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The New Internet Eclectic
By | October 1, 2007
A few things have been underworks here. For starters, the new look. For another, a new companion site called idea-threads (more on that in a bit). All in all, a productive end of summer.
With everything described above, and frankly, getting caught up in the whole idea of an ideation guide, I am now finally getting around to this very special back-to-school focus for October. Crammed in to the normal monthly sections (hereafter called pages) of science and language arts and what all, you will also find the surfing guides. Specifically, you will now find 5 new guides, in addition to the original travel (July), language arts (August) and ideation (September): Art, Education, History, Music and Science.
As ever, each will be continuously updated as time and good hunting allow.
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This month I encourage you to delve deeper into:
Blog Roll: The Reluctant Modernist Stephen Heller on Erik Nitsche at Typotheque; Michael Arrington’s Crunch Food spoof outs himself; comment thread from Slashdot - bringing math and science into writing
Cooking: Making Sense of America’s celebrity-chef culture; Bourdain’s Rant; A salad of cool melon and hot bacon…
Design: Pentagram posters; 50 Designers & 6 Questions; Beautiful Losers; Color vs. Colour…
eMail: Life is like a theater, so invite your audiences carefully
History: The revenge of the fighting Quaker; On the concept of history; review of the Lost World of James Smithson; freemasons mysteries…
Language Arts: The Late Style of Thomas McGuane; Modern Drunkard Magazine; How a web site got it’s groove; The Edifice of Pinkerism…
Music: Perfect pitch; Berimbass; trailer for Heima; why the violin is so hard to play; A Toot And A Snore in ‘74…
Pics: What’s interesting today at Flick’r; the cult of Leica; American environmental photos; Paris Photo 2007…
Science: The mystery of the wandering Daddy Longlegs; Stephen Hawking; How the discovery of geologic time changed the world…
Shopping: Shopperazi; Shoe Guru; digital purchasing and researching tips.
Spin Zone: Animation To The Polemic; One Child Foreign Policy; skin head violence rising in Russia; The Rise of Disaster Capitalism…
Travel: Fragments From Budapest; the unique Radisson SAS es Hotel in Rome; luxury travel forum called Extravigator.
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Webits This Week
How to bake Vampire Cupcakes that bleed when you bite into them.
Moebius Transformations Revealed (YT).
The American Planning Association announces the 2007 Great Places awards; the 10 greatest streets and 10 greatest neighborhoods in America. Read all about what makes the 20 great places work so well.
Directed by Daisuke Yamamoto
Defining the fine line between catchy commercial jingles and mental paralysis.
LessLawn is a place to go if your place needs less lawn - for tips and tricks, plant suggestions and inspiration.
What’s going on with journalists today?
Dove Evolution Campaign (YT).
Icastic has a large database of time visualizations.
GhostCaps is a ghost a day…now counting over 230.
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Every edition of ieclectic ends with last month’s web bytes, and so it shall be in October. First, word on the new companion site Idea-Threads. Here’s how I explained it there:
A virtual cast of embedded characters have taken over this post.
It didn’t start out that way, of course. It never does. Things don’t go the way I initially plan them. Somehow, another tangent beckons.
I was playing with an idea for a website that would capitalize on where I believe some of the best that’s out there resides - in the commentary threads to articles and on social sites. I won’t tell-all here, but suffice it to say I didn’t have the juice to hire custom html-ers, plumb the pipes…
For about a week I mulled and I moaned. Then it hit me.
Madness really.
No, I couldn’t.
What will people think?
Problem is, once the beast had it’s teeth in me I couldn’t seem to shake it off. A parody. A blog of a blog of a theme. (Now, if only those characters would stay on theme!)
What the heck. “You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.” (Robin Williams) For now, M-W-F.
I encourage you to find the inner child at idea-threads.
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Previous Web Bytes
Quick illustrative look at German vs. Chinese culture.
Trailer for Charlie Wilson’s War (Why does everything with Tom Hanks look so good?)
What is green accounting?
Here’s a simply amazing YT of a man juggling hammers…and wait until you see what he does with them.
