Quick Links

• Beware the Button Police - University of Illinois bans employees (including professors) from expressing their affiliation with a political party.
• How a $2 toy ball saved a little girl's life - I think I'd be a little freaked out.
• Cleantech 100
• the Graveyard. - A beautiful game (though maybe I should it "interactive art"?)
• In Quotes - A cool site from Google where you can search for a term and see quotes from different politicians about it.
• Project 10¹⁰⁰ - A cool project from Google inviting people to submit ideas to help make the world better a better place— with the help of $10 million from Google.
• Wondermark #446; In which a Toy prevents against Neglect
• Company will apply green spraypaint to dead brown lawns of foreclosed homes - Dave Barry should've patented the technique.

Links for 27 September 2008

• I could drive one of these.
• Mystery artist etches drawings on residents' milk bottles
• Salvador DaBot, the portraitist robot
• 
  
  
  I'm not sure what this is, but it could be good.
• The School of Life - an interesting concept, and a well-designed website!
• Today (well, September 23) is Earth Overshoot Day
• Gut Decisions May Not Be Smart

Links for 26 September 2008

• Use the Best Avaliable Ampersand
• 5 Unusual Ways to Achieve Super Quality Sleep
• Light Box
• Architectural Gem of the Day: Casa Tolo, Portugal
• Meet Dave, the Man Who Never Takes Out the Trash
• The Museum of Bad Art
• Listen to Yourself - If virus-writers were a little more thoughtful, maybe people wouldn't mind as much.
• 16 Incredibly Colorful Bridges - I find myself posting a lot of COLOURlovers features, huh?
• Immortal McHorror burger is 12 years old, looks just like new
• Chinese schoolgirl flips off old begging woman
  
• monkey's butt is red
• Taxibus
  
• Book Stacks That Tell Stories
• The Problem with Audience Participation
• Breast Milk Ice Cream?
• Eco-Buyer Beware: Green Can Be Decieving

Oddly Enough?

While this was clearly a technical glitch, it made me giggle. ("Oddly Enough" usually features articles such as "Lamb-eating sea eagles upset Scottish farmers" and "Huge pig sent to stud after holding woman hostage".)

Links for 25 September 2008

• Experience Wii - just keep watching
• The Fell Types and Some Revival Fonts
• Digsby = IM + Email + Social Networks - highly recommended, especially with the new efficiency update
• The best magazine covers of 2008 - Out of these, my favorite is New York for June 30, but I've definitely seen some better magazine covers this year (I do periodicals at my college library). Maybe I'll post some pics, though I guess I'm just kidding myself.
• Russian Town Puts Giant Smiley On Google Maps
• The Quote Mine Project: Or, Lies, Damned Lies and Quote Mines - some epic fails via creationists
• The Subprime Primer - the crisis in two minutes— with stick figures!
• What Part of Legal Immigration Don't You Understand?
  

Links for 23 September

Sorry about the lack of original content lately; I'm plowing through backed-up RSS feeds (the source of these links), working a lot, and trying to organize my life. A site redesign is coming soon (though I may not use Blogger; what I want to do might require a custom platform) as well as some essays, etc. Also, if you haven't noticed, the vast majority of things I've posted have been links to multimedia; in other words, not long writings and such. That's because I'm just pushing anything that's going to take me more than ten minutes into Read it Later.

• Eclectic Color Roundup
• The rock art that redraws our history
• 3rings: A Product Blog for Architecture + Design
• FLOW (haven't seen it, but am planning to)
• Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School
• Dr Mark Miodownik - How to Make The Perfect Cup Of Coffee
• 25 Beautiful Macro Photography Shots
• How Star Wars Changed the World
• Mad Men Illustrated (I haven't seen the show, but the images are great)
• Time of My Life - 17 Years of Self Portraits
• Word Clock - Fairly impractical, but a really cool design nonetheless.
• Footnotes, Endnotes, and Parentheticals That Cost Me Marks on My Thesis.
• How to Cheat at Everything
• The Most Alien-Looking Place on Earth
  

The Best of Boing Boing

You know the 20/80 rule? It seems that it applies to Boing Boing too. I was going through my backlog of Boing Boing posts and picking out my favorites, and I found 44 out of 220 that I thought were worth posting— exactly 20%. The first 35 are quick things, mainly images and short pieces, while the last nine are longer text, audio, and video.

