convince myself that that's not the reason I became an engineer.

2008-01-19T20:40:00.000-08:00

Stunning HDR photos from Japan. Some look amazingly like hyper-saturated paintings. I wonder if photographs would take offense at being mistaken for other mediums.

Hitler banned from iSketch. Hilarity ensues.

> get knife
> stab polonius
> say to ophelia "get thee to a nunnery"
Hamlet - The Text Adventure is by far my favorite graphics-less game of all time.

Lore waxes nostalgic for the early days of noisy, 1980's-era computer equipment. Aside from the screech of dot-matrix printers and dial-up modems, I also miss the sound of degaussing CRT monitors. I'd revel in the anticipation of pressing that button after resisting for a few hours, thinking about all that.. gauss that had built up.

School performance is based on names? Apparently, students with the initials C or D get lower grades than those with the initials A or B.

I finished 3/5's of a philosophy minor in college, and it's always been a favorite subject. I'm actually terrible at doing philosophy, but I certainly loved reading and hearing about it, especially the thought experiments. After a day of studying heat transfer and stress fractures, it was so refreshing to have a heated argument about brains in vats or Chinese-speaking computers. Ask a Philosopher and the quizzes at TPM are also a great source for some though-provoking material.

Between movies like 28 Days Later and I Am Legend and books like The Road and The World Without Us, it seems like we're in the midst of a post-apocalyptic renaissance. The History Channel is speculating about Life After People, and even Pixar's getting in on the action with the desolate junk fields of WALL*E. Is this just a way to reflect on our increasingly probable fate of eradication through global warming? Or do abandoned landscapes strike some sort of deep-seated, universal part of the human psyche? Nearly everyone's had those dreams where you're wandering around an empty town devoid of life.

I think part of the appeal is the stimulation of taking a step back and realizing that humans probably won't be around forever. In fact, it's presumptuous to think so, because on a geologic time scale, we've only been around for an instant, and we're already facing multiple self-created threats of extinction. While most people don't base their everyday actions on this sort of thinking, it's fascinating when humans actually DO take our impermanence into account. Have a look at this article about the nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain. A proposed warning plaque would read "Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves a powerful culture. This is not a place of honor... What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us... The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours..." There's something so deliciously sad and lonesome about imagining another civilization finding this message millennia after we've faded from the Earth. Although these were created with a much warmer intent, the Voyager and Arecibo messages evoke similar emotions for me. Is it strange to be nostalgic for humans even before we're gone? I guess it's impossible to be nostalgic after we're gone, but still...

2008-01-15T22:47:00.000-08:00

The D-Day invasion filmed with just three people. Part of the BBC's Bloody Omaha. (via Metafilter)

Pentagram did a fantastic redesign of Dairy Today magazine. The new cover is instantly iconic and makes such a huge visual impact. This is great design.

I've always been fascinated by ligers. Seeing this post about a zorse inspired me to look for other rare animal hybrids. Luckily, someone else has already compiled a great list with pictures. Wolphins? Pizzlies? They're all right here!

2008-01-14T22:42:00.000-08:00

Mostly arbitrary ratings of national flags. I actually found the lowest-ranked flags the most interesting to look at.

Similarly, the most useless flash clocks are often the prettiest to look at.

Sanyo's SolarArk is quite a sight to behold. I refuse to read the page in detail, lest it destroy my fantasy that the SolarArk is a sun-powered laser cannon for vaporizing Earth-threatening asteroids. The 2005 Expo in Aichi was full of buildings just like this that housed all sorts of rides and movies. One was even a giant kaleidoscope! I was there for two days and had the time of my life. It was honestly like a short trip to the future. The site was larger than Disneyland, with daily attendance sometimes breaking 100,000. When I drove past the site again last summer, the entire thing was gone. It was a very sad feeling, as if an entire city had disappeared forever. Maybe after a few decades have passed, I'll wonder if it ever happened at all. I guess I'll probably still have the astronaut food that I bought at the Mitsubishi pavilion, which I'll never eat. Should have gotten the space ice cream instead of the space octopus balls.

Hyena men gallery. That is all.

2008-01-13T00:39:00.000-08:00

Burglar codes and hobo codes.

I saw a museum exhibit in Japan about a system of communication used by ninjas. They had an elaborate code that used different knots to represent letters. This enabled them to leave detailed messages in plain sight, since they were basically meaningless tangles of string to outsiders. The interesting part is that the shapes of the knots were derived directly from the letters of an older system of writing that had long fallen out of use by that time. Apparently, the ninja were linguistic historians as well as silent killing machines.

The Inca also encoded meaning into string. It's a wonder that they developed such an intricate system of record-making that's so far removed from spoken language.

I'm a sucker for all-in-one tools, and the ATAX coolest I've seen in recent memory.

2008-01-10T20:58:00.001-08:00

"The Agriculture Ministry is not in charge of Gundam." Turns out that falls under the jurisdiction of the Science and Technology Agency.

Nice gallery of 18 stunning bridges.

Here's an old map that shows the continents that would emerge after Mars is flooded. These 3D renderings are probably more accurate, but I prefer the Dutch map for using place names like Keplerland and Newton Strait.

People are finding a way to reintroduce nature to Tokyo's urban jungle. I'd like to see a hypothetical time lapse after all the humans mysteriously disappear, and these plants burst out of their pots, exploding in size to engulf the city.

The Deutsches Museum in Munich had an excellent chemistry wing where you can see all sorts of automated reactions. Each exhibit had a button that would release the proper amounts of different chemicals into a large beaker, resulting in color changes, heat generation, or even phosphorescence. But none of them was as cool as this demo!

In high school chemistry, Mr. Angstrom had everyone research a chemistry demo to present to the class. My partner and I tried one that was supposed to make mercury beat like a heart but couldn't get it to work (and probably suffered some sort of permanent damage from mercury exposure). We wanted to attempt the stoplight reaction instead, but in the end went with the tried-and-true ammonia fountain. By the way, my teacher's name wasn't really Angstrom, though it was close so that's what we called him. I just realized that I don't remember his real name anymore...

The expandable chair video made some waves a few months ago. Core77 expands on the expanding furniture collection with videos of a lamp and two tables.

They also have a good post on light graffiti (possibly invented by Picasso!). I actually tried it out once, but it didn't work because I didn't have a decent light or camera. Those are pretty much the only two things you need to do light graffiti, and I couldn't come up with either. I'm such a loser.

This Economist article showcases three groundbreaking charts. Edward Tufte calls this chart of Napoleon's 1812 Russia campaign "the best statistical graphic ever drawn." It took me a while to figure it out, but when I did, I could almost hear the torrent of information flooding into my head.

It seems like recent infographics are striving more for maximum density rather than elegant simplicity, but they're still a lot of fun to pore over. Here are a few on world issues and U.S. taxes. While the preceding pages were definitely designed for print, Understanding USA is a great example of a site that exploits the medium of the web browser.

Even if you don't drink in all the information in these graphics, it's still possible to appreciate them as aesthetic works for their use of form and color. PingMag has a good roundup of charts that demonstrate infosthetics - form follows data. Some more pretty ones at visualcomplexity.

For more data visualization, check out this We Make Money Not Art post, as well as Cool Infographics and Edward Tufte.

2008-01-09T21:49:00.000-08:00

Nice collection of roller coasters with videos of each. Isn't "roller coaster" somewhat redundant? In Japan they're called "jet coasters" or another term that translates to "scream machine." Screaming is important to roller coasters.

What ever happened to hats? I can't imagine that everyone was wearing them merely because of fashion. We have so many to choose from - stovepipes, bowlers, fedoras, ten gallon - it's seems like such a waste to go bareheaded.

Every two years, this tiny casino appears for just one day. I like to imagine that it materializes out of thin air with a sparkly shimmer and the soft clacking of falling coins.

The more I hear about Scientology, the weirder it gets. The headquarters are located in a castle in Hollywood that contains a restaurant, hotel, reproduction Louis XVI furniture, and a drug detox center in the basement. It's like the adult version of having a secret club in a treehouse, except with a multi-million dollar budget. And a drug detox center.

When I read that article, I got this as my random cartoon. It's just like an episode of Johnny Quest where the villain dispatches flamethrower-wielding goons on hoverboards to dispose of a truck. "Make it look like an accident." They create a giant explosion, incinerating half a forest. After the commercial break, Johnny makes it to the scene and warily offers, "I.. don't think this was an accident." Cartoons are great.

2008-01-08T20:40:00.000-08:00

RulesOfThumb.org isn't as useful as I thought it'd be, but it's still an interesting source of trivia. It's too bad, since Tricks of the Trade seems to have stopped updating.

I don't play games on my computer, and Vista turned out to be a total disaster. As a result, this has been the longest I've ever gone without upgrading my computer, and it's not feeling the least bit sluggish. I have, however, gotten several new hard drives for.. backups and stuff. Since my case only fits one HD, all the old ones are now sitting in USB enclosures. I'd love to have an easy way to consolidate all that storage, so I was excited to read about the Drobo. It's a little box that will hold up to four SATA drives of arbitrary sizes. Proprietary software manages the space, using part of it for data storage and part of it for redundancy. The amazing part is that you can hot-swap a drive, and your data is reshuffled on the fly. The reviewers were able to remove a drive in the middle of playing an HD video without dropping a frame. The $500 price tag is too steep for me, but I hope similar products eventually trickle down to the budget market.

In China there is an entire village dedicated to making fake paintings. Apparently China has phased into some sort of weird alternate reality when no one was looking.

I always thought of Nethack as one of those reeeaally old games like Spacewar or Pong - pioneering works that are now downright primitive. When I finally tried it though, I was floored by its depth. That and, well.. it was an absolute blast to play. Being completely text-based, Nethack has a tremendous learning curve that many players will never bother to overcome. But after sticking with it for a while, your brain learns to process the screens of moving punctuation marks and letters, automatically replacing them with the objects and creatures they represent. Nethack is also brutally difficult with no saving and any wrong move potentially ending in instant death. But once you really get into it, there isn't a more rewarding experience in all of gaming. Nethack has been developed and refined over years and years, and the level of detail really reflects that effort. Every conceivable action you can think of has been coded into the game. For instance, you can write a message in the dust on the floor with your finger. It will become increasingly unreadable when you or other creatures walk across that spot. A cockatrice will petrify you on contact, but you can wield its corpse as a weapon to petrify other monsters if you're wearing gloves. Watch out though, because if your pack is too heavy, it may cause you to fall down a staircase and land face-first on the cockatrice corpse. The entire game weighs in at around a megabyte, but keep in mind that's a megabyte of text. That's longer than most novels! Sometimes called the greatest game of all time, Nethack has gotten attention at Salon, GameSpy, Metafilter, and Jayisgames. Give it a try!

