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slowfoxPartly for anotherpenguin, here, allegedly, are four perfectly round circles. Partly for ms_katonic, here's the Bugatti kettle!!!!!!!!!!
The Times had an article about how UFO sightings increase after television shows about aliens. The Beeb countered with how it was down to hotel lights, whilst, the Register prophecised that the MOD's declassification of a third tranche of UFO sightings would surely lead to a media-parlysing feedback loop (gotta love El Reg's particular headline style).
InformationIsBeautiful.net has some fantastic infographics (time travel in films), but this representation of media scares since 2000 is particularly awesome.
Scientific American had an article that suggested that c90% of US banknotes tested positive for traces of cocaine. Which is an astonishingly high proportion, isn't it? Especially, as the article notes, that's up from a 'mere' 67% two years ago.
Robot news: more dextrous robots suggest that the Rise of the Machines is gathering pace. And here, courtesy of Wired, is a video of a robofish swimming. Can you imagine aswarm shoal of these? Kinda related, in the whole machine/human interaction scheme of things, Sony has put forward a patent for emotion tracking using the PS3. Kinda disturbing concept, not at all helped by the supporting illustration. Which, whilst less useful, is possibly less immediately dangerous than your mobile phone being able to turn your oven on for you, as relayed by the New York Times. But it's not all sinister stuff: here's robo-bear to help nurse you back to health.
For those who wish to sear disturbing images across their retina, it's an Angel/Baby/Pinnochio/Witch/Webcam mashup. I'll bet you never even knew you needed one until now. this word-based clock, however, is much more tasteful.
In this week's pet news, Wired had a round up of artificial pets, most of which were underwhelming save for the $6000 baby harp seal. Alternatively, if you're still after something exotic, but perhaps a little more carbon-based, how about a poodle 'disguised' as a peacock? It'd certainly get the neighbours talking... As if Poodle/Peacocks weren't bad enough, there are pandas and camels, too. I offer this photo gallery of cute baby animals as something of a mind-scrub to compensate for the previous horrors.
Not really a pet, but has Google Earth found the Loch Ness Monster?
Capitalising on the singular 09/09/09 date (that works on both sides of the pond), rumours surround Apple's upcoming iPod event, even if the much anticipated tablet launch isn't expected to take place until 2010. For those of us currently not on the fruit bandwagon, here's a guide to running OSX on a vanilla PC. And you only need to buy a £170 BIOS chip, and spend ages tweaking and hacking, plus pay the licence fee and sort of ignore the EULA to get it working.
carolanne5 pointed me to this magnificent sand animation over on YouTube the other week. Soothing :-) And sort of related, in terms of using light as a visual medium, DVice had this post on LED graffiti cans that spray light instead of paint. Obviously you need a long exposure, and that Michael Bosanko light graffiti I've pointed to before refers, but still pretty cool.
This week's It Could Only Be Texas news is perhaps a little less... Texan in spirit than usual, but I thought these 30-foot-tall solar sunflowers were kinda cool - especially since they illuminate a bike-path at night (forgive me, but doesn't the idea of a bike path in Texas* seem like some kind of philosophical paradox?). Talking of bikes, and the colonies, yay for cycling in New York.
Is it terribly, terribly wrong of me to find this Hello Kitty XBox 360 strangely appealing? Actually, Microsoft kinda cut the price of the 360: I say 'kinda' - the cheap one went up by £30, the middle one's been ditched and the expensive one's come down by £30.
Anne Fine, former Children's Laureate, has been bemoaning the 'gritty realism' of modern children's books. So I wonder what nominations she'd put forward for Awful Library Books? To redress the balance, The Grauniad had Malorie Blackman's top 10 graphic novels for teenagers, which contained some interesting markers for me to look up (I've pondered procuring Maus many a time).
This sounds pretty cool: Artists have created a greenhouse of horrors at Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Gardens as part of the festival with a series of light and sound installations.
Maintaining our ocean watch, The Discovery Channel is reporting that Alaska's oceans are turning acidic, due to increased greenhouse gas absorbtion. Which is, in turn, bad news for the fishing industry there. The same site also ran a report suggesting that the warming oceans could induce the Earth's pole to shift by the end of the century (not that much, I hasten to add, and geological record indicate that the Earth's pole has literally flipped several times through the ages, but still...). There's also this piece on how the ocean's 'deserts' are becoming more lifeless - I should confess at this point that the concept of an ocean 'desert' had passed me by until I read James Lovelock's Gaia stuff.
Bad news for those of us with *counts* 14 windows open: researchers at Stanford are suggesting that multitaskers are more easily distracted and less able to ignore irrelevant information than people who do less multitasking.
Here's a Telegraph article about the top 50 Wikipedia searches for 2008 and 2009 (wait: is 2009 over already?). Some things stay constant, some things change.
