My friends and I who are building websites — we’re kids! We’re kids playing around with tools given to us by adults. In decreasing order of adultness, and leaving out an awful lot, I’m talking about things such as: the Von Neumann stored program computing architecture; the transistor; high-throughput fibre-optic cables; the Unix operating system; the sci-fi-ish cloud computing platform; the web browser; the iPhone; the open source movement; Ruby on Rails; the Stack Overflow Q&A site for programmers; on and on, all the way down to the code that my slightly-more-adult co-workers write for my benefit.

Are coders worth it? (Aeon)

WWD Co. Novelty Catalog

Never Underestimate the Value of a Paint Tube (Smithsonian)

Old punk flyers (tumblr)

Any baseball is beautiful (design observer)

Electric Banana- Masters of Psychedelic Art

Mug shot paintings by Mary Gibney

AMOK, the new album from Atoms for Peace  (Thom Yorke, Flea, joey Waronker, Mauro Refosco) is streaming in its entirety at the band's site.

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...

Rooms photographed from above

A huge list of movies that are available to watch for free, online.
(openculture)

A billion stars revealed
Astronomers have today released a picture containing more than one billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. It combines data from two near-infrared¹ telescopes – the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii and the VISTA telescope in Chile ... The full image contains 150 billion pixels, and the detail it contains is only revealed by the three zoom levels, centred on G305, a large and complex star-formation region: the innermost zoom covers a tiny fraction of the full image, but still contains more than ten thousand stars.

America, you should be mad as hell about this (businessinsider)
An intuitive, statistical look at us and them.

The Hobbit production video blog

To conclude, the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause.
from Nassim Taleb's forthcoming book about the diminishing value, and eventual harm, of too much information.

InstaCRT is brilliant
Take a digital photo, it gets sent to Stockholm to be photographed off of a CRT screen, and sent back to you.
youtube of how it works

Peter Brings the Shadows to Life 
A beautiful little piece of skateboard film.

 115MPH Superbus is just plain ridiculous

Slinky on a treadmill.  That is all.

A Brief History of John Baldessari, narrated by Tom Waits

Martin Grover's paintings of old 45s (via thingsmagazine)

Making a handmade cigar

Bricolo mechanical music system (w/vid)

A Russian satellite has taken the most detailed picture of earth ever captured, at 121 Megapixels

Recursive Drawing - a very cool in-browser drawing app that allows you to construct fairly complex fractals by recursively building on basic shapes.  Video tutorial is recommended.

Outer Limits Trading Cards are pretty great, and the very brief captions make the pictures even better.
And here is an interview with the circa 1964 editor of Topps who was responsible for releasing them.

Paul Gravett interviews R. Crumb
It was only later that I discovered bit by bit first the world of old-time illustration, I am very interested in that. And only fringely interested in most fine art. I got to liking those German guys like Dix and Grosz and I liked Salvador Dalí and other surrealist stuff like that. I like a lot of Outsider Art, primitive and strange stuff by crazy people. The thing about the fine art world is they have this pyramid, this hierarchy, and it’s very rigid. It’s breaking down a little bit but it’s according to how much money you can get for something. I don’t buy into that. I had zero interest in abstract expressionism, starting with the post-war American artists.

A Nation of Spoiled Brats (Foreign Policy Review)
Well, there are two types of decline. The first is relative economic decline, and I think this should be uncontroversial. Funnily enough, it isn't yet fully uncontroversial, but it should be: namely, that America's share of the global economy is diluting. In 2000, America had about 31 percent of the global economy, so just under a third. And by 2010 it was down to 23.5 percent, just under a quarter. That is a remarkable shift. So relative economic decline shouldn't be something we debate too much because it's happening and it's going to continue to happen. And I think the U.S. share would be likely to fall to a little more than a sixth in the next decade or so, unless there are dramatic changes in the pattern and distribution of global growth.

The US standard of Living has fallen more than 50% since 40 years ago. (the street)
"On several occasions, I have glibly referred to how it now takes two spouses working to equal the wages of a one-income family of 40 years ago. Unfortunately, that is now an understatement. In fact, Western wages have plummeted so low that a two-income family is now (on average) 15% poorer than a one-income family of 40 years ago."

World population density visualizer

Great talk on Mutilated Urbanism by James Kunstler

Some amazing stereographic wiggle-gifs from artist Dain Fagerholm

State rankings... by corruption!
(spoiler: no A grades were given out)

Where's _why? (slate)
"What happened when one of the world’s most unusual, and beloved, computer programmers disappeared."

I'm going to need to set aside some time to play with Google Input/Output.

ChronoZoom.org - an HTML5 implementation of a clickable, zoomable, open-source timeline that shows the history of the universe.

π

Don't miss this fantastic RadioLab podcast on Escape!.  The phone-phreaking story alone is a must-listen.

Why I am Leaving Goldman-Sachs (NYTimes)
What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Why an MRI costs $1080 in America and $280 in France (Washington Post)

Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies (via metafilter)

I was a warehouse wage slave (mother jones)
As the sun gets lower in the curt November sky, I thank the woman for her help. When I start toward the door, she repeats her "No. 1 rule of survival" one more time.
"Leave your pride and your personal life at the door." If there's any way I'm going to last, she says, tomorrow I have to start pretending like I don't have either.