Bla Bla Bla, by Gino d’Agostino (MTV Germany) .
Ever wonder what a web site looks like to a person with color blindness? Well, I suppose that depends on which kind of color blindness. Here’s a site that tests colorblindness.
Cracking Art at the Tate; the article, and the video.
Temperament and Personality Quiz (109 Questions).
The periodic table of periodic tables.
Free sound database, everything from dogs barking to factory noises.
Take the random number generator test, and see how you would do as a generator of random-ness.
Handmade Perfection, a la VW Phaeton.
Left Brain? Right Brain? Take the test to find out.
Watch what a clothing designed can do with a dress.
Interactive music video for The Arcade Fire.
Trailer for Jmpr, er, Jumper
Disco Elevator (College Humor) - I think I’ll just take the stairs, thanks.
Whose Fish? (Coudal)
Update: We’ve put this puzzle in a handy portable/printable PDF version here so you can find out how smart you family really is this holiday season. Cheers.
This brainteaser, reportedly written by Einstein is difficult and Einstein said that 98% of the people in the world could not figure it out. Which percentage are you in?
There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a Walleye Pike.
The question is– who owns the fish?
Hints:
1. The Brit lives in the red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Malls keeps birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
8. The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.
9. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats…
Fav.or.it Read. Write. Reply. A new mashup of RSS feed, social booking and republishing/blogging.
Lebbus Woods is a very surreal site worth a look, and a stare.
Trailer for Be Kind Rewind…before it’s erased, or the FBI catches up.
Internet Memes and how to explore them. If there is one constant on the web it is that once every few months some wonderful, ridiculous or utterly strange phenomenon will enter the minds and hearts of the webosphere. These memes will spread like wildfire through internet forums, make their way into software as easter eggs and every once in a while even spread into mainstream media.
Weather Flags from around the world.
Dove Onslaught. A short film (YT 1:18) with a telling message: talk to your daughters before the beauty industry does.
Patrick Watson - The Great Escape. Interesting illustrated YT.
Pinkle, exactly like Google, except it’s completely pink.
Trailer for the upcoming Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Tim Burton and Johnny Depp).
September Web Bytes
How I’d Sink Vogue, by Scott King at CR.
Disposable web pages? Yep. You get a page here free, which you can then set a countdown clock as to when that page will disappear - anywhere from 90 days on down. (but probably cached forever somewhere). You’re given a key, which you can share with your friends, so they can then also start editing along with you. Pretty smart. Give it a try.
Theoretical Geography? Created by illustrator James Turner, it is an effort to describe the human condition via an incredibly detailed map containing thousands of names from history and fiction arranged in a theoretical geography that encompasses islands of Abandonment and Wisdom and regions of Abomination and Courage. (via MeFi)
Wall Art is a beautifully bizarre animation (?) that repeats twice, which is OK because you might just want a second look.
The Public Has Spoken, and after a tally of more than 10 million votes, we’ll be sending Barry Bond’s controversial home run record breaking ball to Cooperstown branded with an asterisk. (via Notcot)
Trailer for the movie Atonement.
20 things you didn’t know about nothing.
Magna Carta is going on sale: The 2,500 words fill a page that is a couple of inches shorter than this one, but almost as wide. The faded letters in Latin are unreadable in places. Something that looks like a scraggly, russet-colored tail hangs from the bottom…
Zipskinny gives the low down on a place, based on zip code. Lots and lots of census data, plus comparison with top 100 zips is available for those who’d like to keep tabs on the Joneses.
Che Men’s Magazine. “Let us keep on dreaming of a better world.”
FutureMe Send an email to the future. Loads of possibilities, from reminders to self to predictions that others can be “on the look out” for.
Juno, a comedy about life, is coming soon. And here’s a 5 minute trailer for Mr Woodcock, starring Billy Bob Thornton.
Can you believe it? Even the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing is going high tech, both here and on the new $5.
How far is too far to grab attention? The new Coke Zero viral may well have broached the subject in this German vid. Watch as the kid get’s splashed from one very large breast of a beast. (Josh Spear)
I can has Faultline is long overdue, don’t you think? Those damn cats have been way too dominant, way too long.