As Unruly Media are letting me down with this week's viral videos (the best of them seems to be this legomation homage to 8-bit computing), this week's final link is Q-Block - on-line 3D pixel art creation.
* I promise to stop mocking Texans as soon as they stop making it so easy
anotherpenguin, here, allegedly, are four perfectly round circles. Partly for ms_katonic, here's the Bugatti kettle!!!!!!!!!!The Times had an article about how UFO sightings increase after television shows about aliens. The Beeb countered with how it was down to hotel lights, whilst, the Register prophecised that the MOD's declassification of a third tranche of UFO sightings would surely lead to a media-parlysing feedback loop (gotta love El Reg's particular headline style).
InformationIsBeautiful.net has some fantastic infographics (time travel in films), but this representation of media scares since 2000 is particularly awesome.
Scientific American had an article that suggested that c90% of US banknotes tested positive for traces of cocaine. Which is an astonishingly high proportion, isn't it? Especially, as the article notes, that's up from a 'mere' 67% two years ago.
Robot news: more dextrous robots suggest that the Rise of the Machines is gathering pace. And here, courtesy of Wired, is a video of a robofish swimming. Can you imagine a
For those who wish to sear disturbing images across their retina, it's an Angel/Baby/Pinnochio/Witch/Webcam mashup. I'll bet you never even knew you needed one until now. this word-based clock, however, is much more tasteful.
In this week's pet news, Wired had a round up of artificial pets, most of which were underwhelming save for the $6000 baby harp seal. Alternatively, if you're still after something exotic, but perhaps a little more carbon-based, how about a poodle 'disguised' as a peacock? It'd certainly get the neighbours talking... As if Poodle/Peacocks weren't bad enough, there are pandas and camels, too. I offer this photo gallery of cute baby animals as something of a mind-scrub to compensate for the previous horrors.
Not really a pet, but has Google Earth found the Loch Ness Monster?
Capitalising on the singular 09/09/09 date (that works on both sides of the pond), rumours surround Apple's upcoming iPod event, even if the much anticipated tablet launch isn't expected to take place until 2010. For those of us currently not on the fruit bandwagon, here's a guide to running OSX on a vanilla PC. And you only need to buy a £170 BIOS chip, and spend ages tweaking and hacking, plus pay the licence fee and sort of ignore the EULA to get it working.
carolanne5 pointed me to this magnificent sand animation over on YouTube the other week. Soothing :-) And sort of related, in terms of using light as a visual medium, DVice had this post on LED graffiti cans that spray light instead of paint. Obviously you need a long exposure, and that Michael Bosanko light graffiti I've pointed to before refers, but still pretty cool.This week's It Could Only Be Texas news is perhaps a little less... Texan in spirit than usual, but I thought these 30-foot-tall solar sunflowers were kinda cool - especially since they illuminate a bike-path at night (forgive me, but doesn't the idea of a bike path in Texas* seem like some kind of philosophical paradox?). Talking of bikes, and the colonies, yay for cycling in New York.
Is it terribly, terribly wrong of me to find this Hello Kitty XBox 360 strangely appealing? Actually, Microsoft kinda cut the price of the 360: I say 'kinda' - the cheap one went up by £30, the middle one's been ditched and the expensive one's come down by £30.
Anne Fine, former Children's Laureate, has been bemoaning the 'gritty realism' of modern children's books. So I wonder what nominations she'd put forward for Awful Library Books? To redress the balance, The Grauniad had Malorie Blackman's top 10 graphic novels for teenagers, which contained some interesting markers for me to look up (I've pondered procuring Maus many a time).
This sounds pretty cool: Artists have created a greenhouse of horrors at Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Gardens as part of the festival with a series of light and sound installations.
Maintaining our ocean watch, The Discovery Channel is reporting that Alaska's oceans are turning acidic, due to increased greenhouse gas absorbtion. Which is, in turn, bad news for the fishing industry there. The same site also ran a report suggesting that the warming oceans could induce the Earth's pole to shift by the end of the century (not that much, I hasten to add, and geological record indicate that the Earth's pole has literally flipped several times through the ages, but still...). There's also this piece on how the ocean's 'deserts' are becoming more lifeless - I should confess at this point that the concept of an ocean 'desert' had passed me by until I read James Lovelock's Gaia stuff.
Bad news for those of us with *counts* 14 windows open: researchers at Stanford are suggesting that multitaskers are more easily distracted and less able to ignore irrelevant information than people who do less multitasking.
Here's a Telegraph article about the top 50 Wikipedia searches for 2008 and 2009 (wait: is 2009 over already?). Some things stay constant, some things change.
As Unruly Media are letting me down with this week's viral videos (the best of them seems to be this legomation homage to 8-bit computing), this week's final link is Q-Block - on-line 3D pixel art creation.
* I promise to stop mocking Texans as soon as they stop making it so easy