1. Taxidermy: mouse riding guinea pig time machine
2. LEGO album covers on Flickr
3. Desk cut and folded from a single sheet of steel
4. Fourth grader suspended for using broken pencil sharpener
5. HOWTO make a very very expensive chess set
6. Flip camera tilt-shift visual experiments
7. Mom accused of stealing daughter's identity to attend highschool and become a cheerleader
8. "America's financial system was shaken to its core on Sunday." - mainly for the picture
9. Kako Ueda's solo show of exquisite paper cut art
10. Newly-discovered bizarre ant
11. Homebrew espresso machine
12. Web Zen: diorama zen (actually, I love all of the web zen features)
13. LOL Street: open thread on Lehman/Merrill/AIG/Dow/Fed/FUD/OMG/WTF - again for the picture
14. Sandwich bag has fake mold printed on it to discourage thieves
15. Steven Skollar's robot paintings
16. Thereminists for Obama badge
17. Grapes with a EULA
18. Rotting grand tropical rail-station in former USSR
19. Artist removes living creatures from famous paintings
20. Flaming arrows integral to oil pumping: 1960
21. American Legion WWII posters
22. Etsy's Handmade Kids Challenge
23. Floor "refinished" by drawing on it
24. Freaky, fleshy concept toy that you can pierce
25. Vintage Marlboro ads targeted at mom
26. Beautiful toner explosion
27. Flickr pool of photos taken through viewfinders of old cameras
28. Skeleton letterpress bookplates
29. Modern games as Atari 2600 carts
30. Photos of figeater beetles
31. Obama bumper-stickers for every state project now complete
32. Guy with Chinese landscape tattoo in exhibition of Chinese contemporary art
33. The wacky show rods of Carl Casper
34. Kiddie pool photo on box compared to photo of actual pool
35. Remixed signage
36. Ontario bus-companies trying to shut down competition from ride-sharing groups
37. Cintra Wilson on goth
38. Copyright's Paradox: brilliantly argued scholarly book tackles free speech vs. copyright
39. Testimony of Troy Davis, on death row in Georgia
40. Palin's Yahoo email account hacked, contents posted to Wikileaks
41. Public Resource wants to open source America's operating system
42. Ben Rosenbaum's "The Ant King" as a podcast
43. HOWTO: Take jaw-dropping photos with a mid-grade digital camera and worklights
44. Seaweed: Lush, hilarious oversized indie graphic novel
    

Sidewise Skyscraper Links

• hiddenradio
• Internet Memes timeline
• The Making of Sham, Wow!
• Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?
• Tribute To Graffiti: 50 Beautiful Graffiti Artworks
• Wondermark #444; In which the Classroom becomes tense
• Christopher Ashley, HTML, Drawings, Paintings, Writings, especially the work here
• 36 Colorful Corals: Many Hues Under the Deep Blue
• 33 Masters of CG Art: Awesome Digital Inspiration
• Defining the problem of elevator waiting times
• Yes, Sham, Wow! is a joke.
• zoe keatng: avant cello

How to Stop Once You've Already Popped

If you, like me, sometimes have difficulty setting down a can of Pringles (or a box of cookies, or a bag of candy, or a bottle of soda), try this: grab a "last bite" (but don't put it in your mouth), put the rest away, and then eat.

Obviously not foolproof, but the shame of having to get it out again is usually enough.

Quote/Mission Statement

“I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.” - Michel de Montaigne

Quicklinks

• souvenirs
• Brazil fact of the day
• A truck grows in Sacramento
• Tea 'healthier' drink than water
• N Korea 'develops special noodle'
• Paint your roof white, save the planet
• The Many Incarnations of the Mona Lisa
• 1960's Polaroid Pictures of Signs in Washington
• Monkeys experience joy of giving, too, study finds
• Monkey eludes net-wielding police at Tokyo station
• Group Allowed To Feed Homeless Again Without Permit
• Web delivers new worry for parents: Digital drugs (so bad it's good... wait, this isn't a joke?)
  

Neat Things Roundup

• Solitary Vision
• Paper Clips to Tell How I Feel
• Llamadas: mobile+human pay phone
• How I Stole Someone's Identity
• Stunning illustrated typography on dark backgrounds, and the accompanying
  Dark illustration inspiration
• Type and Media Masters
• An Open Letter to Teachers
• The Curious World of the Last Stop (a little long, but at least worth skimming)
• 25 Most Colorful Lakes on Earth
• Get A Free Haircut - Fashion Styling 2.0 - Crowd-Sourced Hairstyling
• 'bending space': photography of georges rousse

Widgets

I don't like widgets. As a concept, they're okay— little chunks of embeddable content can often be useful. Some of these even turn out to be really good ideas; for instance, YouTube videos, maps, IM status buttons, and Twitter tickers.