The Ray Memorial 100 top non-English films, by Copeland.
The trailer to the movie Southland Tales, which follows up on Richard Kiley’s Donny Darko. (via fimoculous)
The advantages of amnesia From the Internet to the iPod, technology is bringing rapid advances in memory. What society needs now are new ways to forget.
FEUDALISM: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.
FASCISM: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them and sells you the milk.
RUSSIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.
CAMBODIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. The government takes both of them and shoots you
Our Hero, journalist Robert Fisk (Viceland). Best-selling author and British journalist Robert Fisk has lived in Beirut for the past three decades. He is the Middle East correspondent for The Independent and holds more British and international journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent. He has covered every major event in the region including the Algerian civil war, the Iranian Revolution, the American hostage crisis in Beirut, the Iran-Iraq war, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the American invasion of Iraq. His most recent book, The Great War for Civilization, is a 1,300-page epic eyewitness account of Middle Eastern history, and a best seller in the UK. It’s been translated into eight languages…
Anthony Bourdain’s overrated menu, plus overrated people, places and many things at Radar.
Watch as the spam recycler does it’s thing.
100 bottles of beer on the wall, one hundred bottles of beer…wait, that’s 100,000, and it’s gonna take a while to replenish.
NFL TV Distribution Map is a must read for football fans. If your games get blacked out, SportsFaction has “How to watch any NFL game for free.” Not ready to leave summer? Here’s Postseason Odds (wins, losses, probability of making playoffs) for the rest of the MLB season, determined by running a Monte Carlo simulation of the rest of the season one million times. (via Kottke)
Here’s a whole host of crazy facts, such as: It is impossible to lick your elbow. The first novel ever written on a typewriter was Tom Sawyer. And 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321.
I admit I’m rubbing my hands together in anticipation of a soon to be classic release of Sleuth, starring Michael Caine and Jude Law.
If you haven’t already seen this, you should read “Text of a document found in Zarqawi’s safe house.” Then, on a theme, Virtuous Republic’s “Osama Answered in Hell” We in Hell are quite amused by Osama bin Laden’s latest screed. Unlike the lily livered Republicans and Democrats who won’t call ‘em like they see them, We in Hell have a few responses We want to deliver to this earthy devil…Our question to you is, right now, you can’t even defeat 200,000 of our soldiers. What would happen if we mobilized for war and sent 4 million soldiers and marines to your shores? And what would you do if hundreds of these made bombing runs every night for the next couple of years?
“Things I Hate About America.“ is a tongue somewhat in cheek look at some of our most notable, including border guards, speed limits and Waffle House.
Trick pitch caught on Japanese TV. (via Dvorak Uncensored)
Project Censored’s Top 25 most underreported news stories of the year:
1 No Habeas Corpus for “Any Person”
2 Bush Moves Toward Martial Law
3 AFRICOM: US Military Control of Africa’s Resources
4 Frenzy of Increasingly Destructive Trade Agreements
5 Human Traffic Builds US Embassy in Iraq
6 Operation FALCON Raids
7 Behind Blackwater Inc.
8 KIA: The US Neoliberal Invasion of India
9 Privatization of America’s Infrastructure
10 Vulture Funds Threaten Poor Nations’ Debt Relief
11 The Scam of “Reconstruction” in Afghanistan
12 Another Massacre in Haiti by UN Troops
13 Immigrant Roundups to Gain Cheap Labor for US Corporate Giants
14 Impunity for US War Criminals
15 Toxic Exposure Can Be Transmitted to Future Generations on a “Second Genetic Code”
16 No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11
17 Drinking Water Contaminated by Military and Corporations
18 Mexico’s Stolen Election
19 People’s Movement Challenges Neoliberal Agenda
20 Terror Act Against Animal Activists
21 US Seeks WTO Immunity for Illegal Farm Payment
22 North Invades Mexico
23 Feinstein’s Conflict of Interest in Iraq
24 Media Misquotes Threat From Iran’s President
25 Who Will Profit from Native Energy?
Have you ever taken one of those online What Is Your Real Age tests? A friend sent this link to me, and found out I have 11,200 more days left. I better get cracking!