2008-01-06T21:22:00.000-08:00

When we visited the Arc de Triomphe, the most fascinating part was watching the cars circling below. From 165 feet up, they looked just like swarming insects. It was mesmerizing to watch the relentless torrent of near-death experiences repeated over and over again. This footage of traffic in India provides a very similar experience.

I saw a TV program that showed a picture from 1863 of samurai visiting the Sphinx in Egypt. That wasn't exactly a sightseeing trip, but it was interesting to consider the fact that international tourism is by no means a recent invention. For example, the ancient Seven Wonders saw a great deal of tourists. There were even "papyrus guidebooks to consult before departing and vendors with whom to haggle over souvenirs."

"What are the chances that you just inhaled a molecule that Caesar exhaled with his dying breath?" The probability is over 99%.

The Economist describes Ivar Kreuger as the Leonard of swindlers, the Raskolnikov of finance, and the Dennis the Menace of Sweden.

They also have a great article about the rise and fall of the shopping mall. It's easy to forget that the shopping mall is actually a brilliant invention - a shopping center completely different from anything else that existed at the time, incorporating tons of design innovations to encourage browsing and spending. It's amazing how much the inventor, Victor Gruen, got right on the first try. The mall he built at Southdale is so close to a modern mall, it's "as as though Orville and Wilbur Wright had not just discovered powered flight but had built a plane with tray tables and a duty-free service."

I think Tetris is a similar case of getting it all right on the first try. Even though it has spawned an immense tree of descendants, nothing that has come since can truly match up to the original. Some critics even leave Tetris off top ten lists, because they believe it transcends gaming. That doesn't mean other falling block games aren't a whole lot of fun, though. Gamasutra's best freeware of 2007 list let me to Chain Factor, the black hole into which my weekend has disappeared.

2008-01-03T22:42:00.001-08:00

Back! I've been continuously intoxicated for about three weeks now. I'm also no longer capable of operating with less than nine hours of sleep. Vacations are great.

A little late for the holidays, but this pop-up card designer might come in handy for next year.

Auction: "I will send maddening postcards from Poland to the person of your choosing."

London cab driver out-navigates GPS system. The best part of the article is this tidbit: a London cabbie's encyclopedic understanding of the city's streets is referred to simply as "the Knowledge."

I saw a bench in Paris with a colorful cozy knitted around it that just made my day. Turns out there's a whole guerrilla knitting movement.

Turkish Star Wars has been steadily eating away at my brain ever since I saw it. I realize now that the only way I can ever be free is to inflict it on others. Sorry.

Cursor*10 is the most intense game I've played in recent memory. Finished it with exactly one second on the clock, sweating and shivering.

Mitsubishi constructed a 567-foot tall tower just for elevator testing. The windowless, clean white building is really quite striking to look at. I'd be absolutely terrified of riding the elevator though, for fear that the doors would actually open at some floor that isn't supposed to exist. In the same way, I avoid looking in the rear-view mirror when I'm driving alone at night, afraid that I might see someone in the back seat.

I saw a miniature version of the Tokyo Traffic Center when I lost my backpack on a train. It looked just like the pictures in this link, except crammed in the room under a flight of stairs at the station. Notice the hand-written note in the last picture. It's surprising how much is still done the old-fashioned way, despite all the technology around. Anyhow, the station employee did something similar, pulling out a giant roll of paper and unfurling it to reveal a gazillion criss-crossing lines and lots of 3-point text. At first glance it had looked like a solid sheet of ink. He explained that the train I had been on was now somewhere mixed in the Tokyo transit system, and it'd be difficult to catch, because it might switch directions or jump tracks at the end of the line. He looked up some tables in a huge, moldering book and somehow pulled three numbers out of that crazy map, telling me that one of those would correspond to the train with my pack. I'd have to scramble three stations down the line to have a chance of intercepting the right train. I was pretty incredulous but really didn't have any other options. As I pulled into the interception station, another train just leaving had numbers matching the first sequence on the list. Hoping my backpack wasn't on that one, I jumped on the next train that came in, which was numbered with the second sequence on the list. Sure enough, my bag was right there on the rack, just as I'd left it. This was two years ago in December. The bag had my passport in it, and after backtracking for it, I made it to the airport just minutes before my flight departed. If you were on that plane, I'm the jackass that held up the flight. I'd never run faster in my entire life. I got to spend the holidays with my family in Taiwan instead of the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. It was a damn Christmas miracle. My dad is probably still furious with me.

I have a friend who owned one of these squishy toys, except it was a black rat. He'd randomly pull it out and splatter it against the wall or the ground. Strange guy.

Hey! This is like my Pangaea coffee table book, except with future Pangaea!

Japan's robot of the year is pretty impressive to watch in action, but I would've gone with the ice-brick-pooping Yuki-taro. Like WALL*E with snow!

I used to build stacks like this all the time with Jenga blocks! Jenga blocks are relatively well-toleranced as far as toy blocks go, which is ironic, because Jenga is only possible with pieces that aren't perfectly flat.

2007-12-12T07:35:00.000-08:00

Off to Europe! Back after Christmas.

2007-12-10T21:58:00.000-08:00

Kottke has a good overview of this year's NY Times Year in Ideas.

A great list of Pixar cameos and in-jokes (with pictures!).

Turns out humans just aren't made for space travel. Aside from the cosmic radiation, muscle/bone atrophy, and soul-shattering loneliness, the the humane immune system degrades in weightlessness. On top of that, zero-gravity also increases the virulence of some microbes. Stupid virile space microbes.

2007-12-08T21:53:00.000-08:00

MMOCrunch has a list of the top 5 most memorable events in MMORPG history. Reading about the Eve Online heist was absolutely fascinating. Wired readers also pointed to this Shadowbane incident as another notable event. Although VR technology is still in its infancy, the socio-economic complexity of online worlds is becoming comparable to that of the cyberspaces of fairly recent sci-fi novels.

Ping pong players must operate on another plane of existence.

Go balloonhead go!

Is it just me, or does anybody else think that these awful movie pitches aren't too different from what we actually see in theaters? There's nothing quite as bad as sitting through a terrible movie. I wonder if it's obvious to the cast and crew when the movie they're working on is a total stinker. Is there an awkward tension on the set of Deuce Bigalow 2 as everyone's thinking, "this movie is going to be TERRIBLE" but they're just waiting for someone else to say it?

Speaking of movies, at least computer interfaces have gotten a little bit better, with perhaps the best example being Minority Report's giant gesture screen. Mark Coleran's homepage has a demo reel that's a good representation of the typical futuristic interface seen in movies today.

It's also great that movies are finally using plausible present-day computer systems as well. There's nothing more jarring than seeing ridiculous flying envelopes when emails arrive (i.e. The Insider) or access granted/denied alerts with giant flashing fonts.

While I complain about fictional computer interfaces, sadly the real world outdoes Hollywood with programs like these: one two.

Neat flash toy from Adobe. I've been only moderately impressed by the matches at Layer Tennis, but I've always enjoyed the scalable Adobe ads on the site.

I was excited when I saw the Amazon Filler Item Finder, but I'm still ordering extra books to reach the free shipping threshold instead of buying less expensive items that I don't really want. Whoever came up with Amazon's free shipping policy should be given a raise and then get punched in the neck.

This double-decker bus u-turn has the highest impressiveness-to-excitement ratio of any web video I've ever seen.

2007-12-03T23:11:00.000-08:00

Pizza in Japan is.. different. Witness the Pizza Hut crab-shrimp-mayonnaise double king (with a side of roast chicken).

Guy Debord's Memoires was originally published with a sandpaper cover, that it might destroy other books. That would certainly reduce the need for warehouses like this.

I was surprised to learn that the warehouse seen at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark was actually a painting. I saw it in an "Art of ILM" book that had a ton of great matte paintings that were used as backdrops in Indy and Star Wars. That's how they did it before computers. And even with all the CG in films today, matte paintings are still widely used in newer films (one two three).

Via Metafilter, elephant-design is an intriguing company that manufactures small runs of products chosen by customers, like Threadless for stuff. They've also gotten some coverage in PingMag and Metropolis Magazine. I certainly wouldn't mind having a glowing donut washing machine (that you can sit on!).

GPS navigation is one of the most significant automotive innovations in recent memory. I thought it was a technology that suddenly exploded when access to GPS satellites became available, but navigation devices have actually been around for over a quarter of a century! The 1981 Honda Accord offered an Electronic Gyrolocator that cost almost $3000 and used transparencies for maps and a gas gyroscope for tracking movement. Looking at the picture, I can't but help imagine it belching steam and making chugging noises.

The SuperCODER 2000 is the ultimate programmer's keyboard. In the middle are just two keys - one and zero. What makes it perfect is that the third key is labeled "Done".

2007-11-28T22:37:00.000-08:00

Popular Mechanics has an article about proposed high speed rail lines in America. The best part is the interactive map on page two. After being spoiled by the Japanese train system, it's just painful having to slog through traffic or wait for trains that never run on time. Unfortunately, it will be decades at least before our public transportation systems show any significant improvement. It's too bad we can't just hold Olympics in every major American city to spur development.

Speaking of travel, Wired covers a "tray-table book" that's meant to be a guide to landscapes seen from an airplane window. As long as we're mixing coffee table books and flying, I might as well mention the Drift Table, "a coffee table with a small viewport showing a slowly changing aerial view of the British landscape. Shifting items on the table changes its apparent height, direction and speed." I'd love to have a beefed-up version of one of these with a huge embedded screen that makes me feel like my entire apartment is a compartment suspended from the belly of a dirigible.

The New Yorker has an article about the role of viruses played in shaping our evolution. It gives a very compelling explanation of the origins of "junk DNA." And I finally learned the definition of a retrovirus. It never occurred to me to wonder why HIV can be passed from mother to child while other viruses like the common cold cannot.

Marginal Revolution reports, "In its first Asian guide, announced on Monday, Michelin has awarded more of its famed stars to Tokyo restaurants than any other city, with a total of 191 stars compared with 64 for Paris and 42 in New York." Here's a map, in case you were wondering which restaurants got the nod.

2007-11-27T23:00:00.000-08:00

Lots of holiday gift guides out there, but my favorites so far are the ones at Desi gn*Sp onge and NOTCOT (I'm such a sucker for stuff). I totally forgot about the Come in/Go Away doormat. One of the only things I remember from preschool was a reversible picture book. When the teacher got to the "last" page, the book was only half over. She flipped it over, and each picture became a new scene when viewed upside-down. It absolutely blew my mind. That book was The Usual Suspects of my childhood.

