25 Abandoned Yugoslavia Monuments that look like they're from the Future:

These structures were commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place (like Tjentište, Kozara and Kadinjača), or where concentration camps stood (like Jasenovac and Niš). They were designed by different sculptors (Dušan Džamonja, Vojin Bakić, Miodrag Živković, Jordan and Iskra Grabul, to name a few) and architects (Bogdan Bogdanović, Gradimir Medaković…), conveying powerful visual impact to show the confidence and strength of the Socialist Republic. [...]

I feel sure that I've seen these two monuments on film before – possibly as a backdrop to the action in some science fiction film or TV show?¹

[Via Subtraction.com]

1. Podgarić, in particular, looks like something the Goa'uld built. ↩

Kevin Kelly wonders:

How much would you pay for search if it were not free? Let's pretend it's an alternate world, or maybe sometime in the future, and there is no free search. You have to pay for your Google, or Bing, or whatever. How much would you be willing to pay?

I would pay up to $500 per year. It's that valuable to me. What about you? [...]

I couldn't ever imagine myself paying a three-figure sum for search. A nominal fee of something like £20 a year would be about my limit – anything beyond that and I'd just end up finding other ways to locate the information I needed.

I remember using the web years before Google came along. There's no doubt that Google's arrival made life easier – especially early on, when Google was so much faster and more up to date than the existing search engines and directory sites – but we did, somehow, still manage to find things on the internet BG. AG, I'd end up bookmarking more sites that I knew to be reliable reference points for areas I was interested in, and would probably find myself looking to interest groups for pointers to content quite a lot of the time. Usenet and mailing lists used to be really good for this sort of thing, provided that you were willing to wait for a reply. I'd imagine that if Google and their competitors ever went down the paid search-only road it would make Mark Zuckerberg's and Jimmy Wales's and Jack Dorsey's day/week/year/decade.

Of course, the real point here isn't to identify a price point for search: it's to underline just how rapidly and completely access to reliable online search engines has become an essential part of the online experience for many of us.

Charlie Brooker's royal wedding TV Go Home:

10.00 Brief Flurry of Excitement as Ben Fogle Arrives at Ceremony

10.15 Fifteen-Minute Pause for Everyone on Twitter to Make Snarky Comment Re Prince William's Hairloss

10.30 I Couldn't Care Less About the Royal Wedding and I Don't Care Who Knows It

Pundits declare their ambivalence toward today's event while standing on brightly coloured plinths clutching armfuls of live chicks in order to make them look slightly silly for bothering.

Miss Lovecraft's Sex Ed class.

[Via jwz]

Existential Star Wars (In French). Très bon.

[Via Pop Loser]

The New York Times has come up with Project Cascade, a program that takes referrer analysis to a whole new level. Both pretty and useful.

I look forward to someone cloning this and building a WordPress plugin to put this sort of analysis slap bang in the middle of site administrators' Dashboards.¹

[Via Flowing Data]

1. On second thoughts, perhaps not. The post title explains why. ↩

What does the word 'blockbuster' mean to you? Obviously, there's the use of the term to describe an expensive and¹ successful film. Then there's the 'blockbuster' bomb. But there's a third meaning I hadn't encountered. Fritinancy explains:

In the 1950s, blockbuster acquired two figurative meanings: the entertainment meaning (1957) and a racial/economic meaning (1959). The entertainment sense gave rise to the name of movie-rental chain Blockbuster [...]

The racial/economic sense is illustrated in this 1967 citation from the British weekly The Spectator:

The 'block-buster' is a figure in American urban life who has yet to emerge in this country. He is a property dealer who by subterfuge introduces black residents into all-white neighbourhoods.²

1. The producers hope. ↩
2. According to Wikipedia, the Specatator citation isn't entirely accurate. A 'block-buster' wasn't some stealthy agent of integration, seeking to quietly introduce minorities into previously segregated neighbourhoods. Quite the opposite: the idea was to encourage false rumours that minorities were moving into the area, so as to depress property prices and persuade residents to move out to a nice, white suburb as quickly as possible. ↩

Yet another version of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot – this time in animated form. Still worth a look.

Why Frederik Pohl never went to Hollywood (from a talk he gave in 1978):

A couple of years ago, I was coming to Los Angeles and my Hollywood agent called me up and said: "When you come, I've got somebody for you to meet. He's a producer and he wants you to write a script for him."

And I said: "What kind of script?"

"It's a Japanese monster movie!"

And I said, "I don't write Japanese monster movies. I've never tried."

"Well, he wants to take you for lunch at the Lambs Club."

It was a big old theatrical club, and I'd never been in it. I said, "Well, sure, I'll have lunch with the sonofagun. But he's not going to send me off to Buenos Aires and make me write the thing. I'll just have lunch and talk to him."

And he showed me what he wanted to do. He had built a monster. It was called Thermoliath. It had six limbs and it was run by two men inside the suit, one sitting on the shoulders of the other, and the man on top did the head and the hands and the man underneath did the feet and the middle set of tentacles, or appendages. They were not exactly arms; they had ray-guns on their ends – heat-ray guns, which is where he got the name Thermoliath – it was supposed to melt things.

I said, "That's not my kind of thing."

And he said, "I don't care what kind of script you write as long as you do three things for me. First, you have to use Thermoliath because I've already got the suit built and I don't want to waste the money. Second, you've got to use some stock footage I own of hurricanes and earthquakes – you've got to work at least 10 minutes of that into the film somehow. And the third thing is that you have to destroy the city of Palm Springs, California."