However, good ideas are not the norm. Many widgets are simply stylized news feeds. These are good for the content creators, of course, but why anyone would want to put a ticker with someone else's brand and someone else's content on their site is a mystery to me. They clash and nobody's uses them anyways. It seems kind of Geocities-ish to me, though I guess that could explain the appeal.

But sometimes widgets go beyond useless and into the realm of annoying. Anyone who's been on Facebook in the last year or so knows all about these; they plague many profiles in the form of "Top Friends" and "wat kinda lvr r u" apps. To be fair, these seem to be mostly limited to social networking sites, but they have been popping up elsewhere more and more lately.

Overall, I guess I have no problem with widgets, in the same sense that I have no problem with knick-knacks or makeup. It's all a matter of how you use them.

Seth Godin: "Ads are the new online tip jar"

The idea here is that, if you like some content, it'd be nice to repay the author by clicking an ad (as they are likely his/her main source of revenue). Note, however, that it's important that you actually at least consider the product which the advertiser is offering. Otherwise, while you are helping out the content creators in the short-term, you are hurting them long-term by devaluing ad click-thrus. If people only click ads to thank creators, ads don't do advertisers any good.

(I wonder if I have to remove this post if I start offering advertising space?)

Link: Ads are the new online tip jar

Quick Links

I've realized that I've been putting perhaps too much into my link roundups, so I'm going to try to separate them a bit. I'll have some post (like this one) with just links, mostly of light stuff- images, etc.; I'll have some with a few brief summaries; and the items which I was writing paragraphs about I'll put in separate posts. So, here are some pretty pictures/funnies:

• Bending Light & Color With Alan Jaras
• Invisibility Win
• 42 Essential Flickr Abandonments Groups Dedicated to Abandoned Places, Properties and Buildings
• Physical Theories as Women

Link Roundup

• Graphical visualization of text similarities in essays in a book - Data visualizations intrigue me. With the vast amount of information we have available, we need to find new ways of looking at and processing it. This one does a good job, besides being pleasing to the eye.
  
• Politics 2.0: Hack the Vote - The idea of this article (though maybe not the exact way it's presented) is spot-on. I really think that there are enough people out there who would like to vote for an independent (or at least a non-Democratic/Republican) to make it viable for them to win, if those voters would stop worrying about "wasting" their vote.
  
• Unnatural Selection - A cool micro-biography of Nikolai Vavilov. It's interesting to look at the ways that history, politics, and culture have limited (and accelerated) the progress of science and technology.
  
• Algebra - it's everywhere - I think it's probably a good thing to make it "standard" for algebra to be taught in 8th grade. There will, of course, be people ahead of and behind the curve, who should be pushed further or given extra time/tutoring. (In fact, honestly, I think that algebra should be taught much earlier. Arithmetic without algebra is like knowing how to drive without knowing how to get anywhere.)
  
• Bottled Water Demand May Be Declining - I've always thought that buying water bottles was a bit stupid if you have access to a tap, especially if you have a filter (sorry, Mom), so I'm glad to see that people are starting to figure it out. Maybe the whole Nalgene bottle ordeal will help the situation out
• 35 of the Most Unique & Creative Sofa Designs - A neat gallery. I especially liked the slinky couch. I wonder how hard it would be to build one.
• Why ban poems about knives? - O, bureaucracy and overprotectionism! It seems fairly obvious to me that the less you expose your kids to, the less they'll be able to handle later. Obviously, there are limits on this (you don't show your two-year-old Saw) but people tend to take things too far.
  
• Eating Bugs - This is an oldish article (I remember reading it at the doctor's office a while back) but it presents an interesting idea. What if peoples' aversion to eating bugs was entirely social? Could the next generation be raised entomophagous?
• Save the planet by cutting down on meat? That's just a load of bull - While London's mayor is probably correct when he says that the root cause of most environmental problems is overpopulation, his point is rather moot— there is very little that the those who hear the UN's advice can do to reduce world population, but everyone is capable of cutting out a serving of meat per day (assuming they eat meat). I would hope for a little better than this petty reactionism from an important politician, but then again, he is a mayor.
• And finally, a laugh: Wondermark #441; In which Politics exhilarate

Link Roundup 2

• Saving the Day: Save Systems in Games - I agree with the author completely; games should allow a complete save at any point (preferably without checkpoints) unless the gameplay requires otherwise, in which case there should always be at least a "save and quit" or "save token" option.
  
