A visual history of Corvette logos [part1] [part2]
(Via Core77)

Mars colony program lands first investors
Managing the selection process could prove challenging, as Mars One anticipates receiving hundreds of thousands of applications from people interested in becoming Mars colonists.

Mars One plans to launch a series of robotic missions between 2016 and 2020 that will build an outpost on the Red Planet. The first four astronauts will arrive in 2023, and more will touch down every two years after that. There are no plans to return these interplanetary pioneers to Earth.

Message in a binary bottle
Notes from game developers hidden in ROM, found later (sometimes much later) by curious fans armed with diasassemblers.

Gold, Golden, Gilded, Glittering (believermag)
Representations of value, or the unexpected double history of banking and the art world.

If Mars had oceans it would look like this (theatlantic)

Metal Robots - Compressorhead: Ace of Spades (youtube)

The full workout of all that may be some years further out, but the blowout will commence in 2013. The glue that held these markets together was faith that they meant something -- and that faith has been pissed away by fools in high places who drained all the honesty out of them. It was a classic case out of the Joseph Tainter playbook: diminishing returns of ever-increasing complexity addressed with ever-more layers of complexity, larded with systematic lying based on mystifying, opaque jargon, sanctioned statistical misreporting, felonious cronyism, and scuttling of the rule of law. In short, the markets have been taken over in effect by a criminal racketeering syndicate. In doing this, so much resilience has been removed from these market structures that they are riddled with rot, like a mansion infested with carpenter ants. In other words, borrowing a term from Taleb, they are hopelessly fragile. Any little vibration could reduce the whole creaking arrangement into a heap of rubble and ashes. There's plenty of vibration available out there. Events are humming.

James Howard Kunstler predicts 2013

The New York Knicks logo that should have been

Real hobbit house
Actually, this is rural Chester County, Pa., about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia, where Vince Donovan lives. A lifelong fan of The Lord of the Rings, for the last 50 years he has been amassing an enormous collection of all things J.R.R. Tolkien. So much so, he hired an architect to design a house to contain it.

Mike Watt runs down every song on 'Double Nickles on the Dime'.  If you're a fan of the Minutemen, it's worth the read.

Amazing strobe-scupture from Gregory Barsamian.  Click on the sculpture link.

A critics case for critics who are actually critical (NYTimes Mag)
A couple weeks old, but a good read, as is the supplemental commentary from DesignObserver

Peter Saville on his classic Joy Division and New Order album covers

The Revolt of the Rich (the American Conservative)
I do not mean secession by physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens from time to time—for example, Erik Prince, who was born into a fortune, is related to the even bigger Amway fortune, and made yet another fortune as CEO of the mercenary-for-hire firm Blackwater, moved his company (renamed Xe) to the United Arab Emirates in 2011. What I mean by secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot.

Apparently, MIT has moved past rigging bets at blackjack tables (This American Life) to bulk-gaming state lotteries - with more than a little help from the State of Massachusetts Lottery.

Cardboard bike? (slvimeo)

Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco: Drawing America's invisible poor

What would happen if you tried to hit a ball pitched at 90% the speed of light? (xkcd)

The Money-Empathy Gap (NYMag)


“While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff says, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”

Does anyone know if there are any operational automats left in the U.S. running as a regular business?  Bamn in NYC is now closed...