Worldmapper describes itself as showing you "The world as you've never seen it before." That may not be strictly accurate – the site certainly didn't invent the concept of skewing the proportions of a world map to reflect the regional differences in some interesting variable – but Worldmapper certainly boasts a large collection of fascinating maps drawn in a uniform, easy to understand format.

From Work to Food to Death there's data aplenty here, with maps available for download as bitmaps or PDFs and the underlying data available in Excel or OpenDoc format. (CSV format would be nice, but I'll take OpenDoc over Excel any day.)

[Via 3quarksdaily]

Amazing photographs of a melting glacier.

[Via Informationally Overloaded]

Geekiest. Marriage. Proposal. Ever!

[Via kottke.org]

The teaser for the second season of Life on Mars. So good.

[Via Found]

The List of Unusual Articles at Wikipedia is great fun:

This page is for Wikipedians to list articles that seem a bit unusual. These articles are valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but are somewhat odd, whimsical, or something you wouldn't expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica. We should take special care to meet the highest standards of an encyclopedia with these articles lest they make Wikipedia appear idiosyncratic. If you wish to add articles to this list, a broad consensus amongst contributors has identified two main guidelines. If the article in question meets one or both of these categories then it could possibly be deemed "unusual":

1. The article is something you would not expect to find in a standard encyclopedia.
2. The article contains some form of juxtaposition that most people would find unusual. eg Killer Cockroach, Henry VIII in Space, edible computers.

Note that this is a broad definition. Some articles may still be considered "unusual" even if they don't fit the guidelines above.

What do Wikipedia's users consider "unusual"? How about the Cardrona Bra Fence, or the List of Objects Dropped on New Year's Eve, or the only piece of art on the Moon.

Pages like this could easily put weblogs like mine out of business…

[Via GromBlog]

Ladies and gentlemen, courtesy of the wonders of YouTube I bring you the surreal sight of New Order performing on the set of Baywatch.

New Order and David Hasselhoff sharing screen time: you'd have thought bringing together talent and anti-talent in those quantities would have caused an explosion big enough to level the state of California. Not one of the band's finer moments, though I suppose we should all be grateful that Mr Hasselhoff didn't give us a duet with Barney Sumner.

I think the fact that the song they're performing is called Regret says it all, really.

Cow Corporations in China:

SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

OLD COMMUNISM
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.

NEW CHINESE COMMUNISM
You have two cows.
You breed twenty new cows cheaper than Americans can produce one.
You export eighteen cows.
You treat yourself to a Japanese car made by cheap labor in the US with money meant for your employee’s health insurance.
The American government declares your wealth a threat to national security so you begin selling your newest cows to the EU.
You and your mayor gamble together in Macau and Monte Carlo instead of Las Vegas.
You buy a plane made by your new friends in France.

Lost "The Final Episode": a few of the cast members have a little fun for the benefit of the Disney CEO at the CES conference. Very funny, especially Sayid's comment about "a frenchwoman with an east european accent."

<geek mode="B5">
I was thinking it was a Minbari accent myself.
</geek>

[Via Qwghlm]

Famous quotes on Sex:

You know "that look" women get when they want sex? Me neither.
Steve Martin

[...]

Ah, yes, divorce, from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man's genitals through his wallet.
Robin Williams

[...]

There's a new medical crisis. Doctors are reporting that many men are having allergic reactions to latex condoms. They say they cause severe swelling. So what's the problem?
Dustin Hoffman

There's very little advice in men's magazines, because men think, I know what I'm doing. Just show me somebody naked.
Jerry Seinfeld

[...]

[Via del.icio.us/popular]

Packet Garden looks like a fascinating application:

Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore.

To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an 'HTTP plant' is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a 'Peer to Peer plant' is grown, and so on. [...]

Once the OS X version of Packet Garden gets a few steps further on I'll certainly give it a try; the screenshots look really interesting.

[Via Yoz Grahame]

Daniela Edburg's Drop Dead Gorgeous series is good fun:

Your Drop Dead Gorgeous series reminds me of some horror films and thrillers featuring women — Carrie, The Stepford Wives, Basic Instinct, Rosemary’s Baby — have any films or scenes influenced your work?