• tiny houses - small dwellings of every shape and size - A beautiful gallery.  I wouldn't mind living in one of these, at least for a while— especially the zeroHouse.
  
• The vanishing personal site - I don't like this "outsourcing", or at least the way that it's basically mandated for certain types of social interaction to take place.  I wish there was a more open social networking system which would allow you to link up these different services all on one site, which you could either host yourself or could host on a site like Facebook.
  
• Thinking People Eat Too Much: Intellectual Work Found To Induce Excessive Calorie Intake - AHA!  SIMON'S ROCK, I BLAME YOU!
  
• What Your Global Neighbors Are Buying - A cool map which depicts various categories of consumer spending levels in 2007 by resizing countries.
  
• Top 5 MD Myths, Busted. - I love it when people get pissed off.
  
• Klein Calls Blogger to Respond to Criticism - I see these kinds of things as the first steps towards truly utilizing the internet for citizen participation and government accountabilty. What if more politicians read was written about them on the WWW? 
• Neanderthals Not Dumb, but Made Dull Gadgets - This article seems to be pretty fail to me.  For instance, while this quote is on the spot, it has nothing to do with the findings of the study: "We've got to stop thinking of our being the only species of humans on this planet as our right, or as fate. Given different circumstances, perhaps Neanderthals would have gone on to colonize the world."  Also, this seems self-contradictory: "The superiority of blades has long been seen as evidence of human superiority. But according to Eren's team, blades had only one advantage: they can be easily attached to shafts."  Clearly, blades were superior: spears are a big deal.
• Tired of Waiting for Efficiency - Excellent points here.  People often forget that making twenty 1% improvements (each over the original) is equivalent to making one 20% improvement, and that often even a 1% increase is really helpful.  Maybe it has something to do with the way that we interpret percentages.  And finally...
• Just right for the garden: a mini-cow 

I should really credit these links, but unfortunately I'm working from a backlog of saved URLs and as such I'm not sure where a lot of these came from.  Most I either came upon directly (through RSS feeds) or I found on Polymeme.

I need to find a better way of posting these.  I'd like to just use Google Reader's share feature, but I don't just want to output an RSS feed.  Perhaps I'll write a little script to automatically merge that feed into my blog to make my life easier.

Link Roundup

• RCA: The Future of Money - A couple of beautiful projects, worth a look.
• Era of Scientific Secrecy Near End - After doing a research internship this summer, I definitely agree with the sentiments in this article; science should be a more open process, especially in regards to the way the peer-review system works. After all, the World Wide Web was created mainly for scientists; why aren't they taking advantage of it?
• A blogger takes office in Malaysia - I'm glad to see this, and hope to see more like it in the future. The internet age is enabling previous unelectables to have a chance at holding public office. More on this later.
• Fall Down, Go Boom - The effect of play is something that seems vitally important to the development of children, but it's just now being studied scientifically. More on this as well.
• He's giving you access, one document at a time - This seems pretty obvious; how are we supposed to follow the law if we can't afford to look at it? Also, if the government holds a copyright on something, and we live in a democracy, then...
• Death of the Credit Card Economy - Good riddance.
• In tough times, some families finding private school tuition too much - Not exactly huge news here, but I wonder what impact this will have on public school education.
• Faber Finds generative book covers - while I wouldn't consider these "beautiful", per se, the process described here is interesting. It's similar to automated music composition; the product isn't the greatest, but it's really neat conceptually.
• Chalk and talk ‘A Recent History of Writing & Drawing’ at the ICA - I'd like the chalkboard thing; a good example of a tangible interface (potentially, at least)
• Logic tells us we’re Simpsons not Spocks - A good look at the way the term "logical" is looked at and the different ways it can be applied. Also more on this later.
• Atheist Finds Nothing in Toast - Just funny.

Quick Update

Sorry for the break (I know you missed me, right?); I've been busy with the transition into the new semester. I'm not going to be posting much over the next few weeks, but not because I won't be writing. For the benefit of my own sanity and of yours, I've decided that I'm going to wait two weeks before posting anything I've written (as long as it isn't time-sensitive) so that I can edit it a bit more and have a steady queue of stuff to publish. Thus, you won't be seeing much for a little bit as I build up the queue.

Also, I'm working on putting together a better design for this site, including both better visual appeal and better information organization. I'd like to split the blog into a few little "streams", each covering different topics/types of content (link roundups, essays, reviews, etc.), but I'm not quite sure yet how I'm going to do it.

So, until my next post-
Jebadiah Moore