Who'd have though a melted keyboard would look so fascinating?

[Via Qwghlm]

Boogie Nights – Star Wars Edition.

[Via Fimoculous]

Jamie Hewlett has decorated a Virgin Train to publicise a circus-cum-opera he and Damon Albarn have written that is due to open in Manchester next month.

As a rule I'm less than thrilled by the drive by the world's companies to maximise the quantity of advertising per square metre of public space, but I have to admit that Hewlett's train looks fantastic.

[Via GromBlog]

God's Business Plan.

The first person who writes a program that can do a serviceable job of automating the creation of a Story Map^* is going to make a tidy sum of money. It's a clever idea, well executed:

When my wife and I were married last year, we had a fairly small wedding with a few groups of very tightly-knit friends and family. Wanting them to chat one another up easily, we made this graphic to help start conversations and allow, say, our college friends to enjoy my wife's father's friends without too much awkwardness.

We also wanted a program-like document, something that would tell the roles of each member of the wedding party. (Hence my wife, Heather, and me in the middle, and the ring around us of the major players.)

We collected our favorite stories (and solicited some from our parents–at least one for each guest), and Heather distilled them all to the teaser text you see between each "node". I then rendered the map in Illustrator and we had them printed on newsprint. My mom and my sister tied them around cardboard tubes filled with sunflower seeds (later to be thrown at us as we walked back up the aisle), and each guest received one as they took their seats.

^* View the image at the Original size to get the full effect.

[Via kottke.org]

The non-geeks among visitors to this site might want to move along to the next entry.

For the geeks, I give you the programming language of the future: LOLCODE

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A TBL ITZA MATRIX
TBL 0 IZ 1
TBL 1 IZ 2
TBL 2 IZ "^_^"
TBL 3 IZA MATRIX
TBL 3 0 IZ TBL 0
I HAS A I ITZ 0
IM IN UR LOOP, UPPIN YR I!!1 TILL NERF LENGTH IN UR TBL!!1
   VISIBLE TBL I
IM OUTA UR LOOP
VISIBLE TBL 3 0
KTHXBYE

All we need now is for the next April Fools' Day RFC to be written in lolcat and the takeover will be complete.

[Via helmintholog]

This Astronomy Picture of the Day of Saturn emerging from behind the Moon after a recent occultation is a delightful bit of work; carefully composed to take advantage of a trick of perspective, obviously the product of careful timing, and just plain pretty to boot. What more could you ask for?

The Obscure Fetish Prankster makes pranks calls to phone sex girls. I'm sure there were an awful lot of misfires, but the good calls were really hilarious.

See, for example, "I'm into Clippy…"

[Probably Not Safe For Work.]

[Via MetaFilter]

This trailer makes Fido look like this year's Shaun of the Dead:

Welcome to Willard, a small town lost in the idyllic world of the 50s, where the sun shines every day, everybody knows their neighbor, and rotting zombies deliver the mail. Years ago, the earth passed through a cloud of space dust, causing the dead to rise with a craving for human flesh. A war began, pitting the living against the dead. In the ensuing revolution, a corporation was born: ZomCon, who defeated the legions of undead, and domesticated the zombies, making them our industrial workers, our domestic servants – a productive part of society. ZomCon would like the people of Willard to believe they have everything under control… but do they? Timmy Robinson doesn't think so. At eleven, Timmy already knows the world is phony baloney – Mom and Dad just won't admit it. Now ZomCon's head of security has moved in across the street, and Timmy's Mom refuses to be the only housewife on the block who doesn't have a zombie of her own. When she brings a zombie servant home, Timmy discovers a new best friend, and names him Fido. And even though Dad has a bad case of zombie-phobia, Timmy is determined to keep Fido, even if he does eat the odd person…

I spent quite a bit of time browsing YouTube today. Two clips I particularly enjoyed:

• The Temptations Vs The Four Tops. It may have been filmed a quarter of a century after the two acts' peak, but damn they could still belt out a tune.
• A landing so smooth you wonder why anyone bothers to fit undercarriage to their aircraft.

The new Creation Museum in Kentucky is clearly a museum with a mission:

The heart of the museum is a series of catastrophes. The main one is the fall, with Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge; after that tableau the viewer descends from the brightness of Eden into genuinely creepy cement hallways of urban slums. Photographs show the pain of war, childbirth, death – the wages of primal sin. Then come the biblical accounts of the fallen world, leading up to Noah’s ark and the flood, the source of all significant geological phenomena.

The other catastrophe, in the museum’s view, is of more recent vintage: the abandonment of the Bible by church figures who began to treat the story of creation as if it were merely metaphorical, and by Enlightenment philosophers, who chipped away at biblical authority. The ministry believes this is a slippery slope.

Start accepting evolution or an ancient Earth, and the result is like the giant wrecking ball, labeled "Millions of Years," that is shown smashing the ground at the foundation of a church, the cracks reaching across the gallery to a model of a home in which videos demonstrate the imminence of moral dissolution. A teenager is shown sitting at a computer; he is, we are told, looking at pornography.

It could have been worse: he could have been reading The Blind Watchmaker or The Origin of Species.

William Shatner at 160mph, with added techno.

