« Previous Post | Home | The New Internet Eclectic »
The New Internet Eclectic
By | January 28, 2008
February is indeed a short month that came up all too quickly. From where I live, it’s typically a pretty dreary time, overcast, gray, still cold…and I’m starting to feel like a shut-in. Let me tell you, I’ve got to do something about my surroundings - albeit this month’s just new Design Guide has virtually nothing to do with interiors, it nonetheless contains much to do with everything else design-related. Check it out!
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
This month I encourage you to delve deeper into:
Blog Roll: Recycled Words; 40 Words for “Looked”; Against Bi-Partisanship
Cooking: The Holy Church of Food; The Trouble With Organic Food; KFC’s Famous Bowls; Anthony Bourdain
Design: Charles and Ray Eames; Visual Arts Data Service; Data, branding, web design, pouring acid into my eyeballs and what graphic design is for…
History: Polar Dinosaurs; Ephemerea Society; The Early Days; Cliopatria; Discredited Historical Theories; Ancient Egyptian Medicines; The Color Mauve
Language Arts: My Wife Is An Immigrant; Banned Words; The Many Faces of Eustace Tilley; Dry Store Room #1; Contronyms; Not The Last Word…
Music: Steve Reich’s City Life; screenplay from Pink Floyd’s The Wall; Qtrax beta; 21 Fun Facts About Music…
Pics: Franco Donaggio; breaking the sound barrier; miniatures; edible photograph; The Johnson Treatment; The Emptied Prarie; Revealing Character…
Science: Your brain on music, magnets and meth; Bionic Eye; Watching David Attenborough; Dinosaur extinction caused by insects; Squirrels are indeed sneaky…
Shopping: Mackintosh House Numbers; anarchy in the aisles; novelty toaster; a measuring gaggle
Spin Zone: Myth of the Strong Man; The Mind of the Market; The Fall of America…
Travel: Smithsonian’s picks of those places you have to go; Moscow Diary ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
This Week’s Web Bytes
Picturingtolearn is a site going live 2/15. In American Scientist Online, Felice Frankel writes “Informed Decisions“…an example of what has become for me an obvious, but too-often ignored, transformative exercise: clarifying and learning science by thinking about how to visually represent an idea, a process or a structure in science, for the purpose of explaining it. My Harvard colleague and coauthor George Whitesides, with whom I am working on the book No Small Matter, forthcoming in 2009 from Harvard University Press, asked that I make an interesting representation of nanotubes. I am a science photographer, not an illustrator, so my first course of action is usually to think photographically. The obvious, making a scanning electron micrograph of a nanotube, was not an option. Others have done that, probably much better than I would have. I decided to photographically simulate a nanotube structure. Here’s what I did. First I printed a black hexagonal pattern, representing a standard carbon lattice, on an 8×10 piece of transparent acetate (a).
Annotation: EVIL. (Harpers) Google’s addiction to cheap electricity…
Moonshine Moves Out Of Mason Jars. The sensation starts with a slight burn at the back of your tongue. An innocent tingle that quickly builds into a slow- burning, skin-removing inferno in the back of your throat. By the time it hits your stomach, you’re wondering if your esophagus remains intact…
Strange Things You Likely Didn’t Know. My favorite: The dot over the letter “i” is called a tittle.
Anthony Bourdain Casting Call for No Reservations FAN-atic special…Qualifications: To be cast for the Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations FAN-atic Special you must be a legal resident of the fifty United States or the District of Columbia, 18 years of age or older and unaffiliated with the Travel Channel, its parent, subsidiaries or affiliated companies. No more than one video per person can be submitted.
The Atlas of Strange Maps. Strange Maps grew out of a love for maps, and a frustration with atlases. As much as I love to read atlases, most of them essentially tell the same story. The blog was meant to be a repository of maps unlikely to be included in one of those ‘regular’ atlases – an ‘anti-atlas’ (geography buffs might appreciate the double-entendre) aiming not for any kind of comprehensiveness, but only to surprise and delight the many people who love maps.
Even an ‘anti-atlas’ itches to be published, and the 5,000,000 mark might be a good moment to announce that there shortly will be a real-life book, tentatively titled The Atlas of Strange Maps. An agreement to that effect has been concluded with Viking Studio Press, an imprint of Penguin USA.
Although the Atlas will be based on the blog, it will not be a quick-and-dirty blogsploitation job. I’m selecting the best maps on the blog for the book, rewriting the entries to incorporate the many necessary corrections and helpful additions provided. I’m also looking for maps that have not appeared on the blog to be incorporated into the book.The Atlas of Strange Maps will be inspired by the eponymous blog, but will stand apart from it.
Previous Web Bytes
February is National National Awareness Month Awareness Month! (Scroll down for a month-by-month rundown of what’s important to be aware of…)
EarthLive: Discovery Channel site with good interface lets you see the dynamics of weather and climate.
Stumble Card #9 - Are you a collector?
Howcast is a YouTube like site with an ever growing list of how to videos.
Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year, 2007.