2007-11-26T21:05:00.000-08:00

Six "better-than-average" umbrellas. They missed the water gunbrella, flaskbrella, glowbrella, WiFibrella, sproutbrella, and light sabrella.

I would've loved a bright blind back when I was working in a windowless stucco box in LA. Instead, I had a poster of a window opening into a tropical beach. I stumbled upon it while cleaning out my closet over Thanksgiving and was overcome by waves of nauseous depression-by-association.

Turns out the Untergunther was responsible for the underground cinema in Paris I posted about earlier. In 2005, they set up a secret workshop in the Panthéon to fix a famous clock that had fallen into disrepair. I wish I had cool hobbies like that.

Stephen Wiltshire is a savant who can draw entire cityscapes from memory. There's something so satisfying about watching other people draw. It makes me feel somehow vicariously productive. Back before YouTube, we had Bob Ross. I found out just now that we share the same birthday! Black Tuesday.

2007-11-23T17:02:00.000-08:00

Scientists are so messed up.

Eternal Sunset links to web cameras around the world to give you a view of a sunset at any time of day.

Wouldn't mind visiting this exhibition of drinkable art. Speaking of consumption, is it just an ironic coincidence that Thanksgiving has become a holiday of not just copious eating, but also copious spending and consumerism?

Scientific American reports on radically different lifeforms living amongst us undetected. The idea is that we only search for life that fits a very particular definition that we're familiar with. But there could be other living things based on completely different biologies and chemistries that we're unaware of simply because we've never looked for them. Is it just me, or is anyone else easily taken in by phrases like "shadow biosphere"? Add "shadow" to any phrase, and you've got my attention for at least a few minutes.

Design challenge to fit an entire calendar in the smallest space possible. This competition has led me to conclude that utility is inversely proportional to visual appeal.

This article on the lameness of university mottoes is great for all the brutally honest quotes from "branding experts." On Stanford's slogan, "Die Luft der Freiheit weht (The Wind of Freedom Blows)," Rob Frankel tells it like it is: "No, that slogan blows." I really can't argue with that assessment. I was also surprised to realize that I have zero recollection of hearing or seeing that phrase in all my time there. I was able to remember Berkeley's "Fiat Lux," though, which I always thought was powerful and elegant. But the one that tops them all must be this unofficial motto: "The University of Chicago: Where Fun Goes to Die." Awesome.

This article that just introduced me to the intriguing Open-Source With Project also declares that it is futile. Don't you hate it when that happens?

2007-11-20T21:47:00.000-08:00

I've been a huge Cirque du Soleil fan ever since seeing Mystere at the Mirage. A few years later I saw O, which was a huge mistake; it was so amazing that no other show I've seen since even comes close. The Cirque is hiring, and they have a great page that shows the disciplines they employ. Interesting to see the organization from a new perspective.

The DARPA Urban Challenge is over. There was a lot of media coverage, but it seems like public interest has diminished noticeably since the second Grand Challenge. This completely blows my mind. Despite the fact that this year's task was infinitely tougher than just driving through a barren desert, six teams crossed the finish line! Consider that just three years ago, the competition was an embarrassment with the most successful team traveling just 7.36 miles. Just a year later, five teams finished, and this year the automated cars drove effortlessly through an urban environment. These things were driving through traffic, which is hard enough that there are more than a few humans who can't do it without meeting fiery death. This field is finally hitting the part of the hockey stick curve where we skyrocket into infinity, and somehow people seem fairly unimpressed. It's amazing that we stayed as excited about the space program for as long as we did.

Japander is one of those classics of the web - American celebrities whoring themselves on Japanese television. Looks like they haven't updated.. at all, but as long as they still have Nicholas Cage singing his heart out about pachinko, I can't complain.

Sony's Eye of Judgment has gotten mixed reviews, but you gotta admit it's a very neat toy. Like the holochess in Star Wars, there's something so compelling and magical about combining virtual objects with real ones. It's like adding another layer on top of reality. Kobitos, U-Tsu-Shi-O-Mi, Morphovision, and funky forest are some other interesting examples. And there are endless possibilities for applying this technology toward more practical applications as well. I would certainly love an augmented reality navigation system. And doctors would probably enjoy having the next best thing to x-ray vision.

2007-11-15T23:21:00.001-08:00

Amazing photomosaic done with just a handful of panels. The Corinthian teeth eyes kinda freak me out though. Really shows how important photo selection is in creating a mosaic. I say this after making a mosaic with a pool of over 6000 photos and still getting just big amorphous blobs in the macro picture.

Blendie is a blender that spins based on how you growl at it. Low pitch for slow speed, high pitch for high speed. The idea is to get you to speak the blender's "language" and connect with it on a new level. Reminds me of the Dyson vacuum that talks to the diagnostic center. You just call technical support, hold up the receiver to the vacuum, and it warbles modem-like to tell them how it's doing. It sounds a lot like being in a room with two people speaking a foreign language. I would suspect the vacuum of saying things like, "help get me out of here my owner's abusing me!" warblewarble bleepbloop

Treasure of Cutlass Reef consumed my day. It's like a full-blown version of the pirate ship fighting in Monkey Island 3. Why do upgrades make everything instantly so addicting? This is why I'm never playing an MMORPG.

Fighting thieving servers with checksum. Geekery put to practical use.

You know what I miss? Hot corners for screen savers. Place your cursor in one corner of the screen, and the screen saver comes on after about a second. Place your cursor in another, and screen savers are disabled as long as you keep it there.

2007-11-12T22:52:00.000-08:00

VGMaps is a great trip down memory lane. The best thing on the site is this fully animated Legend of Zelda map.

I'd love to hear the story behind this grainy surveillance cam footage. Too fantastic to be real, but too painful-looking to be staged.

The Superest is like that comic where the Sandman fights the demon in Hell for his elephant-helmet (you know what I'm talking about).

Ask Metafilter is a great community that provides helpful answers to just about any question. It even gets some activity from celebs like Mythbuster Adam Savage, Steve Wozniak, and Wired founder Kevin Kelly. My favorite question, though, has to be this one about tracking down an address in Vienna from 1939. Here's another great post that shows just how diverse the community is.

2007-11-09T22:55:00.001-08:00

The roller suit fulfills a bizarre dream I didn't even know I had.

2007-11-08T22:05:00.000-08:00

Zombo cracks me up without fail. Too bad the recording doesn't go on forever anymore. Actually, that's probably for the best.

I spent this week going through the archives at Deputy Dog. Great source of interesting photos.

I'm also working through all the xkcd comics. It's nice to discover web comics after they've been long established. One long gorging is so much better than waiting for days for the next update.

I couldn't find a great example, but snow-on-the-beach is a completely under-exploited postcard/calendar/poster/coffee table book opportunity.

2007-11-06T21:35:00.001-08:00

Super Mario Bros. theme music produced by Tesla coils. Keep in mind the coils aren't being synchronized to the music. They're actually making the music.

Amount of space to transport the same number of people by cars, bus, bicycles. Cars are so stupid.

Shopping page becomes a Rube Goldberg machine.

Turning a sphere inside-out with no cuts or creases. Mathematicians sure are a strange lot. Disembodied voices and narrator-questioner dynamic reminds me a lot of Donald in Mathmagic Land. I must've seen that video over 100 times as a kid.

Portal flash game. Gave up shortly after the energy balls appeared. After watching the inside-out sphere movie, my poor brain couldn't take much more pummeling.

Some pictures of manufacturing in China. FoxConn's factory in Shenzhen is a city unto itself. Apple employees refer to their visits there as "being sent to Mordor."

2007-11-05T22:44:00.000-08:00

Amazon's Mechanical Turk, named after the famous chess-playing machine, has been used for everything from labeling CD's to searching for Jim Gray. Recently, a student used it to create The Sheep Market, 10,000 drawings of sheep for a thesis paper.

Transformers design.

Nanaca Crash is the reason it took me an entire weekend to write a 5-page paper. Surprisingly deep mechanics and a lot of hidden secrets.

I have a great idea for a coffee table book. It's called "Natural Wonders of the Past." Alright, the title sucks, but here's the gist. There are some absolutely amazing natural wonders in the world. Places like the Grand Canyon, Victoria Falls, Mount Everest, and Ayer's Rock. Especially with mountains, it's easy to forget that the unique shape of a peak like the Matterhorn only appeared recently in geological terms. Mount Fuji actually used to be two peaks, and it's shaped has changed markedly even within the past 300 years. So the idea is to generate some photorealistic CG renderings of places from the Earth's long history that would've been huge tourist attractions. I'm talking about reaching back into the Pangaea age. What we see on Earth today represents such a tiny temporal slice. There must have been vistas immeasurably more gorgeous that existed for brief stretches over the millions of years of plate tectonic upheaval. Make a few full-page spreads, tack on some pseudo-scientific blurbs, and start raking in the cash. And if that doesn't work out, it'd be even better to take people on tours to see these places in person. With a little something I like to call a "time machine."

2007-11-04T22:03:00.001-08:00

California needs high speed rail, says Wired's Autopia. With the 8+ hour Thanksgiving haul looming ahead of me, I couldn't agree more. The CA High-Speed Rail Authority has a promotional video on their front page. Seeing a blue and gold bullet train streaking through I-5-ish scrublands makes me wet my pants with excitement.

Novak's Blog has a page that links to all of their Moments frozen in time and Stumble on Sunday posts. Many of the pictures must be photoshopped, but there are enough real things happening that it's still interesting. On the other end of the spectrum is Worth1000, which is all about photoshopping. There are always a few absolute gems in each contest.

I've been wanting to try out kite aerial photography for a long time. I even got as far as making a simple mechanical timer, but the whole needing-a-huge-kite issue ended up being a showstopper. Here are one, two, three of the sites that almost inspired me to do something really cool. Maybe I should just skip kites altogether and go straight to sending cameras into space. Like these guys.

