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The New Internet Eclectic
By | March 31, 2008
April, sweet April. I finally got around to removing the Flickr photos along the right sidebar, as it was simply taking too long to download. I’ve also been working on a new site, which will go live April 7th. I’ll update this post accordingly, when the time comes. Until then…
Time has come for the reveal…i-sorcerer is now live. You may want to take The Sorcerer’s Challenge.
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This month…
Blog Roll: Pruned - Aurora Bibliotheque; iwritefunny; Hezbollah Tofu
Cooking: Onomastic sobriquets; Thomas Keller; eating videos;fast food vs. reality; 45 Cooking And Baking Tips; Dining On A Dime.
Design: Tekken Kinkreet; Michael Beirut; Diamond Shreddies; Kinetic Typography.
History: Champlain Was Here; Bluestockings.
Language Arts: His Illegal Self; BookLamp.org; Hints on pronunciation for foreigners; History’s Greatest Replies; favorite signature passages…
Music: MC5 - True Testimonials; Hallelujah; 5 Auditory Illusions; Celemony aims to destroy live music; 1000 Albums To Hear Before You Die.
Pics: Annie Liebovitz; A Flipbook On China; the ama girls by Yoshoyuki Iwase.
Science: Spotted hyenas in Sociable And Smart; Magical Thinking; Carcharodon Megalodon; Newton; The Universe’s Most Powerful Blast.
Spin Zone: Oppressing The Danes; The Man Between War & Peace; The collected controversies of William F. Buckley; Why I Am No Longer A Brain Dead Liberal.
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This Week’s Web Bytes
Best Story Ever. Site has both good and lame stories galore.
Train your memory with Mnemonic Arts. Who’s Ramon Llull?
18 Minutes With An Agile Mind (Clifford Stoll on TED Talks)
Hammer Quiz. Guess what each is used for. Answers after the pics.
Atoll Gallery (slow loading gallery of 247 atolls).
Henry Miller - Bathroom Chronicles. Part 2. Part 3 and follow on. (Links to Henry Miller.)(MeFi)
Simply Google - all Google features listed on one page.
Brain Rules - 12 brain rules that share what we know about the brain and what me might do about it.
Supercharge the right click function of your mouse (Windows Explorer). And, while on a roll, 91 Utilities to Supercharge Windows (PC Magazine)
Comparison of MetaFilter comments vs. YouTube comments.
Saul Griffith Wattzon’s “Redefining Climate Change As An Engineering Challenge.”
Previous Web Bytes
This is Charley. 2:00 YouTube Goodness.
Easter, Purim, Persian New Year and Spring recipes. Will any believer be left with out a chance to cook something up?
The idea of dragging the early 1900s parlour game Exquisite Corpse into the 21st century and applying it to the very small screen of personal media players is spawning an ongoing series of scripts and films, with a different director picking up where the other left off. The concept of an interconnected, content driven and non-linear film series made specifically for download to iPhones, iPods and Sony PSPs, which would not only entertain, but give directors the chance to stretch their imaginations, appealed to Little Minx… the eyes of everyman upon her she turns back and faces forward, at peace she walked calmly disappearing into the darkness without missing a beat, she asks, “Want waffles for breakfast?” she stares longingly at what she had lost
10 Greatest Stolen Ideas In The Web.
Siezure Warning: download Kings of Power 4 Billion % - 12 AVI from Pixel artist Paul Robertson at risk from much flash.
While I don’t normally highlight flash on this site, this flash is something else.
Sports Business Journal: There is a PowerPoint presentation that has been making the rounds in league offices and among ad buyers for the past six months. Distributed by multiple networks, the full color presentation uses a series of bar graphs to bash everything about ESPN. It describes ESPN’s multiplatform strategy as a flawed concept. It calls ESPN’s marketing machine a myth. It says that a sports property’s TV ratings consistently decline on ABC and ESPN. The presentation, titled “The Emperor’s New Clothes: How ESPN’s Multi-Platform Strategy Hasn’t Improved Ratings,” looks to illustrate how sports properties such as the NFL, NASCAR and the NBA have seen significant TV rating and viewership declines on ESPN and ABC in the past year. It’s a compelling read.
Typematching - what typeface are you, and who are you compatible with?
InSuggest - Tell it a website you like, and it will make recommendations on other sites.
YouTube 2007 Award Winners. But wait, who were the nominees?
Fitna (English version). Radio Netherlands: About Fitna (YouTube). Spiegel Online explains in print. Imam Fawaz Jneid of The Hague’s As-Sunnah mosque is included in the part about the Theo van Gogh murder. In his prayer, Fawaz said to Allah: “Cause Van Gogh a disease which all the inhabitants of the earth are unable to cure. Cause him suffering making him long for death. Blind the sight of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, give her brains a cancer. Give her tongue a cancer.” Fawaz said this week he had just wanted “to blow off steam”.
Ralph Lauren has a great car collection. Here’s two short film clips - 1 and 2. Here’s a trailer for the Discovery Channel program from 2005. (MeFi)
What do your favorite colors reveal about your personality?& 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)
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.
Topics: April |