Very cool flash site that despite slow loading is nonetheless worth the wait…
Now that the writers strike is coming to a close…are you interested in when your favorite shows are coming back…?
This month’s Vanity Fair: The Holywood Issue. Hitchcock movie posters shot with today’s stars.
Kick A Migrant.Beautiful, slow motion skateboarding intro by Spike Jonze (Review).
Nano - Nikon’s interactive universcale.
This year’s 2008 Animated Shorts Nominations are…right here
JEWGLE - Would it hurt you to pick up the phone and call your mother?
Virtual Cable car navigation is nicely intuitive and in beta…
The Mindscape of Alan Moore (documentary, fansite).
Cultural icons from throughout history…how many do you recognize?
100 Things You Can Do With Google Maps.
Around the World in 2 Billion Pages.
The Hitchhiker is a short digital animation by Simon Reeves (Presurfer)
The Atlantic.com is now free. Explore the last 12 years of articles. Consider The Dark Art of Interrogation. The Profits of Doom. A Reader’s Manifesto.
David Gallo on TED Talks: Underwater Astonishments
Everything you need to know about 2008 (Wiki)
Dark and beautiful ad on AIDS (nsfw)
Galifianakis as model for the new web celebrity? Here’s this clip (Fiona Apple Not About Love). Then here’s one a tad bit older.
Here’s a graphic calendar/clock that’s worth a look.
The best of the personal finance blogosphere 2007.
Gnooze (pronounced newz, the “g” is silent)is Marta Costello’s take on the top 3 stories…
And, on somewhat of a theme, announcing the debut of The Digg Reel. The top ten, or so, of the Digg community’s video’s each week.
The New Home of the New York Times. (Slate Photo Essay) Thirty years ago, Piano and Richard Rogers designed the Pompidou Center, which heralded high-tech architecture and culminated a decade later in Norman Foster’s Hongkong & Shanghai Bank. Since then, Foster has moved away from high tech, as evidenced in his sleek Hearst Building, just up Eighth Avenue from the Times. So has Piano, whose addition to the Morgan Library in New York typifies his current low-key approach. However, in the New York Times Building (designed in association with FXFowle) Piano returns to his Pompidou roots; not exposed pipes and ducts—those were always impractical—but dramatic structural details that say, “This is how I am made.”
Ten Recurring Economic Fallacies. #1: Broken Window One of the most persistent is that of the broken window—one breaks and this is celebrated as a boon to the economy: the window manufacturer gets an order; the hardware store sells a window; a carpenter is hired to install it; money circulates; jobs are created; the GDP goes up. In truth, of course, the economy is no better off at all. (Kottke)
Wikia : (NYT) Mr. Wales expects his new Internet search engine, Wikia Search, an early version of which is being made available to the public Monday at www.wikia.com, to follow a similar trajectory.
Another new site is Cullect, a collaborate feed aggregator.
“We want to make it really clear that when people arrive and do searches, they should not expect to find a Google killer,” Mr. Wales said. Instead, people who use the Wikia search engine should understand that they are part of the early stages of a project to build a “Google-quality search engine,” Mr. Wales said.
Like Wikipedia, Mr. Wales plans to rely on a “wiki” model, a voluntary collaboration of people, to fine-tune the Wikia search engine. When it starts up Monday, the service will rank pages based on a relatively simple algorithm. Users will be allowed and encouraged to rate search results for quality and relevance. Wikia will gradually incorporate that feedback in its rankings of Web pages to deliver increasingly useful answers to people’s questions.
Big Think: We are what you think we are. Video site featuring big thinkers from the worlds of politics, academia, science, and business.
Snow Plowing Train…just how do they see ahead?
LiveWeatherMap. Use the arrows on the edges to frame your piece of the planet.
Mr. Blackwell’s 47th Annual Worst Dressed List.
As Seen On TV: 10 most Laughably Misleading Ads.
40 Social News Sites is a look at 40 sites that aggregate a community’s take on what’s interesting on the web.
HP Office Orchestra plays Mozart. (Coudal)Prophet Motive: Kahil Gibran phenomenon. Shakespeare, we are told, is the best-selling poet of all time. Second is Lao-tzu. Third is Kahlil Gibran, who owes his place on that list to one book, “The Prophet,” a collection of twenty-six prose poems, delivered as sermons by a fictional wise man in a faraway time and place. Since its publication, in 1923, “The Prophet” has sold more than nine million copies in its American edition alone. There are public schools named for Gibran in Brooklyn and Yonkers. “The Prophet” has been recited at countless weddings and funerals. It is quoted in books and articles on training art teachers, determining criminal responsibility, and enduring ectopic pregnancy, sleep disorders, and the news that your son is gay. Its words turn up in advertisements for marriage counsellors, chiropractors, learning-disabilities specialists, and face cream. (The Prophet, flash paper)
The Gratitude Campaign - just say thank you. It isn’t political.
List Universe has The Top 15 Amazing Coincidences.
The 50 Greatest Fishing Lures of All Time. (Field & Stream)
50 Things we know now (that we didn’t know this time last year).
Topics: February |