I had a list of things I wanted to do before getting old/married. Near the top was shaving my head. Unless you can pull off the look (which I can't), it's something that really has to be done while you're young (because people will just write it off as the stupidity of youth) and single (because shaving your head is a terrible reason to get dumped). If you don't do it, how will you know?? Does your scalp have weird things on it? Is your head actually strangely misshapen? Anyhow, I never had the balls to find out, but I did stumble on this site about no hair washing. Long story short, this guy hears that washing one's hair on a regular basis is actually unnecessary. Shampoos and conditioners actually replace all your natural oils with synthetic shininess like orange juice made from concentrate. He stops washing his hair and finds that, after the initial period of feeling grimy and frizzy, it reaches some sort of "natural" equilibrium where washing is no longer necessary. I tried it out and got pretty similar results. Like hunger, if you can deal with the initial agony, the unpleasantness plateaus, and you'll eventually feel like you can go more or less indefinitely. Really! Well, I kept it up for a few months, thinking that I was a super-genius for breaking through the lies of the shampoo industry. But it turns out that, as clean as my hair felt, it actually smelled pretty musky. I eventually had to start washing again by a sort of girlfriend veto. Life without shampoo was still a big revelation, though. If you're poor and single, give it a shot!

2007-11-03T23:02:00.000-07:00

If Sea Monkeys aren't exciting enough for you, NOTCOT has a roundup of all sorts of insta-pet kits, including Triops, which look like mini mutated horseshoe crabs. I would've loved these as a kid. All I ever had was an incompetent venus fly trap that died soon after I got tired of having to feed it feeble, helpless flies every day. Do your job, fly trap!

The stairwells of an NYU building got some rainbow-casting prisms as part of a renovation. It sounds like a frou-frou designery idea, but it completely changes the space and would certainly make me smile every time I took the stairs. Rainbows make everything better!

Via Cynical-C, iconic 20th-century photos reenacted by senior citizens.

BLDBLOG posted great two articles last week about nature areas and an underwater neutrino detector. My takeaway: increase reader interest by dropping tantalizing glimpses from intriguing yet disturbing novels into every blog post.

In one of his lesser-known works, H.G. Wells made a stunning display of imagination by writing about the development of an atomic bomb. The World Set Free was published in 1914.

2007-10-31T22:57:00.001-07:00

Ruining vampire movies.. with math!

Another link for Halloween - the Body Farm of Dr. Bill Bass.

Annoying website, but some amazing drawings at Biro Drawing.

Noli Novak is the WSJ's stipple portrait artist, rock star.

Some tutorials for scratchboard, another stylized drawing method.

2007-10-29T23:47:00.000-07:00

Having an Asian character set opens up so many emoticon possibilities.

Ironically, manga Mario is much creepier than manga Simpsons/Futurama.

After a short hiatus, Street Fighter: The Later Years is back in top form.

Addicting chain reaction explosion game.

2007-10-28T21:21:00.000-07:00

Real-life fractal.

Cai Guo-Qiang has done some unbelievable art installations, including Head On (a pack of 99 life-size wolves barreling into a glass wall) and Inopportune (suspended tigers impaled with hundreds of arrows). His homepage has pictures of his other works, all of which are very striking. And I was also delighted to find that more than a few of them involve explosives.

3D flipbook. And I thought the flipbook industry was just resting on its laurels.

The analemma is considered one of the most difficult astronomical phenomena to photograph. It involves exposing the same piece of film to the sun from the same spot at the same time of day throughout the course of a year.

An airplane is moving on a conveyor belt that's going the opposite way at the same speed. What happens? The answer is surprising. So much so that it warranted a second answer. I love it when The Straight Dope lays the smackdown.

Why does it seem like drawing 3D objects in perspective is such a recent invention? Most adults can probably do a decent rendering of a house or a table or at least a box in perspective. And humans basically have had the same innate intelligence since the cave-dwelling days. So why do all cave drawings look so flat and, well.. primitive? And all the ancient South American, Egyptian, Chinese, and Japanese art I can recall is also very flat and stylized. I realize that these cultures have aesthetics very different from ours, but it's strange that they didn't produce any more realistic works. Or maybe they did, but it wasn't preserved? Or maybe it was preserved, and I'm just rambling on a topic I know very little about..

2007-10-25T22:37:00.000-07:00

Mini planets. Another cool photoshop trick that I'm just too lazy to try. I've been too busy not trying HDR images for months.

Via Metafilter, a flickr photoset of Scrooge's money bin! What's even better is this link in the comments to an awesome fanboy rant re: Scrooge's ranking on the Forbes Fictional 15 list. Incidentally, I tormented myself for over a month trying to remember the name of Scrooge's arch-rival, Flintheart Glumgold. Whoever came up with that name is a genius, by the way.

Mapping software has come a long way in recent years. EveryScape is looking to extend the already vast datasets with interiors of buildings, making formerly common activities such as "going outside" obsolete.

4-foot tall wild turkeys are roaming the streets of Boston. How are residents not completely flipping out? I repeat, 4-FOOT TALL WILD TURKEYS. I'd barricade myself in my apartment, living off canned soup and cowering in the corner.

I was disappointed to learn that senators aren't actually required to talk continuously to sustain a filibuster. I always imagined senators reading the phone book or the entire Great Gatsby, Andy Kaufman-style, to their fuming, helpless opponents. I suppose it's amazing enough that such a custom ever existed at all.

2007-10-24T22:58:00.000-07:00

Tragedy befalls mini-Starbucks-town.

Wall Stairs is a neat concept for, well.. stairs that pop out of a wall. Just like making a set of stairs in Google Sketchup! Too bad it only appears to exist in itty-bitty cardboard form.

Slate has some great slide shows on a variety of topics. They're not categorized together, so it's a pain to search for them, but the architecture section holds a good chunk of them. I particularly enjoyed the ones on bridges, McMansions, skyscrapers, failed icons, anti-icons, stairs, and public sculptures.

Microsoft created quite a buzz with Surface, their giant touch-sensitive tabletop screen. It was very exciting to see this sort of technology get some mainstream exposure. It seems like tabletop displays have been waiting to break out for years, with every nearly every digital art exhibition featuring some sort of projector-table installation. The Sony ExploraScience center in Odaiba (like SF's Exploratorium without all the learning) and the ICC space in Shinjuku have tons of interactive exhibits that use cameras and projectors.

There's a table that projects ripples where you touch it. There's another one that morphs your hand shadows into animations of animals that swim, scamper, or slither away. They've been running for years on now outdated technology, so they don't work perfectly. But when they do, it feels completely magical. Imagine making a shadow puppet that morphs into a flock of birds that fly away. Shadow Monsters is a similar display that modifies your shadow in real-time. Tool's Life is another one that makes great use of projections and shadows.

But now with Surface, we're seeing these augmented tabletops creeping into everyday life. And there's so many possibilities! I was extremely impressed when I saw this concept for a new restaurant ordering system. But the Surface is a platform where this would just be a single application. I'm excited to see what happens when this really starts to take off.

2007-10-22T22:35:00.000-07:00

currently reading: Murakami Haruki, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Why didn't somebody think of this sooner? A USB dock that lets you plug in hard drives like game cartridges. Would've been perfect if they'd made it look like a toaster. Man, that's an even better idea. Why did I have to tell you!? Sorry, but I'll have to kill you now.

McSweeney's has a series called "Dispatches," anecdotes from people with interesting jobs. Kinda like Terkel's Working, but less soul-crushing. Anyhow, my favorite is Dispatches from a Public Librarian. I hadn't checked the page for years, so I was pleasantly surprised that it's still being updated!

Chat Noir, a fun 5-minute break. Would be less maddening if it were actually possible to pass every stage. Aside from Jay is Games, Good Experience Games is a reliable source for a quick diversion.

Did you know? Puma and Adidas were started by brothers with a fierce rivalry.

Penn & Teller made an unreleased video game called Smoke and Mirrors that, among other strangeness, simulates a real-time 8-hour bus drive from Tuscon to Las Vegas. The scenery never changes, and the bus veers slightly right, making it impossible to tape down the buttons. Completing the trip gets you one point.

In other magic-related news, a Japanese TV program brought over two Masai tribesmen and showed them some magic tricks. The two men, who had the keenest eyesight in their village, were able to see through every trick.

2007-10-17T20:28:00.000-07:00

Justin Schmidt subjected himself to the stings of 78 kinds of bees, ants, and wasps to develop the Schmidt Sting Pain Index. He wrote several papers on the subject with vivid descriptions that read almost like wine reviews (if wine were delicious, flaming napalm). His experiences ranged from mild (1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.) to troubling (2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.) to excruciating (4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.). I'd like to offer some sort of praise for Schmidt's dedication, but.. this guy is completely out of his mind.

Chessboxing is exactly what it sounds like. And I thought Kung Fu Chess was pretty fast and furious.

Alright, I posted about the buffalo sentence a while back. The lion sentence is at least 11.5 times more ridiculous.

Aside from absurdly complicated sentences, the Chinese also created absurdly complicated navigation devices like the South Pointing Chariot. I first read about this in a Make interview with Dean Kamen, who apparently likes to talk about the chariot as the epitome of an inelegant solution, as the Chinese already possessed the technology of magnetic compasses. It's too bad Kamen didn't think about this before doing a little over-engineering of his own. He should realize that the South Pointing Chariot, like the Segway, isn't appealing because it's a simple, elegant solution. The SPC isn't a better compass than a magnet floating in water, just as the Segway isn't a better "human transporter" than a bicycle. These devices are appealing because they're cool. Well, to engineers, at least.

2007-10-16T20:52:00.000-07:00

Via kottke, article on historical photo detective Maureen Taylor.

Wired has a story about a guy who became obssessed with beating the legendary Cannonball Run by driving across the US in under 32 hours and 7 minutes. Since it required averaging about 90 mph the entire way, the 1.5 day sprint was insanely irresponsible, and he easily could've killed someone.. but it's still a damn interesting story.

Also a reference to the short film C'était un rendez-vous, a mad dash through the streets of Paris.

After you read the story, think about how absolutely crazy that guy was. Now guess who completed the a LONGER coast to coast run in 33:39, 26 years earlier. That's right, freaking SimCity creator Will Wright.

Another bit of car trivia - which side is the gas tank on?

2007-10-15T22:46:00.000-07:00

Kangaroo on a racetrack.

Mel Blanc on Letterman. Every once in a while, I'll catch a Looney Tunes marathon on TV and end up watching for hours before realizing how much time has passed. I was raised on WB and Disney shorts, and it's so sad that both studios have all but abandoned the format. I mean, the next generation is hardly going to know Bugs, Daffy, or even the scrappy Mickey that we grew up with (not the eternally giggling, glazed eyes Mickey). I've heard that the Pixar guys are trying to revive cartoon shorts at Disney. They also have a ton of other ideas for turning the company around, but it's a shame that Disney is too much of a lurching behemoth to act quickly on any of them.

You know what's awesome? Using both hands to write two different things at the same time. The Doctor does it in Iron Monkey, writing two different prescriptions simultaneously in lightning-quick, sleeve-fluttering kung fu movie style. It didn't matter how many asses he kicked in that movie (a lot) - the two-handed writing was all I needed to see. Of course, it only works in vertically-written Asian languages. Somebody writing with both hands in English would have their arms all contorted, thereby looking pretty foolish. And you can't be awesome when you're looking foolish.

