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.