Death by Bananas is an almost direct reference to Hitchcock’s The Birds. For Death by Cotton Candy I watched The Wizard of Oz, many times. I love the tornado scene. The first picture I did that was more referential to film than to painting or television, was Death by Gummi Bears; a girl having a picnic and from a nearby sugar anthill thousands of gummi bears stream out to devour her. Then, I did Death by Tupperware where a Japanese high school student in her uniform is being attacked by an enormous slimy tentacle from a creature that has formed in her refrigerator. In Death by Saran Wrap a girl is trying [to wrap] a small container of strawberries when two huge plastic spiders start to wrap her into a cocoon of plastic wrap. All these [photographs] come from the classic monster movies like the creature from the black lagoon, which I love.

For my money, the pick of the series is either Death by Bananas or Death by Cotton Candy.

Another neat remixed film trailer: What if Ferris Bueller really was sick?

[Via Apropos of Something]

This animated advert for Lux Provocateur is very nice work.

[Via Bibi's Box]

I'd pay good money to see this scene in the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel.

Photographer Bill Sullivan captured a fantastic variety of expressions on the faces of ordinary New Yorkers as they noticed he'd been photographing them as they passed through the turnstile in one of the city's subway stations. I wonder how many shouting matches he got into.

[Via Kottke.org remaindered links]

I hope the owners of the Pet Spa aren't planning on retiring to count their millions any time soon. I'd imagine they're going to be wiped out by a wave of lawsuits from owners of traumatised cats any day now.

[Via little. yellow. different.]

South Korea isn't the high-tech utopia it's often painted as:

What would you say if I told you that there was a nation that was at the forefront of technology, an early adopter of ecommerce, leading the world in 3G mobile adoption, in wireless broadband, in wired broadband adoption, as well as in citizen-driven media. Sounds like an amazing place, right? Technology utopia?

Wrong.

This nation is also a unique monoculture where 99.9% of all the computer users are on Microsoft Windows. This nation is a place where Apple Macintosh users cannot bank online, make any purchases online, or interact with any of the nation's e-government sites online. In fact, Linux users, Mozilla Firefox users and Opera users are also banned from any of these types of transactions because all encrypted communications online in this nation must be done with Active X controls. [...]

Fascinating. The article goes on to explain how the country ended up so dependent upon one, highly insecure and exploitable, feature of the dominant PC operating system, and why this is a problem.

And yet … 90% of home banking users over here – even the ones who are sick and tired of updating their anti-virus software and dealing with spyware outbreaks – would read that last paragraph and say "So what's the problem with using Windows?" Despite years of viruses spamming people's Outlook address books and spyware being installed just because the user made the mistake of visiting a dodgy web page the concept of the "software monoculture" just hasn't gained traction amongst the general public. Is it that the notion of a 'monoculture' is an agricultural/biological concept, and the majority of urban dwellers lack the hands-on experience of agriculture and wildlife that would help them intuitively understand how rapidly a disease can rip through a homogeneous populace? Or is it just that after years of reporting on IT security problems the mainstream press – to the delight of Microsoft's PR people, I'm sure – tends to refer to them as "internet viruses" or "security problems" without emphasising that most of these programs only infect Windows-based systems and making the point that the flaw being exploited is in Windows itself?

For the record, I'm not claiming that Windows is the only operating system with exploitable bugs. But every time Microsoft release a new version they tell us that this time they've taken bug-fixing and security seriously, and every time they're proved wrong within weeks. If Windows Vista does turn out to be reasonably secure – or at least as capable of stopping a non-admin user from breaking the system as a Unix-based system is – then that'll be really nice. It'll also be about twelve years too late.

[Via A Whole Lotta Nothing]

Oh my! It turns out that John Byrne once wrote a comic featuring Superman making a pornographic movie, co-starring Big Barda. That's wrong on so many levels.

(The title of the post is borrowed from the second comment at the linked page, by The Mutt.)

[Via Oliver Willis]

A Russian web site has somehow got hold of stills from the forthcoming feature film adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Stardust.

Nothing spectacular, no big special effects shots to impress the crowd, but good to see nonetheless; a pleasant reminder that there's at least one decent fantasy film on the way this year. (Plus, they have a photo of Claire Danes on horseback: not something you see every day.¹)

¹ Have we ever seen Claire Danes on horseback in any of her previous films? I can't think of an example offhand.²

² No, it's not that I have some weird actress-on-horseback fetish. Honest! It's just that for some reason upon seeing that photo it struck me that we've mostly seen Ms Danes on film in modern settings, where her opportunities to ride a horse have necessarily been somewhat limited. Really, that's all it is to it.

[Via Neil Gaiman]

Apparently even traders hawking pirate DVDs in pubs have some standards. (Well, the ones who listen to Mark Kermode do anyway.)