[Via Apropos of Something]

Steven Poole's review of Brian Morton's Prince: A Thief in the Temple suggests I have another candidate for my to-read pile:

As Morton’s efficient and carefully researched biography shows, there is no mystery to Prince’s background (as opposed to the colossal mystery of his art): Prince Rogers Nelson grew up in a musical household, learned to play many instruments, and worked on music to the exclusion of all else, finding collaborators in the Minneapolis soul scene and honing his skills over several early albums until a record called 1999 made him a mainstream star in 1982. Morton usefully points out Prince’s fruitful early relationships with others, an arranger/producer here, a keyboardist there, who probably had more input into the early work than is normally recognized. But in the end, what counts is the music, so Morton proceeds album by album, relating studio anecdotes and offering his own analyses of the work. He has a nice line in evocation – the atmosphere of the album Purple Rain is said to be that of "post-apocalyptic libertinism" – and he rightly points out that on rhythm guitar – the shiny jigsaw chord fragments that hook the ears into Kiss, for example – Prince is "a – possibly the – unquestionable master". On the other hand, Morton finds that Prince’s lead-guitar style "has little to do with the blues", which is a bizarre comment given the soaring call-and-response solo and twanging Memphis blues-picking breakdown of a song such as "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man", or the Hendrix/Van Halen-esque eruption that introduces "When Doves Cry".

[...]

Morton’s book fulfils admirably its most important duty, which is to send you back to the music with fresh ears, and if there is room to disagree with him on analytical details, his conclusion that Prince is "arguably the most important popular musician of his time" is impeccable. No less a musician than Miles Davis, Morton notes, called Prince "the Duke Ellington of the 1980s". (Prince once wrote a note to Miles suggesting a collaboration, and signed it "God".) Two decades on at the SuperBowl, Prince, pushing 50, looked as impish, as playfully sparkly and pansexual, as when I saw him play Wembley Arena in 1988. Odd to remember that there was a time when Michael Jackson seemed to be Prince’s rival: now, like Dylan, he has no rivals except his past selves.

The Truth About Wireless Devices.

[Via But She's A Girl]

Courtesy of Robyn, a photo of one very stylish robot.

Could a 1D skyscraper solve the problems of organising accommodation in the modern office building?

The principle is a cylindrical building with a helical shape for the floor. The slope of the floor is 1.5% (it rises by 1.5 cm every meter), thus hardly noticeable. The height of each 'storey' is 3 meters, so that when you walk 200 meters along the corridor, you have walked a full circle, but you end up one 'storey' above or below your starting point. This results in a diameter of approximately 60 meters, therefore quite common for large skyscrapers. The corridor is on the outside, so that everybody has access to the fabulous views over the city. Offices are all on the inside. As the tower is hollow in the middle, and the inner diameter of the patio is still approximately 40 meters, this makes for a very nice light shaft with peaceful lighting conditions.

The floor of each office is made horizontal, so that your chair does not roll down and hit the separation. But if you take your chair in the corridor, be careful not to let go of it. All things rolling naturally find their way to the lost+found in the lobby.

The fundamental consequence of this shape is that everyone works along the very same corridor. No more split teams. Yoou have a project with 10 people? – Nobody is going to shove your team off to a god-forsaken corner just to have a storey to themselves. You have a team of 200 people ? – You can take 1,100 degrees of offices and have your whole team working in a connect stretch of the corridor.

Instead of taking an elevator, everybody can walk the distance to whomever they want to visit in the building: 'what's your office angular coordinate again ? – 14,845 degrees – OK, I'll be here in a sec'. As the slope is really shallow, it make for a nice stroll, where you get to meet people and walk with them instead of stupidly watching an elevator dial while pretending to brush some kind of dust speck off your tie.

I tell you, that idea's so crazy it just might work.

[Via Kottke.org]

Hours of Darkness is home to several galleries of images shot at night or in low light. Well worth a look.

[Via The Sideshow]

A woman doesn't dress up in white spandex and call herself a superhero without giving it a certain amount of thought.

Brilliant. There's no other word for it.

[Via Wis[s]e Words]

I love the Spoilt T-shirt.

[Via Oliver Willis]

Best. Spider-Man 3. Review. Ever!

They never did any talking when it would have really helped. I swear! Spiderman just arrives, sees someone who doesn't fit his conventional heteronormative white-privileged idea of what people should look like and starts punching! Dude! Way to leap huge buildings to get to your conclusions! And there were times when a little talking would have averted a lot of getting thrown around. Like, when he first meets the Sandman and the Sandman is all "I don't want to hurt you." That was such a great opportunity for dialogue and communication. Why didn't Spiderman ease his stance a little and say "What I'm hearing from you is that you don't want to hurt me. Can you tell me a little more about that? What is going on with you, my friend?"

See, and that was especially frustrating because I bet that if the Sandman and Spiderman could have just gotten away from their positional stances ("I need to take money" and "I need to catch crooks" respectively), to their underlying interests ("I need to help my little girl" and "Dude, I'm all about helping the people"), they could have found some common ground. There was opportunity there, and it could have saved a lot of expensive plate glass and I-beams and cars being thrown about.

[Via Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal]