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The New Internet Eclectic
By | March 3, 2008
March is starting to bring spring back, and with it my spirits. None too soon!
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This month…
Blog Roll: Matt Webb’s Closing Keynote Speech; Better Than Free; Cosmic Variance “Postmodern Climatology”; Overcoming Bias “My Favorite Liar.”
Cooking: Land of Plenty; Anthony Bourdain interview (YT); Incompatible Food Triad; Culinary Seductions; Herve This (pronounced Thees) on Molecular Gastronomy…
Design: History of visual communication; Design for the elastic mind; 100 years of design (ID); How to be creative; Pantone’s Fall 2008 Fashion Color Palette…
History: A better place; Illustrated history of copyright; Early visual media archeology; Tiki; A lead on the ark of the covenant…
Language Arts: John Cleese’s Letter to America; Idiom Shortage (Onion); The Charms of Wikipedia; Begging the question; 100 Greatest Headlines…
Music: Welling Up; Historic American sheet music; Soft Focus; Facemelter; Songerize; Album Covers (Alex Steinweiss)…
Pics: Child Labor; Breakthrough movie stars; Film Techniques of Alfred Hitchcock; The ones We Love; America’s best kept secrets…
Science: When incest is best; Getting Duped; Encyclopedia of Life; Punctuation Marks In Language; Trail blazing scientists; Worldwide Telescope (TED)…
Shopping: Wrought Iron Art; Mackintosh House Numbers; anarchy in the aisles; novelty toaster; a measuring gaggle
Spin Zone: Atheism is the new black; America Still Works; Wall Street Meltdown (YT); What Makes A Miracle; Independent Kosovo…
Travel: Smithsonian’s picks of those places you have to go; Moscow Diary ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
& Teller: The Last Living Entertainer in Las Vegas.
Visual Arts - No Revolution in Hyper Space. A former insider laments the dumbing down of art museum websites. (Includes some terrific links to sites.)
Hand Shadow show by Raymond Crowe. (YouTube)
Stubby Beer’s Symphony spot.
Remember Wake Up Cat, an animated short about a hungry kitty and a sleeping human? Simon Tofield has now released Let Me In. (MeFi)
Previous Web Bytes
Ted. Ted. Ted. Everyone’s talking about TED. What, not invited? Fed up with it all? Then again, if your ego permits you to not be invited and still OK with yourself, here’s a fun little talk about steve Jurvetson’s little hobby: Rockets. Or, if you’re rooted to terra firma, try Roy Gould & Curtis Wong demonstrating WorldWide Telescope.
Braille on beer cans (inventions).
Beat-boxing Basset (flash)
Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures. Documentary (2 hours, 18 minutes)
The Pyrotechnic Imagination. (NYT) Cai Guo-Qiang says his favorite artistic moment is the pregnant pause between the lighting of the fuse and the detonation of the gunpowder. “There is a pressure in it to be preserved, and then it explodes,” he says. “This moment belongs just to the artist and the work.” On a breezy afternoon last September, in a large A-frame shed at the Grucci fireworks plant on Long Island, he was setting the stage. With the help of his wife, Hong Hong Wu, he cut a long green fuse into segments, then laid the pieces carefully on eight contiguous panels of handmade Japanese rice paper. After three young female assistants placed stencils in the shape of an eagle’s wings, head and beak onto the panels, Cai, a onetime serious student of martial arts, moved gracefully as he sprinkled different grades of gunpowder, some custom-made for him. “I don’t know what the result will be, even though I preplan,” he told me, speaking through an interpreter in Chinese. “It is like making medicine — a little of this, a little of that, watch it and taste it a little and see how it is working. My work is like a dialogue between me and unseen powers, like alchemy.” (In Chinese, the word for gunpowder is literally “fire medicine,” an allusion to the eighth-century Chinese alchemists who accidentally invented it while searching for a magic elixir.)
Ironic Sans has termed a new typographic term: Keming.
The dying art of penmanship and calligraphy.
Philately, the modern stamp. Set 1. Set 2. Set 3.
NYC Highline: Piet Oudolf design (pdf) for the highline; his vision on gardening, work with perennials, respect for nature, and other work. (MeFi)
Also found at MeFi, My Paper Mind.
Why $0.00 is the Future of Business. (Wired) The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It’s as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?) You know this freaky land of free as the Web. A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending. In 2007 The New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal.
In a related article, here’s their mini-Wiki on how to make money around free content.
Larry Lessig - The Creative Commons.
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.
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.
Topics: March |