I said, "Why do I have to destroy Palm Springs, California?"

He said: "Well, one of my Japanese backers wants it destroyed!"

[Via James Nicoll, who linked to a different story from earlier in the same talk transcript.]

Another week, another time-lapse film. Grant Wakefield's Walu Ngalindi depicts the night skies of Western Australia. It's amazing how much glorious detail a long time exposure of the night sky brings out.

The sequence with the sky mirrored on the waters of the lake at the one minute mark is especially nice.

[Via Bad Astronomy]

I've slipped lately: I'll try to get back to posting these weekly.

• Winter Aerials
• sleeping fennec fox
• Shelf Cloud
• Sakura Polaroid
• Jumpers #1
• Dark Power
• Sugar Beach Fog
• Deep into the Patagonia Glacier
• Hellway
• look girl "adventures of view"
• Bab Al Shams falcon #2
• DANS LES PROFONDEURS DU HAUT ATLAS 09

For the record, I prefer CollegeHumor's Galactic Empire State of Mind to the Jay-Z/Alicia Keys original.

The Best Obnoxious Responses To Misspellings On Facebook. My favourite: the entry about the bombing of Libya.

[Via Word Magazine Blog]

I'd recently seen one or two examples of Corrie White's water drop photos used as desktop wallpaper, but I hadn't realised how many she'd produced.¹

A drop of water (or milk) can splash in so many interesting ways.

[Via Today and Tomorrow, via FFFFOUND!]

1. More information on the technology behind her work – and that of other artists producing similar pictures – can be found here. ↩

Marvelous.

Given that eight years on David Fincher is still talking about his and Morgan Freeman's adaptation of Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama as a film in need of a solid script, I think it's safe to assume that this brief animation by Aaron Ross when he was studying at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 2001 is as close as we're going to get to seeing Rama on the big screen any time soon.

Still, it could be worse. Fincher could have announced that he'd decided to take the project to TV in order to tell the story as a miniseries. A twelve-part miniseries incorporating the Gentry Lee-penned sequels.

[Aaron Ross video via James Nicoll]

Welcome to the future of postal deliveries:

Somewhere in the Netherlands a postwoman is in trouble. Bad health, snow and ice and a degree of chaos in her personal life have left her months behind on her deliveries. She rents a privatised ex-council flat with her partner and so many crates of mail have built up in the hallway that it's getting hard to move around. Twice a week one of the private mail companies she works for, Selektmail, drops off three or four crates of letters, magazines and catalogues. She sorts and delivers the fresh crates but the winter backlog is tough to clear. She thinks her employers are getting suspicious. [...] The postwoman is paid a pittance to deliver corporate mail. She hasn't done her job well, yet so few people have complained about missed deliveries that she hasn't been found out.

Across the world, postal services are being altered like this: optimised to deliver the maximum amount of unwanted mail at the minimum cost to businesses. In the internet age private citizens are sending less mail than they used to, but that's only part of the story of postal decline. The price of driving down the cost of bulk mailing for a handful of big organisations is being paid for by the replacement of decently paid postmen with casual labour and the erosion of daily deliveries. [...]

John Naughton has posted a good summary of the varying reactions to the 'spyPhone' story as it has developed over the last day or so:

Firstly, lots of people began posting maps of where their iPhones had been, which is a clear demonstration of the First Law of Technology – which says that if something can be done then it will be done, irrespective of whether it makes sense or not.

To my mind, this story is much like the Dropbox insecurity stories that broke over the last week.

Geeks who are motivated enough to pay attention will mostly understand that:

1. Mobile phone carriers have always been able to plot the approximate location of your phone over time according to which cell towers it connects to. Which means that the truly interesting element of this story is that iOS 4 seems to keep an unencrypted version of that data on your smartphone and in your phone's backups, meaning that anyone who can access your phone or an unencrypted backup of your phone on your computer could – in principle – access this data.
2. At least some of Dropbox's system administrators are bound to have a way to access the contents of users' dropbox folders, if only in order to comply with legally-binding requests for information from the appropriate authorities.¹ The big questions here are how widespread and carefully monitored access to unencrypted copies of users' data is among Dropbox staff, and the extent to which the company's marketing claims actively misled users about how secure data held in their Dropbox is.

Never mind the geeks: the big question in both cases is whether ordinary users (and/or their employers) get so freaked out about these security issues that they look for an alternative with a better balance of convenience and security. I'm guessing that they won't, unless either company completely mishandles their response to these stories or there are new, scary developments suggesting that these vulnerabilities are being actively exploited.

1. If you really want to secure the data you share via Dropbox, create an 'secure' container for it on your computer – be it a TrueCrypt volume, a Mac OS encrypted disk image or just a password-protected .zip file. – and put that in your Dropbox folder. Of course, you'll then lose the convenience of Dropbox seamlessly doing versioning of individual files and will be dependent upon all your Dropbox client devices being able to access the same type of encrypted container. Also, the more you require users to enter passphrases to delve down to the level where they can access their files via Dropbox, the less likely they are to want to bother. Dropbox users mostly value convenience over absolute security, IMHO. ↩

The Chemistry of Creme Eggs, or, I've Never Seen a Creme Egg Catch Fire Before.

[Via Pop Loser]

Another day, another time-lapse film. This time it's Terje Sorgjerd's The Mountain, a spectacular view of the Milky Way as seen from Mount Teide, Spain's highest peak.

[Via The Awl]