Saturday, March 15, 2014

Not until we are lost...

Combine weather reporting with typography and you get TypoWeather, a text-based weather website. Who needs all those fancy maps and graphics anyway?

I hate to say "I told you so" but entitlement among millennials is overblown.

Remember the Mars Climate Orbiter that crashed due to an error converting metric to British units? As often is the case, it's really not that simple. "A critical flaw was a program management grown too confident and too careless, even to the point of missing opportunities to avoid the disaster."

If the moon was only 1 pixel the solar system might look like this webpage with virtually infinite horizontal scrolling.

Beer Viz says it can help me discover new beers based on my preferences. Perhaps, but I don't recommend trying to interpret their diagrams after you've had a couple of pints. The room's spinning and I'm sober. If you like your beers two at a time you'll appreciate the Dual Beer Glass on sale at Etsy.

Teleporter: I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing. GeoGuessr: uninspiring map-based guessing game.


Jackson Pollock's Mural recently emerged from a 1-year conservation effort, the before-after comparison of which can be seen in the image above (from the Modern Art Notes blog). Listen to the MAN podcast as the lead conservator describes what was done to the painting.

Edward Tufte, guru of data presentation, has a new thing: ImageQuilts. Based on his technique of small multiples, the idea is to display 100-150 images on a single topic on the screen at once. There's an Android app and a magazine article.

The list of the worst named tech products includes The GIMP, an image processing tool that I actually use. My personal pet peeve is any software product that includes "soft" in its name. Yes, I am probably too hung up on phallic imagery.

Proving that they don't really know me, the BBC thinks I've only read 6 out of the 100 books on their list. I've actually read 28.

Sweet Jesus, it's hamburger porn - PornBurger.me.

For Trekkies who read, use this chart of figure out the proper reading order for all the Star Trek books.

An ImageQuilt of Josef Albers
Speaking of Tufte, hater of PowerPoint, is PowerPoint a tool for innovation as evidenced by the work of David Byrne and others or is it the work of the devil especially in the hands of professors? For me it's the same as "guns don't kill people, people kill people." I get the impression that Tufte hears the word "PowerPoint" and completely shuts down. I understand his point - if people blindly use PowerPoint's built-in templates to create presentations they are often not "good." He's a fan of paper for its data density and proposes use of handouts in conjunction with a presentation of visuals. Which is where I step in and say that someone can use Tufte's principles to craft a decent presentation using PowerPoint. Oh, and then there's this book called Slidedocs written entirely in PowerPoint.

Warren Buffet's annual letter to shareholders is online for your perusal.

Watch the trailer for the movie Particle Fever, about the Large Hadron Collider and the search for the Higgs boson.

If you like smart and beautiful women you'll be intrigued to know that Betabrand's spring collection is modeled by women with PhDs.

For the loved one in your life, how about a Disney princess inspired engagement ring.

On the nuclear secrecy blog you'll now find an interactive map comparing the firebombing of Japan during WWII with U.S. cities of equivalent size.

Animation the hard way - drawing it by hand on a gallery wall. The resulting video is Plumb.

The United Steaks of America. If each state was represented by one meat, Texas would be brisket, Ohio would be Kielbasa, and California would be Tofu (ha!).
Someone is selling superhero poop on Etsy.

World leaders as drag queens?

Almost unbelievably I can tie together those last two links (one with Putin, one with poop) with this one: a 3D printed Vladimir Putin butt plug.

Only in San Fran-fucking-cisco - stunt nudity experts.

This is a motherfucking website.

This makes less sense than a lot of the crap I post here but Old Spice has a website where you can request that a hairpiece play your favorite Huey Lewis song - That's the Power of Hair.

And now, Bouncy Balls - real time, interactive, ball bouncing with your computer's microphone.

...do we begin to understand ourselves. ~Henry David Thoreau

P.S. The final proofreading revealed this post to have a decidedly nasty tinge to it. No explanation, just observation.

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