2007-10-14T20:59:00.000-07:00

The whole office is strangely fascinated by Wing (check out "Dancing Queen"). She apparently showed up on a South Park episode too. It's like that feeling of being unable to turn away from a flaming train wreck. Only funnier.

Does anybody else feel that monster.com is a horribly wasted domain name? I mean, MONSTER! And then you find out it's just a site full of moldering resumes. Another one is www.com, which used to be the homepage of a radio station in Wisconsin (or another W state), but it's now one of those useless search engine/link aggregators.

This has always been one of my favorite McSweeney's lists - confusing e-mail addresses.

The spinning girl illusion is getting a lot of attention. In case you don't have a headache yet, about 5 seconds on this page should do the trick. Here's another neat one - Mr. Angry and Mrs. Calm.

2007-10-13T22:48:00.000-07:00

The Truman Show's got nothing on Japanese TV. Nasubi, a Japanese comedian, won a lottery for a "show business-related job." He was subsequently kidnapped, stripped naked, and locked in a room with nothing but a stack of magazines and pens. He was forced to stay in the room until winning ¥1 million worth of prizes through mail-order sweepstakes, living off only the things he had won (including food!). My friend described this show as "hilariously sad." I concur.

I'd love to visit this year's Tokyo Motor Show, especially with all the awesome previews we've been seeing. My new favorite blog electro^plankton has covered the major concept models. Honda 124, Honda PUYO, Nissan Pivo2, Suzuki X-HEAD, Toyota i-Real.

Man, Japan gets all the best stuff. When I visited a Toyota showroom in Tokyo, I was blown away by all the futuristic concept cars. It turned out they were actually production models. And the sheer variety they get is just amazing. How many Toyota models can you name? How many Honda? Now check out Japan's Toyota and Honda lineups.

Japan even has better American products than America. How many flavors of Kit-Kat can you name? "But Kit-Kats don't come in different flavors!" They do in Japan - there have been easily over 100 different ones. That's right, there are more varieties of Japanese Kit-Kat than ice cream in your local supermarket. Strawberry? There's actually strawberry, smooth strawberry, strawberry fromage, winter strawberry, chocalatier strawberry & nuts, strawberry milk, blueberry-strawberry, and tsubu^2 strawberry.

Carmen Sandiego has been found! This is why I love the internet. This poor lady has no idea that some random passer-by's fleeting thought has been broadcast to the entire world and will be preserved for all eternity.

The Nagoya Center of Consumer Goods received a letter claiming that carrots produce sparks when microwaved. They dutifully investigated, and the results were a little surprising. Grapes will supposedly produce this effect as well. CD's will also give you a little light show, but they'll also make your entire house smell like brain cell-destroying molten plastic fumes, causing your entire family to hate you forever (or so I'm told).

Cartoon character skeletons. An oldie but goodie. Conclusively proves that Hello Kitty has no mouth.

New Yorkers sure live on top of a lot of... stuff.

The slanket is definitely a good idea. Unfortunately, it's one of those products where anyone who hears about it and actually wants one will spend 30 seconds making their own instead of actually buying it.

More Photoshop geekery - the NY skyline hidden in the histogram of an image.

A brief history of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Pinkerton detectives appear in everything from Sherlock Holmes to Bond novels to the recent 3:10 to Yuma. They're always just supporting characters, so it's interesting to read an article that puts them in the spotlight. I never would've guessed that the agency still exists as part of Securitas. Even more awesome, the article has a quote from Pinkerton General Counsel John Moriarty. Also, did you know Dashiell Hammett was ex-Pinkerton?

2007-10-11T21:46:00.000-07:00

Taking the average of even a few unattractive faces results in a very attractive one. Makes sense once you think about it, but it's still surprising to see it work. Here's another site that has some averages of world cities.

I wish I could doodle like this. It's takes a lot of skill to wring so much expressiveness out of just a few clean lines.

The lyre bird can mimic the sounds of other birds, cameras, and even chainsaws.

Somebody once explained to me that the term "green restaurant" refers to any large chain restaurant like Friday's, Chevys, Outback, or Olive Garden. The phrase comes from the fact that most of these restaurants have or used to have green awnings. Sorta like a "big box" store, but applied to eateries. Since then I've been unable to find a single reference to a "green restaurant," and I've never met anyone else who'd heard of the term. Now that I think about it, those restaurants don't even have green awnings! I'm starting to think that I imagined the entire exchange. Anyhow, even if it was all a hallucination, there really should be a word for this kind of restaurant. The environmentalists have a monopoly on "green," so it'd have to be something different, of course. Any suggestions?

2007-10-10T21:35:00.000-07:00

Two posts from kottke - a story about Tom Murphy, a homeless man who just happens to be one of the best chess players in the U.S. And a neat site called Layer Tennis, where the Photoshop volleys fly fast and hard.

I have little interest in chess, but I can't get enough of the game's interesting characters. It's also easy to come up with an engrossing chess story, since we tend to associate chess skill with intelligence. And, obviously, everyone harbors prejudices and stereotypes about intelligence. So just make the main character anybody we have low expectations for (homeless man, little kid, crazy anti-Semite), endow with superhuman chess ability, and pow! classic article.

Layer Tennis is competitive Photoshop geekery in full force. Probably more practical, but less awesome than Photoshop Hero.

Pictures of some reimagined sports equipment. The tubular ping pong table looks like fun. Is it just me, or does it seem like mankind is getting lazy about inventing new sports? We could do all sorts of new things with the latest technology, and I'm not talking about Slamball.

Mankind is not getting lazy about inventing new toasters, however. Ceramic toaster - bread goes in, toast comes out. Transparent toaster.

Cat jousting. I'll say it again: CAT JOUSTING. Poke around the artist's site. Especially if you also like mouse jousting.

Somebody pointed out that Google could help save the world by making its homepage black. All those CRT's still in use are practically hemorrhaging energy from displaying all those white pixels. Enter Ninja Google. As far as I can tell, the page is actually owned by Google itself. I can't believe they got the ninja domain, though.

Design Within Reach has an annual contest to design a chair from bits of a champagne bottle. The variety that comes up each year is simply amazing. The contest is great, but I am not a fan of the store. I realize their furniture is based on classic designs that are displayed in museums, but no place that sells thousand-dollar chairs should consider their merchandise "within reach."

Spot the 5 differences game. Didn't think it'd be as fun as it turned out to be.

There's just something about this photo of a man punching a rubber vase...

This article on "Graffiti-style rail art" has some striking photos of rooms and spaces decorated with loads of plastic toy railroad tracks. The stark contours of the tracks reminded me of this designer hotel room where all the edges of the walls and furniture are outlined with a clean black line, making it look just like a cartoon. The same page also has pictures of the other rooms in the hotel, which are pretty cool too.

My favorite part about SeaWorld was always the play area with the ship and walkways and ropes to climb on. Seeing some of the structures built by Tom Luckey makes me wish I were a kid again. Some other cool kid spaces (cool spaces for kids).

I know this robot is just a version of the hamster ball for fish, but I can't help imagining that's a disembodied brain in the bowl..

This is a great idea - 3D virtual replays of sports. Storing all of the players' movements as numbers saves a ton of space over video. Of course, even though rendering software has come a long way, most fans will still prefer seeing the live action version. But when bandwidth is limited, as with mobile phones, this is where the technology shines. Check out baseball for Japanese mobiles.

2007-10-09T20:18:00.000-07:00

It all started with the Eames powers of ten video (it's no longer on YouTube, so here's the next best thing). Here's a JavaScript recreation and another version by Nikon. And here's a really big picture of a whale, feels like it should also belong in this paragraph.

Collection of cool staircases. This one is especially slick, but here's the one I want in my house.

If you have forty people in a room, what's the chance that two of them have the same birthday? The answer.. is 90%. This is known as the Birthday Paradox, which is phenomenon that is also cropping up in cryptology. More math fun with Monty Hall and the infamous Dollar Auction.

If you've ever seen the tape signs at the eternally under construction Shinjuku station, you've enjoyed the work of Sato Shuetsu. Here's another in-depth look. By the way, has anyone noticed that they play a recording of running water near the temporary bathrooms? Strange, but it does kinda help..

Craig Mullins is an amazing artist. I hear some people call him Godbrush.

2007-10-08T20:37:00.000-07:00

With the number of buttons on remotes getting way out of hand, why on Earth doesn't someone create a Wiimote-like interface for controlling advanced features?

Kim Keever takes some amazing landscape pictures. The fact that it's trick photography didn't bother me at all. Sorts like the same thing in reverse, tilt-shift photography makes big things look real small.

This NY Times article argues that we're all living in the Matrix. According to philosopher Nick Bostrom's reasoning, current trends suggest that computers will eventually advance to the point where it will be possible to simulate virtual worlds with virtual people with virtual nervous systems. And since it'd be trivial to run zillions of such simulations on futuristic supercomputers, regardless of whether it takes a few years or a few millennia, there will eventually be overwhelmingly more virtual humans than real ones. So the probability that we're virtual humans is extremely large. It's an intriguing theory, though such logic could lead to any number of absurd conclusions. On a related note, I've also seen it argued that we're all in a way immortal. Even if you believe that consciousness and personality are just products of our atoms and sizzling synapses, it can all be considered a form of information. And in this universe, information can never be lost.

Via Metafilter, work on a documentary about the Ghost Army is getting off the ground. During WWII, the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops was comprised of artists, actors, set designers, and engineering whizzes who used inflatable tanks, giant speakers, and other unique methods to deceive Axis forces.

More wartime trickery: Dazzle Camouflage.

The Safe Bedside Table is almost as good as Office Space's Jump to Conclusions mat.

As a kid, I was fascinated by the Oak Island Money Pit. I loved reading about real-life mysteries and desperately wanted to know the truth about UFO's, what lurks at the bottom of the sea, and the secret of the Bermuda Triangle. Oak Island was special, because it seemed like a genuine mystery that anyone could solve if they just had the will and the cash.

Just discovered the site oobject, which has lists of crazy gadgets and such. I think they should just convert to a site about watches, because those are their best posts. But then they'd have to compete with Watchismo, which has some great posts too. Or you could just skip the blogs altogether and go straight to the source of crazy watches: Tokyoflash. PingMag has a writeup of the founder.

These mini-games are so awesome, they almost make me want to drink Pepsi.