Drive Across Mongolia in 4 minutes (vimeo)

Drive Across Mongolia in 4 Minutes from Spots Unknown on Vimeo.

Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success by Jesse Thorn (via boingboing)

Attacks paid for by big business are 'driving science into a dark era' (guardian, uk)
"Those of us who grew up in the sixties, when we put men on the Moon, now have to watch as every Republican candidate for this year's presidential election denies the science behind climate change and evolution. That is a staggering state of affairs and it is very worrying," said Professor Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, San Diego"

City of Samba
A tilt-shift view of Rio

The Secret Life of Ice (Science Friday)

“Just wait. We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.”
NYTimes magazine on How Companies Learn Your Secrets

"He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings “loaner” devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns. In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery, for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely. He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, “the Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop.” 
Traveling Light in a Time of Digital Thievery (NYTimes)

Looks like google's drive-in-the-sky is coming soon...

Google launches We Solve for X
Solve for X is a place to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems. Radical in the sense that the solutions could help billions of people. Radical in the sense that the audaciousness of the proposals makes them sound like science fiction. And radical in the sense that there is some real technology breakthrough on the horizon to give us all hope that these ideas could really be brought to life.

A great map showing block-by-block energy consumption (zoomable down to the building level) for NYC. (from Columbia.edu)

Who knew wall trampoline was a thing?

Detroit Re-Photography (designobserver)
Dave Jordano’s photographs of Detroit help provide an antidote to this process of mystification. Jordano was a student of photography at the College for Creative Studies in his native Detroit in the early 1970s. Following the example of his photography heroes — Walker Evans, Robert Frank and others who also stretched, but did not break, the bounds of the documentary tradition — he set out back then to photograph his city. More recently, Jordano, who now works as a commercial photographer in Chicago, has been revising his student photographs and rephotographing the sites of the originals

 Stephen Hawking: "Philosophy is dead."
Philosophy: "Excuse me?"
The Atlantic:  What Happened before the Big Bang.  The new Philosophy of Cosmology

The Rise and Fall of Personal Computing, statistically.

Today is PROTEST SOPA day.  Several sites have joined the blackout effort to raise awareness over just how horrendous and technically inept this bill is.

Please take a moment to write Congress through instructions at AmericanCensorship.org, or the EFF to voice your concerns about the legitimacy of this lobbyist-authored legislation designed to deliver unconstitutional power to law enforcement on behalf of special interests.  Or sign directly through google

Metafilter, google, BoingBoing, Wordpress, Reddit, Mozilla, MoveOn have all gone dark today.

Clean a record with wood glue!

The Coming War on General Purpose Computation (Cory Doctorow) (slyt)
From the description:
The upshot: a world of ubiquitous malware, where everything we do to make things better only makes it worse, where the tools of liberation become tools of oppression.
Our duty and challenge is to devise systems for mitigating the harm of general purpose computing without recourse to spyware, first to keep ourselves safe, and second to keep computers safe from the regulatory impulse.

Richard Stallman Was Right All Along (osnews, via slashdot)

"But here we are, at the start of 2012. Obama signed the NDAA for 2012, making it possible for American citizens to be detained indefinitely without any form of trial or due process, only because they are terrorist suspects. At the same time, we have SOPA, which, if passed, would enact a system in which websites can be taken off the web, again without any form of trial or due process, while also enabling the monitoring of internet traffic. Combine this with how the authorities labelled the Occupy movements - namely, as terrorists - and you can see where this is going."

Happy 2012!  With the new year, you may be firming up your dictatorial resolutions to guarantee absolute dominion over your subjects.  To this end, the Economist has published a handy guide:  "How to Be a Dictator"

Extreme Path-walking

Need a base for your super-villainy?  You need Project Utopia.

2012=1968? (nymag)
In 2008, Barack Obama lit a fire among young activists. Next year, Occupy Wall Street could consume him.

Zdenek Miller, Czech animator passed away today.  Miller created Krtecek, a black mole famous to European audiences.  His color, characterization, background styles are pure mid-century gold.  [youtube trail starts here]

Famous Magazines' First Covers

$35 Indian Android tablet

Brian Eno on bizarre instruments

Researchers in England are starting a 10 year project to build the 1830s Babbage Analytical Engine
(nytimes)

If you want to play the arcade game Off the Waffle, you'll need to make a trip to Eugene, OR.

"You've never heard of this game. It's in only one cabinet, playable in one city and, generously estimating, maybe it makes a dollar a day. Nothing about this video game suggests it's someone's meal ticket, but it is. For life."

Formula for complete and utter Bayhem!
(or, why Michael Bay films make so much money)

Secret iOS Business: What You Don't Know About your App

Dark Stores, a photo project by Brian Ulrich documenting retail casualties of the economic bust.

 Cartoon eyes! (with hints, only if you need 'em)

A Few Million Monkeys Randomly Recreate Every Work of Shakespeare

RIP Steve Jobs.  This is the end of an era.  I remember spending hours on the first generation Mac at the University of Delaware's computer lab in the summer of 85.  Under Jobs, Apple revolutionized technology, and the rest of the world was always playing catch-up.

Elizabeth Warren explains what happened to Wall Street during the last 30 year on Jon Stewart's Daily Show.

 

I really like Google's error-bot.

What if the secret to success is failure? (NYTimes)

Dr. Michio Kaku: America has a secret weapon.(4 min video, wimp.com)

How well do you see color?