Saturday, August 24, 2013

Every moment is a golden one...


Strike Up The Band

For your listening pleasure, here's a sampling of Tony Levin's favorite bits from the upcoming Levin Minnemann Rudess album (or as I like to think of it, Liquid Tension Experiment 3). Speaking of Mr. Levin, check out this claymation of him playing with funk fingers.

Hardcore ambient fans only - Jacob Kirkegaard's 4 Rooms is a sonic representation of locations within the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Here's Swimming Pool.

MURAL is an improvisational musical trio that performed inside the Rothko Chapel. If you've never been to the Rothko Chapel, I highly recommend it the next time you're in Houston. But I can't get my head around MURAL's work.

Still not happy with the sounds? How about just background noise from Rainy Cafe?

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You can't look away from these animated gifs by Mat Lucas. For my work friends, this looks like a mesh trying to fix itself.

Fill Your Pie Hole

From patty formation to bacon arranging and bun toasting, here is your guide to making the ultimate bacon cheeseburger.

What happens when artists get hold of your favorite beer labels? They animate them.

Can't finish your beer? Save it with silicone bottle caps called Beer Savers.

I'm not a big seafood eater but this Scallop BLT bite looks awesome.
Take a Big Byte

Are you a programmer? Do you sometimes need an excuse to explain something that your program is doing? Excuses For Lazy Coders to the rescue. "I broke that deliberately to do some testing."

How geeky am I? Apparently only 43% geek - "staring in despair at the Microsoft Word help system to write a simple letter." How geeky are you?

In only one second, a lot of stuff happens on teh interwebs.

Bret Victor on the future of programming told from an interesting perspective.

Emoji. Never installed it, no plans to do so. But lots of folks have. You can track the real-time use of emoji on Twitter. The heart seems to be most popular, which I suppose is a good thing.

I had a Spirograph when I was a young lad but never made anything like Rachel Evans' world map.
This NYT editorial about "a society ambivalent, even skeptical, about the fruits of science" struck a chord with me. However, as Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether you believe it or not." Sorry creationists. Sorry anti-vaccinators.

Moving Picture Show

Ze Frank continues to please with the latest in his True Facts video series. This time it's True Facts About The Owl.

What does love look like?

Ride on a (and chase a) U-2 spyplane.

Take two minutes to see what Curiosity did on Mars during its first year.

Pigments Galore

What every fan of abstract painting fears - paintings by chimps. Fortunately, this is not a challenge to guess which painting is legit and which is monkey business. 

You can probably guess the painting and artist just from this detailed closeup (there are more where this one came from).
Webcam of Andy Warhol's gravesite.

For animation geeks, in this podcast we hear that Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble didn't get along.

From 1931 comes the histomap, an infographic illustration of 4,000 years of history.
Numbering Things Doesn't Make Them Better

When I saw that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was included at #6 in the top 10 influential business books of all time, my interest in the list plummeted to virtually zero. Seriously?

This list of 20 things you should always have in your car is so bad it includes duct tape twice. Not that there's anything wrong with duct tape.

From a list of worthless facts: naked means unprotected, nude means unclothed. If you prefer random facts, hippo milk is pink. More facts? Knowledge Nuts says LBJ held meetings while he was making a #2.

The squatty potty is just what it sounds like it is. And this video explains why it's good for you. (Holy crap! It's $99 on amazon!)


Up, Up, and Away

Only WWII/aviation mavens need peruse this list of the most devastating bombing raids. And who in Russia has their finger on the nuclear button? What might the Queen have said at the start of WWIII?

What will they open-source next? An airplane.

Must watch video/audio/graphic mashup of the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing.

A while back we read how abstract art was funded (indirectly) by the CIA as a Cold War tool. Now we read about how artists helped win WWII by helping develop camouflage. “Abstraction’s dissolution of form, surrealism’s subversion of the authority of vision, collage's disorientation of perspective and cubism’s fragmentations were all modernist trends."

This is video inside a German prisoner of war camp during WWII taken by French prisoners.
 Wurd

What are authors' favorite first lines from novels? Jonathon Franzen cites Kafka's The Trial: "Someone must have slandered Josef K., because one morning, without his having done anything bad, he was arrested." Coincidentally, I just finished The Trial and can't say it had any literary impact on me. I'd cite my favorite first line but you probably already know what it is. (Hint: see #25.)

I fear reading Ulysses. This synopsis doesn't help.

Author George Saunders gave the commencement address at my alma mater this year (better than my completely forgettable commencement address from the head of the library of congress) on failures of kindness.
Texter lets you do stuff like this. Why you would want to is another question.
Lovin' those text toys? Check out Typeflash.

I've always thought graphology (handwriting analysis) was fun. (Sorry about the infographic.)

The Downward Slope

Disney fans: check out these photos of the Contemporary Resort under construction.

You knew one was coming, right? A minimalist periodic table made from dots

Guess first before clicking through to the article. At what age are women most happy with their naked bodies?  (When men were asked that question the answer was "yes.")

If your vibrator is programmable, what does a blue screen of death feel like?

If patience is a virtue, how virtuous are you?

And I leave you with, The Blob.

...for him who has the vision to recognize it as such. ~Henry Miller

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