2007-10-07T12:05:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling pretty guilty for completely abandoning my exercise routine. So I'm doing the next best thing, which is.. reading about exercising. It's funny how all the safety tips for hikers tell you not to run from wild, predatory animals. Mountain lions, lumbering bears, and even stubby-legged alligators can all easily outrun a (delicious) human. So it's surprising that, over long distances, humans are actually built to outrun nearly every other animal on the planet. Savannah hunters will actually run gazelle down to exhaustion over several hours in scorching heat. The best part of the article is that one of the researchers actually went out there and tried to run down an antelope.

Long distance runners are really a special breed, not just physically, but mentally. And by that I mean they're crazy. One of my friends in medical school told me that, when he was starting his studies, his advisor asked him if he was a runner. Because apparently running is a lot like med school in that those who succeed are capable of suffering a lot of pain over a long time for seemingly intangible gains. I can't say much about the med school side, but it's definitely true about running. The more I train, the faster and longer I can go, but it never gets any less painful. I mean, I've never been out there pounding the pavement and thinking, gee, this is greeat! I can run a lot farther than when I started, but it just means the same level of pain for a longer time. And if anyone tries to tell you about runner's high, that's just another term to describe your brain resorting to delirium to block out the screaming from all your body's cells. I think I remember reading somewhere that people who run have longer lifespans. But the amount of time they extend their lives is roughly equal to the amount of time they spent running.

To prove my point about the crazy and the running, just check out any article about Dean Karnazes. This guy just decided to go out for a jog after a night of depressing drinking, then kept going Forrest Gump style for 30 miles. Now he runs hundreds of miles at a time, once going 350 without sleeping, all while stuffing down entire pizzas on the road to make up for the 9000 calories he's burning every day.

Steampunk is the blogosphere's new obsession. I gotta admit, Steampunk Star Wars definitely has some potential.

I'm a huge fan of the Perry Bible Fellowship, though recent strips have been mediocre at best. Here are some gems from the past: 1 2 3 4 5

Via Slashdot, scientists have discovered the purpose of the appendix! It's great how doctors just "assumed it had no purpose" and did a whole lotta appendix removing. I mean, who was the first person to remove an appendix, and why on earth did he think it'd be okay to rip out and discard an organ? But from what I've seen of the world of medicine, a lot of treatments resulted from trial and error - they work, but nobody really understands why. I guess that's an apt description of engineering as well. Fluid dynamics was especially disillusioning.

Damn Interesting on lucid decapitation. I always had the silent conviction that, were I ever to be decapitated, I'd do my best to scream as long as possible after losing my head in order to inflict maximum psychological trauma on my executioners. I never thought that anyone would have a similar idea (even for different reasons). Can you imagine living in a time when the guillotine gets so much use that people actually think to provide data points while being decapitated?

If you don't know about the Grow games at Eyemaze, you're missing out on some of the best the internet has to offer.

2007-10-05T00:18:00.000-07:00

Here are some clever ads.

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a perfectly grammatical sentence.

That is all. I'm going to bed. (It's Friiiiiiiiiidaaay!)

2007-10-03T21:03:00.000-07:00

Pink Tentacle posted some pictures of rice paddy art created using different colors of rice plants. Now they've got some pictures of it being harvested.

Lots of buzz at digg over the human LCD video. Sports fans in Korea use their clothes to show not pictures, but amazing animations.

Wireframe Toyota! Too bad it isn't a little lighter. I'd love to stroll down the street, spinning this over my head like a helicopter.

The Retro Encabulator is one of those memes that keeps popping up periodically over the years. It's based on an old joke, and the dated-looking footage is part of the appeal, so I'm sure we haven't seen the last of this one.

Today's BBC Day in Pictures has a shot of the Maman sculpture at Tate Modern. I first encountered one of these things at Roppongi Hills in Tokyo, and I was surprised to discover that there are copies all over the world. I've also seen Robert Indiana's LOVE sculpture in Vegas, Shinjuku, New York, and Taipei. It's such a delight to stumble upon something familiar in a completely new place. Like, hey.. I know that!

By the way, if you've ever wondered what Rodin's The Thinker is pondering, it's actually a representation of Dante gazing down on the Inferno. The statue was originally a part of The Gates of Hell, which also has copies all over the world. The first time I saw it was at Ueno Park in Tokyo. I was pretty surprised when I came across another one in Korea, and then I found another one right in my backyard at Stanford. The Stanford version is actually against a freestanding wall, so you can walk behind it to see a little utility door on the other side. The back door to Hell. It's too bad Rodin didn't have the foresight to link all his Helldoors with wormholes.

I don't watch the Colbert Report, but I still enjoyed this Vanity Fair article on Colbert. Snarkmarket points out Jon Stewart's comment as the "best metaphor about a person's brain, ever" - "[The whole show] depends on Stephen's ability to process information as this other person," says Stewart. "I've seen talk-show hosts who can't do that for real. ... And then you watch Colbert and it's like the first time you use broadband: 'How the fuck did that happen?' He's rendering in real time."

Metafilter has a roundup of links on magician Ricky Jay. This guy wrote the book on card throwing, which I tried to get into a few years ago. What they don't tell you about learning card throwing is all the stooping. To pick up cards. That you threw. Poorly.

The Blue also has a post on the 0.99999... = 1 debate. I have a friend who never trusted another math teacher in his life after seeing this so-called, alleged "proof."

The same guy was also obsessed with Sputnik, which celebrates it's 50th anniversary tomorrow. Boing Boing is in a tizzy over the fact that Lord British is the only private owner of a Sputnik. Incidentally, Sputnik is also the crux of the novel I'm currently reading. Two main characters meet when one confuses "Sputnik" with "beatnik" and later points out the irony that Sputnik, a lonely hunk of metal out in space, means "co-traveler" in Russian. Yeah. Sputniksputniksputnik.

2007-10-01T22:26:00.000-07:00

There's a great story at the New Yorker about Bobby Egan, a guy who runs a BBQ restaurant in Hackensack, New Jersey, and how he became the president of the US-North Korea Trade Council. Egan's this semi-sketchy guy with a basic education. In school, he and his friends pass English through a bit of coercion. "We went as far as hanging our teacher by his feet—we stood up on top of the desk and shook him—until he changed our grade to a C." Egan drifts around a bit and even gets rejected from joining the Mafia, because he's only half Italian. Eventually, he somehow meets a bunch of North Korean government officials through some Vietnamese he's befriended, and now he has DRKP ministers on speed dial. It's a bizarre match that gives rise to many bizarre situations, but Egan seems to take everything in stride. He's particularly close with an ambassador named Han, whom he would "take a bullet for without question."

According to Egan, he and Han used to joke about having the opportunity to fight each other if it came to war between the U.S. and North Korea. "I said to him, 'When I get to you, I am going to yank all those teeth out with pliers before I kill you,'" Egan recalled. "He laughed and said, 'You don’t even want to know what I’m going to do to you.'"

The whole article is filled with outrageous anecdotes like this. Considering Egan's aforementioned sketchiness, probably only half of them are true, but I still guarantee that this'll be the most interesting thing you read all week.

I was surprised the first time I heard that tourists visit North Korea on a pretty regular basis. I remember reading about how all the bridges near the DMZ are packed with explosives. I'm doing some research for a trip to Europe, and it turns out that Switzerland also maintains bombs throughout their infrastructure, not just on bridges, but under roads as well.

Dave Devries is a professional artist who paints finished versions of nonsense sketches from children. Another good source for random monster pictures is the Creatures in my Head (now with cute screensaver!).

I really enjoyed this article on the MIT kids who made millions in Vegas. Wired really loves this stuff. Nerds get rich! With math!

My recent posts have been pretty heavy with long articles, but.. here's another one anyways! Damn Interesting on the Lonely Tree of Ténéré. It's one of Neatorama's 10 Most Magnificent Trees in the World.

This page is getting a lot of digg traffic - 50 pictures of 1000 islands.

2007-09-30T21:57:00.000-07:00

There's something so satisfying about building something up from nothing, slowly and methodically. And for the lazy like myself, it's almost just as satisfying watching somebody else do it while I eat a bucket of Costco chocolate on the couch. I think that's the appeal of everything from cooking shows to video game RPG's to Bob Ross painting to Home Network DIY shows. In grade school, it was also this vicarious productivity that totally sucked me into books like My Side of the Mountain and Robinson Crusoe. A few years ago, fond memories of these old books came flooding back when I stumbled on Tom Neale's book An Island To Oneself. This guy lives the dream, spending 16 years alone on the island of Suwarrow, having adventures worthy of any novel. It's a long read, but worth every minute. It'll give you a bad case of wanderlust, so another good one to prolong the escapism is Confessions of a Long-Distance Sailor, the around-the-world journey of the guy who wrote the first word processor for Apple (betcha didn't see that one coming).

More of watching things built up from nothing, but on a bigger scale - Ten Tokyo time-lapse trips.

Clive Thompson looks at this Marvel social network map, which reveals Mary Jane/Peter Parker as the strongest tie in the universe. Another interesting observation - heroes have many more connections than villains, suggests that they win so often because they team up.

Something similar from a few years back, the TV crossover page connects shows as diverse as Star Trek and Cosby. It also reveals the mind-blowing fact that just about every TV show we know and love takes place in the imagination of a young boy. This follows from St. Elsewhere's prominent location in the nexus of the TV multiverse. The last episode of St. Elsewhere reveals that Tommy Westphall had dreamt the entire run of the show.

2007-09-29T21:56:00.000-07:00

It's time for the human clock roundup!

Humanclock.com snagged the best URL, but I think Billy Chasen's implementation is more.. human clocky. Yugo Nakamura's Industrious Clock is nice and simple. Uniqlo's version is more of a normal clock with frequent dance breaks, but it's probably the hardest to stop watching.

From the ever-interesting Damn Interesting, two of the strangest disorders ever:
- People with Chuck Bonnet Syndrome see highly vivid hallucinations that "may consist of commonplace items such as bottles or hats, or brain-bending nonsense such as dancing children with giant flowers for heads."
- Those with Capgras' Syndrome believe their friends and family are, one by one, being replaced by exact duplicates.

Speaking of exact duplicates, I remember this magic spell in Dungeons and Dragons (please stay) that creates a duplicate of another person. Basically, this duplicate tracks down that person, and this meeting is guaranteed to result in either (a) one killing the other or (b) both going insane. It always struck me as really strange and troubling that these were the only possible outcomes, as if that's how anyone would naturally react. There was something similar in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, where Hugh Jackman's character (spoiler alert!) creates a duplicate of himself for the first time. He's surprised and confused for a instant but then grabs a gun and promptly disposes of the copy. If I were ever faced with my doppelganger, disturbingly enough, the thought of offing him would probably occur to me at some point. But is that because I've been exposed to the situation in other media before? Or is it because that really is a natural reaction? If it's the latter, that would say something really interesting about human nature. And it'd be pretty odd that humans have such a specific hardwired response for a situation that could never actually happen.