Superfund365 will feature one of the EPA’s super fund clean up sites each day for the next year. Superfund365 is from the New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation. Additional funding provided by New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). The day I visited the featured site was the US Radium Corp., where the company formerly processed radium on a 1-acre site in the highly populated area of Orange, Essex County, New Jersey. From 1915-1926 the company disposed approximately 1,600 tons of ore on-site.
BMW-TV has just launched. It is a YouTube-esque take on everything BMW, searchable by division, and they promise to provide plenty of exclusive content (including product launches) on their web magazine. (via JoshSpear)
The Guardian recently had an article on the soon to be released Trapped in the Closet Chapters 13-22, and described the first -12 as follows: The first 12 chapters of Trapped In The Closet debuted a couple of years ago to mild acclaim and widespread befuddlement. It told the story of a man named Sylvester who was cheating on his wife, only to discover that his mistress (Kathy) had a husband (Rufus) with a clandestine gay lover (Chuck). That revelation is acerbated upon Sylvester’s discovery that his own wife (Gwendolyn, a friend of Kathy’s from high school) is having an extramarital affair with a black police officer (James) married to a white woman (Bridget) who’d recently been impregnated by a dwarf from a strip club. Chapters 13 through 16 focus on Gwendolyn’s brother (Twan) who was recently paroled after a three-year prison sentence for a drug violation involving Tina (the father of Twan’s child) and a woman named Roxanne (Tina’s lesbian lover). As chapters 17 through 22 unspool, we learn that Rufus (who works as a minister) elects to end his homosexual relationship with Chuck and remain with his wife; meanwhile, Sylvester becomes involved with an Italian crime syndicate. Also of note: it now appears many (or perhaps all) of the characters are HIV positive.
I realise this may seem incomprehensible.
This is not my fault.
If anything, I have grossly oversimplified the details of the narrative…
None other than the WSJ recently had an article on beer pong entitled “Thwock, Gulp, Kaching? Beer Pong Inspires Inventors.” video.
Phil Collins Gorilla created by Fallon London’s Juan Cabral for Cadbury is wonderful. (via Coudal)
I’m not sure what to make of the Sexual Relationship Database. Who would volunteer information for this, anyway?
Check out your vision, memory and face recognition - part of a study of Prosopagnosia, also called face blindness, often accompanied by other types of recognition impairments (place recognition, car recognition, facial expression of emotion, etc.). (via Neatorama)
Learn to dance with James Brown. Then again, he’s probably the only one who could look good doing any of these steps.
BoardRideTV is niche-rific; I guess it’s YouTube for thrill-ers. Not found on BoardRide but a listening thrill on YouTube is this video listen to what it’s like riding a Honda 1300 CB motorcycle (put on your earphones for best results).
How To Beat Carnival Games is an interesting read at Bifaloo. (via Lifehacker)
New spam pandemic about to be unleashed - don’t fall for Quechup. Harn from Palo Alto replies: Let me return the favor. It pays to be vigilant. Ticks Are Out. I hate it when people forward bogus warnings, and I’ve even done it myself a couple times, but this one is important. So please send this warning to everyone on your e-mail list. If someone comes to your front door saying they are checking for ticks due to the warming weather and asks you to take your clothes off and dance around with your arms up … DO NOT DO IT!! IT IS A SCAM!! They only want to see you naked…I wish I’d gotten this yesterday. I feel so stupid.
“Do the Mash (Even if You Don’t Know All The Steps).” POP music has its mash-ups that combine tunes and vocals from different songs. YouTube viewers do it, too, mixing together segments from various music videos. Now mash-ups are poised to hit the mainstream, and to spread well beyond music. Yahoo, I.B.M., Microsoft and others are creating systems to let ordinary people who’ve never been near a Java class create useful computer applications by combining, or “mashing up,” different online information sources.
Sprint Ahead and watch a bit of viral - a bit of an attempt at one, anyway.
Topics: October 07 |