Say, this could make for an interesting movie. There's a fascinating dynamic where, if somebody considers killing their copy, they know that the copy will also have the same idea, so they realize they'll have to strike first, but then the copy is thinking the same thing, and then... Well, maybe the character can spend the first hour and 50 minutes building the duplication machine.

A recent article about urban spelunking on BLDGBLOG set me digging for some old articles I remember reading. Here's a one-two part article on exploring the Las Vegas storm drains. Damn Interesting also has a few things to say about subterranean cities. Seven riddles suggest a secret city beneath Tokyo. And a few years ago, police found a hidden movie theater in the Paris catacombs. A smaller, adjacent cave held a restaurant and bar. "The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there. Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: 'Do not,' it said, 'try to find us.'"

Alright, now that I've given myself goosebumps, I'm off for a few rounds of Dolphin Olympics to set everything right again. Part 2 came out a while ago, but it just doesn't do tail-slides as well as the first.

2007-09-27T21:52:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who was obsessively jealous of people with perfect pitch. It's so mysterious that some people are born with the ability to recognize a note as easily as most can recognize a color. And the crazy part is that it's completely binary - you either have it or you don't. I'm not sure what I'd do with it.. but I do feel like I'm terribly missing out by not being one of the chosen.

If I weren't so lazy, I'd love to try out some DIY 6th sense self-augmentation like the compass-belt experiment described in Wired. This guy continuously wore a belt that would always buzz in the direction of north. After a while, he developed a superhuman sense of direction. "'I'd be waiting in line in the cafeteria and spontaneously think: I live over there.' On a visit to Hamburg, about 100 miles away, he noticed that he was conscious of the direction of his hometown. Wächter felt the vibration in his dreams, moving around his waist, just like when he was awake." This is probably one of those things that gives a big payoff for little effort, but most people have too much inertia to try anyways. Too bad I'm one of those inertia-people.

Here's another one - implanting magnets in your fingers to feel electromagnetic fields.

The backwards movie game is a fun one for road trips. Here's an example for Star Wars: "A rather large moon-sized spaceship suddenly appears in the vast depths of space and, to prevent it from disappearing again, a nice young man called Luke extracts a bomb from its central chambers. The space station re-assembles a disintegrated planet, saving its occupants, and slowly begins to dismantle itself as a group of rebels become more and more disorganised. The young man goes home to his farm."

As long as we're talking about Star Wars, there's no way you can keep from smiling at Darth Vader being a smartass.

2007-09-26T21:35:00.000-07:00

Slate article on "the strange allure of murdering your video game persona." I've definitely put a game's goal on hold for a round of jumping into pits or fireballs. I've even enjoyed some of the games mentioned in the slideshow like Stair Dismount (vid) and Truck Dismount (vid). Now that I think about it, I'm a little disturbed by the fact that.. I wasn't disturbed while playing these games. Of course, there's a pretty huge disconnect between games and reality. It's more than a little creepy that in the vast majority of games, every living being in the entire world is trying to kill you. Even in something as simple as Super Mario Bros., you're basically trapped in a universe that's completely saturated in malevolence toward you.

Actually, I guess Real Nature's pretty much the same way. There are creatures out there doing some pretty horrific things to other creatures. I've never felt more vulnerable then when I went diving. You're surrounded by a tremendous openness all around, and it makes you acutely aware of the fact that you're no longer anywhere near the top of the food chain.

Now that I'm ready to think happy thoughts again, the mention of Stair Dismount reminded me of another game that was popular back in the day - the venerable Bridge Builder!

Godwin's law states that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." At that point the conversation is completely over. It seems like such an outrageous statement, but it's absolutely 100% true.

Here's a question that I would've felt really clever for formulating: "With all the billions of new cells being created in the human body each day, why don't our bodies evolve?" The question never did occur to me, but I did stumble upon the answer.

A.J. Jacobs read the entire encyclopedia and wrote a book about it. For his newest project, he followed all the rules in the Bible for a year. He and the Super Size Me guy seem to have this genre covered.

Another thing that's better in Japan: the ads.

2007-09-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

Two days ago, I posted this link about random piles of junk that cast shadows of people. Thought these LEGO ads would be a nice juxtaposition.

The New Yorker on stocking Indy Jones' library. I always wondered how they can spend a hundred million dollars on a movie. That's $100000000! After reading this article, it's a lot easier to imagine.

There was another New Yorker article today about the Russian government and Garry Kasparov as an opposition leader. If you don't have time to go through all 12 pages, let me share a pretty awesome tidbit (though it's not related to the main thread of the article). Kasparov fills his days with heated meetings and intense politics, but at night, "well after midnight, settle[s] down at his computer to play 'blitz'—five-minute-long games of chess. He plays anonymously, but the cognoscenti know his style of attack. They still feel his presence. Sinatra cannot sing anonymously."

I'd never heard of train switching puzzles before. They're logic puzzles where you have to figure out how to manipulate train cars on predefined track topologies. Common goals include reordering the cars in a train, getting two trains to pass each other with a single track, or reversing the direction of a train. Most puzzles are either completely invented (like sudoku) or are simplified versions of real-world problems (like sokoban). It's striking how a train switching problem is identical whether you're doing it for recreation or as an occupation. Although it's also a little sad that these neat puzzles are fading away along with America's train culture.

Reminds me of the book The Big Con. It's about the three big con games that were widely used in the early 20th century (the wire, the rag, and the payoff). The book described these cons in detail, but also paid a lot of attention to linguistics and the language of con men. This language really brought the pages to life and painted a vivid picture of a very different America. In the end, the most interesting story wasn't about the cons, but about a time when railroads were a huge part of life - when businessmen traveled by train for days at a time and stayed in strange cities for weeks while waiting for deals to close. It must've been a very lonely way of life that wasn't too long ago, but has already faded into history.

On a completely unrelated note, I'd really like to visit Naoshima someday. It's an "art island" in Japan, a beautiful island with several contemporary museums and gorgeous art installations.

2007-09-24T22:01:00.000-07:00

I was riding to work today when I saw a twisting mass of feathers falling from a streetlight. All of a sudden, it unfurled into a bird and threw out a clawful nuts at the ground. The bird flew back onto the light, and the nuts shattered open when they hit the street. I was speechless. I looked around for someone I could say "...duuuude.." to, but there was no one around. I've heard about crows that put nuts at intersections for cars to run over (which would probably be even more dude-worthy), but I wouldn't have believed it until I'd seen it.

We humans had better not get complacent. Who knows what could happen if the crows start colluding with the octopusseses. See! Octopus opening jar! Marvel at! Octopus escaping through 1-inch hole! Witness! Octopus walking on 2 arms! Fear! Octopus EATING A SHARK.

This month's Wired mentions the Wilhelm Scream, an actor's scream from a 1951 film that's been used in tons of movies since, up to the present day. I like how different industries have these interesting tools and traditions that EVERYBODY in the field knows about - completely mundane to those in the know, but fascinating for outsiders. Like Lorem Ipsum in text layout. Or the Utah teapot in 3D modeling. Or The Aristocrats in comedy. Or Lenna in image processing.

Don't watch this next one if you're easily offended by racial slurs. Even though it's pretty hilarious. This was big way back in college, and I never did find out the story behind it.

Everyone's heard about gold farming by now, but the New York Times has the best article I've seen to date.

Yukio Miyamoto does the most amazing drawings with Adobe Illustrator you will ever see. This cruise ship render is ridiculous. Since I started writing this paragraph, I've decided that Miyamoto is actually not human, but an Adobe Illustrating super-robot from the future.

2007-09-23T00:37:00.000-07:00

A nice introduction to "the greatest blog ever" - 2 years worth of daily pictures of a vending machine. No, really.. it's good!

All sorts of math-related riddles to annoy your friends. Luckily, most of them have been solved in the extensive forums, so you'll be able to sleep tonight.

I just discovered the blog Think or Thwim, and it's a good source for a daily dose of random linkage. Digging around their archives...

Webs built by spiders on drugs. Surprisingly, the caffeine spider seems the most messed up.

A pile of junk that looks like a piano only from the right angle. More piles of junk that cast amazing shadows.

Equivalent miles/gallon efficiencies for different vehicles. Bicycles absolutely crush all comers.

2007-09-20T21:52:00.000-07:00

Picture tour of 10 impressive temples.

Pretty surprised by the secret in the Toblerone logo, though it's not as mind-blowing of a revelation as the Fedex logo (considered by some to be the greatest logo ever).

The beginning of this story about man with extreme amnesia is absolutely heart-breaking, but it evolves into a fascinating exploration of music and memory and love.

I'm definitely riding this someday. How can you turn down something with a name like the Fantasticable?

And the day after that, I'm stickin' a ton of LED's on a boomerang.

Robocop.. is a college professor!?

Hatsune Miku is a simulation of the voice of Saki Fujita, running on Yamaha's Vocaloid2 software. It recently hit the #2 spot on Amazon, and is actually pretty impressive. I just hope nobody ever thinks to combine it with this.

I never understood why anybody would learn a constructed language, let alone make one themselves. It's like becoming a Guitar Hero expert instead of learning the real guitar (if Guitar Hero wasn't so much damn fun).

revolving door -> sliding door -> auto door

2007-09-19T20:19:00.000-07:00

Some crazy pencil carving to go with some crazy book carving. Here's how they made books cooler in the olden days - fore-edge painting.

The summit of Everest is on tour!? Kinda reminds me of how the peak of Mt. Diablo juts out from the floor of the little museum at the top.

Very engrossing history of the Leica camera.

The New York Times is finally opening up, and Kottke is digging up a lot of great old stories.

Pictures of consumption and eating.

A photo album belonging to an Auschwitz SS member has surfaced. Completely normal pictures of people socializing and having a good time with friends, but thoroughly unsettling due to the context.

Well, it's about time that Segata Sanshiro made an appearance on this blog.

In a perfect world, we'd not only be typing on Dvorak keyboards, we'd be calculating on Reverse Polish Notation calculators!

Japan gets all the cool stuff. Even the fruit is better there!

Way back when, somebody made a program for OS X that would play the Mega Man 2 intro (with scrolling background stars) whenever an application was opened. Did some poking around, and found these two versions for Windows. Unfortunately, each one has different things wrong with it. I'm sure they'll get after I forget all about them and then remember to check again in two years. The best part about the second one is that it played the intro for itself when i uninstalled it.

2007-09-18T22:20:00.000-07:00

Batman and Dostoyevsky, together at last!

Kevin Kelly's Street Use blog has a great collection of home-made tools, improvisations, and mods from the third world to the first. Like hacking.. with stuff!

Apparently, creativity is also flourishing in our local prisons. See: shivs, pruno.

I really hope they actually build this waterfall hotel. It's a waterfall. hotel.

Hey, why doesn't natural selection work for more stuff? Like recipes. I mean, when I search for cherry pie, why do I get 5000 hits instead of The One Recipe (or just a handful of the good ones)? People have different tastes and all, but many recipes are inarguably bad, so shouldn't they eventually disappear from the collective memory of humankind? People are less likely to pass on terrible recipes, and I can't imagine that hordes of untalented cooks are just churning out that many new ways to make crappy cherry pie. So there should be a gradual net reduction until only the best is left. Of course, for food there is no single metric of goodness, but an ideal recipe search should turn up just a couple of variations, each optimized for price or difficulty, etc. If there's some reason why this isn't happening.. somebody really should fix that.

2007-09-17T23:40:00.000-07:00

Here's an optical illusion that, to this day, I still refuse to believe.

Gamasutra has an article on game design essentials. Very informative for a professional, but a little long for the casual reader (i.e. me). Still, there was a bit on page 8 that caught my eye. It mentions how the entire Legend of Zelda - all the darknuts and tektites and dungeons and 128 screens of overworld - fits in 128 kilobytes of memory. It never occurred to me when I played the game, but they crammed all that in by duplicating graphics in vertical strips and other tiling wizardry. I always knew that old games use all sorts of clever tricks to deal with the limited memory, but I never appreciated what a damn fine job they did.

I'm sure glad I live in the days where I can make everything a double float and my programs can leak memory until the cows come home. I'm also glad I don't have to write 99.9% error-free code for the space shuttle

2007-09-17T00:03:00.000-07:00

The new hip topic du jour is fonts! Designing typography is one of those jobs where, if you do it right, nobody will realize you even exist. The NY Times recently covered the redesign of the font used on highway signs. Here are one and two random font movies (not as long as Helvetica).

It's funny how there are like 500 English fonts on my computer, but just two Japanese ones. Designing a new Asian font must be like building a space shuttle. It's amazing what a huge variety of typography exists for languages that have characters like this.

2007-09-16T00:41:00.000-07:00

The Order of the Stick is one of those works that I never want to end.. but I wish I hadn't found until it was all over, because it sucks always having to wait for the next installment. It starts out a little unpolished, but really hits its stride soon and just keeps getting better and better. The author is really talented, and paces the story so well - it's a shame he'll never get the recognition he deserves because of the medium (comics) and subject matter (Dungeons & Dragons) he chose. It's also a great series, because there's a compelling uber-story, but each strip also ends with a satisfying punchline. Now would be a good time to jump in, as it's a long break between story arcs.

Scientists discover that moray eels have two sets of jaws - one for the initial bite and one for pulling prey down the throat.

I almost went into physics after reading some of Michio Kaku's books. He has a blog with some excerpts. I was really fascinated by his description of how civilizations can be classified by energy consumption, and why we're still a type 0. The time travel sections were also interesting, and he gives a brief summary of Heinlein's short story "All You Zombies," which really epitomizes the time travel paradox as a plot point genre. I was reminded of Kaku by the website Imagining the Tenth Dimension. This site brought me the closest to understanding >3-dimensional space that I'll probably ever get.

I also remember a thought experiment that probably came from one of Kaku's books. This was before the dark matter stuff when we still thought that the universe cycled between big bangs and big crunches. He put forward the idea that as the universe begins to contract again to an infinitesimal dot, everything will heat up toward infinity. Consequently, any living beings will evolve metabolisms that are faster and faster. This will increase the speed of their cognitive processes, or in computer-speak, cycles/second. Since these creatures will think so quickly, their perception of time will slow. SO, as the SizeOfUniverse -> 0, PerceivedRateOfTime -> 0,
effectively prolonging the life of the universe forever, as long as living beings are concerned. Of course, there are a million things wrong with this line of reasoning, but it's fun to imagine.

Now feel free to turn your brain off for a while with this video of live-action Punch-Out.

2007-09-15T00:32:00.000-07:00

I saw these awesome piggy banks in Japan. Really wanted one, but pretty useless without a steady source of 500-yen coins.

Another neat idea - the power-failure light. Device with a rechargeable battery and LED's that goes between a light bulb and socket. Seems like it could be easily made smaller and cheaper, though.

The new Indy movie has a title: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The ride at Tokyo Disney Sea is also based around a crystal skull, so it seems like too big of a coincidence for them to be unrelated. But it'd also be pretty weird to name the movie after the ride, since the script wasn't written until long after the ride opened. Anyhow, I really hope they don't screw it up. The Indy series is one of the few that has genuinely aged well, and it'd be awkward to have to pretend the fourth was never made.

Dark Horse has the entire War of the Worlds comic up for free. H.G. Wells's stories are so striking, because even now they can almost pass as modern sci-fi. Until pretty recently, the same also applied to Jules Verne.

Ice loss opens the Northwest Passage. Some countries are going to profit famously from global warming.

And one, two articles on immortality. Who needs fiction when we have history? Seeing the terracotta army in Xi'an has definitely jumped a few places up my list.

2007-09-12T23:25:00.000-07:00

currently reading: Murakami Haruki, The Sputnik Sweetheart.

Back from Japan, still alive, but a little jet-lagged. So during the past few days, I've been waking up two or three times in the middle of each night. They say that you only remember dreams when you wake up during or right after them. Well, I remember my dreams, and they've been weird. Weird and disturbing. What if this is the norm? I mean, what if I have these bizarre dreams every night, but I just don't remember them? Nah...

Paul Saffo is one of the most interesting people I have ever met. I could listen to this guy all day. If anyone else was predicting that the U.S. will end in 50 years, I'd call them crazy, but when Saffo's talking, it's a good idea to listen.

The arrest of 16 Chinese people has reduced the burglaries in Tokyo by 30%. I'm not sure if this says more about the skill of Chinese burglars or the lack of crime in Japan. Though I'm guessing it's probably the later. This is a country that broadcasts stories about car accidents on the national news.

Interesting article on Boing Boing about how magicians protect their intellectual property. I'll admit, I only skimmed the article. But it's enough that I can sound like a genius at the next cocktail party by talking about negative spaces in IP law.

2007-08-31T04:58:00.000-07:00

Taking off for Nagoya in a few hours. I usually stay up all night the day before leaving for Japan to help with the time change. I have to wake up pretty early for work nowadays, but I'll probably never become a morning person. There's just nothing better than the cool, quiet nights when everyone's asleep, and it feels like I have the world all to myself.

Some links before I go!
The new Boing Boing Gadgets site posted a link to Overdrift today, which is like watching a huge collision of all things ridiculous.

Train melodies!! If you've ever spent time in Japan, this'll be a great nostalgia hit. If not, here's a primer from NPR.

Not going to Tokyo this time, but I'm definitely visiting the G-Cans project next time I'm in town. Wiki article and flickr set. Future archaeologists are probably gonna love this stuff after we're long gone, and our cities are dust.

I've really been enjoying the retrospectives at game trailers. It started with Zelda, and the Metroid series just wrapped up. Final Fantasy still has a few episodes left. The internet's really destroying traditional media at game journalism.

2007-08-29T22:34:00.000-07:00

Pretty surprised to hear the Owen Wilson news this week. Dunno why, not a huge fan or anything. But he's a funny guy, and I guess it's just impossible to separate that from whatever he may be like in Real Life. Do celebrities really have more issues than normal folks, or is it just that we hear more about their problems? Anyhow, I hope everything works out for him. Here's an article about him in better times.

I'm going to Japan on Friday. I know the novelty of Engrish has long worn off, but this menu really elevates it to a new plane of existence. These people are crazy, crazy, illiterate geniuses.

2007-08-29T00:14:00.000-07:00

When did this happen? Wikipedia is now the all-knowing ubervault of all human knowledge. I use it as a primary source for everything. Technical engineering stuff at work, movie trivia, travel info... Sure, there's criticism about its accuracy, but unless you're writing your thesis with it, you're really not going to have any problems.

Even seemingly mundane entries turn up a lot of interesting tidbits. Entering the name of my town for example, I found that the local Toys 'R Us is believed to be haunted. It's also a great source for anything pop culture, since there's really no other one-stop shop for something like Marvel superheroes or lightsaber combat. I'm pretty embarassed to admit that I enjoyed every bit of those articles. I can just feel all the useful information being pushed out of my brain.

2007-08-27T23:46:00.000-07:00

I really really want a Morfeo couch! Why is there no middle ground in the couch market? I mean, it's either you pay $5000 for a new one or $50 for a ragged one from the 80's that some college kid was going to throw away anyways.

In other news, one of my coworkers is currently in Taiwan for a business trip. I wonder if he's seen the Beijing left. I have a feeling that understanding how Chinese traffic works will simultaneously unlock several mysteries of the universe.

2007-08-27T23:35:00.000-07:00

I'll probably update this blog for all of four weeks until I completely run out of steam. Then the moldering begins. Reminds me how you can google for "I haven't updated in a while" and thereby open a door to a wasteland of dead or soon-to-be-dead blogs. I was going to say that'll probably how this blog will end too, but I just realized that's how it now starts.

Among other interesting things to google:
inurl:/view.shtml for live cameras
DSC00001.jpg for the first pictures people take with their new digicams (nsfw)

Funny how a sorta random search phrase gives back a really specific set of pages.

2007-08-27T23:20:00.000-07:00

currently reading: Stefan Zweig, The Royal Game (and other stories). Imaginary chess and crazy people!

Visited UCSC this past weekend. Very pretty, but not a place I'd ever want to attend. I'm not sure how anybody can deal with hiking to class every day. Schools shouldn't have ravines. It was completely deserted, save for a random Shakespeare performance in the woods. I didn't recognize the play, but it was likely the Bard's most yellingest work. There was also a bike race going on near the entrance to campus. Hey, why do bikes have so many speeds? I can understand the need for those guys with the spandex and the aerodynamic sunglasses and the drafting. But for 99% of the population biking to school or work, when is anyone ever in 11th gear and thinking, dude, this looks like a job for 12th gear??

I'll be posting all the links I've accumulated over the past few months, so it'll be a lotta old stuff until I clear up the backlog.