Liberty trainers, oh my!
March 31, 2011 § Leave a comment
This is love at first sight. Fabric legend The Liberty of London have collaborated with Nike (again) for this amazing series of Art Nouveau trainers in their classic designs.
Available from April 1 at Liberty’s. You’ve been warned.
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Back up, now!
March 31, 2011 § Leave a comment
You know you’ve been burned before. You lost your data. You know that, like in a hangover, you promised never to let it happen again. You vowed to always back up. And then you forgot.
March 31 is World Back Up Day. So take a break from what you’re doing and back up.
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Make up your mind about your mind
March 31, 2011 § 3 Comments
Everybody has one. A conscious mind I mean. And with it comes the self-referential ability of theorizing about it. Philosophers of Mind, Cognitive Scientists, Neuroscientist and Religious Scholars have all put out theories on what consciousness is (especially in the last 20 years it has become a hot topic of study,and, believe it or not, zombies have central role).
So, where do I stand on the consciousness debate? That’s what Information is Beautiful told me:
What is Consciousness? Make up your mind is a short and sweet web app that gives you an overview of the main theories of Consciousness, lets you choose what you find more plausible and in the end hits you with an almost post-modern description of your theory.
P.S. I actually am not a Identity Theorizing Emergent Dualistic Higher Order Theorist.
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Filling up the gaps
March 31, 2011 § 7 Comments
Bodies in the service of filling up the urban void? Choreographer Willi Dorner squeezes human bodies in brightly coloured hoods into the city’s most peculiar places. Into nooks and crannies, actually.
Bodies in Urban Spaces’ project was first conceived in an abandoned residential building in Vienna, in 2004, but it rapidly spread around the streets of the world, from London, France, Norway to downtown Manhattan. Willi Dorner works with performers, dancers and passengers, placing them into spaces where bodies normally do not go and occupying the urban landscape in a completely new way.
More photos after the jump « Read the rest of this entry »
Larger-than-life people in candid shots
March 30, 2011 § 2 Comments
We’ve seen innumerable photos of them in every imaginable setting. Publicity shots and paparazzi shots. But the shots featured in This is not porn have the rare quality of capturing the real person. Carrie Fisher and her stand double sunbathing in their iconic Princess Leia bikinis. Salvator Dalí skipping rope. Dustin Hoffman goofing behind Sir Lawrence Olivier’s back. Hunter S. Thomson, John Cusack, Johnny Depp and an inflatable doll.
Be sure to visit This is not porn‘s archives.
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Living windows
March 30, 2011 § 6 Comments
On 911 Prestes Maia, in São Paulo, Brazil, there is a 22-story tower block that hosts an estimated 1,630 people, including 468 families with 315 children. Julio Bittencourt, raised in São Paulo, photographed the residents at their windows. Every window is like a theater stage, every person an actor. And most of all, every window is an extention of the residents towards their neighbours: through these windows they fight and make up, they talk, they cry, they fall in love, they grow, they die.
See some of the residents after the jump
Angry Birds do Libya
March 30, 2011 § 1 Comment
Disclaimer: I am annoyed by anything that becomes hugely popular and Angry Birds is no exception. However this video is good.
A mash-up of Angry Birds and the Three Little Pigs, it is the digital natives’ guide to the uprising in Maghreb, in escalating levels from Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, to Egypt and to the last level in Libya. With guest starring roles by the Twitter and the American Eagle Angry Birds.
On faces
March 30, 2011 § 2 Comments
Good things come in pairs:
1. This amazingly detailed chart of comic book facial expressions by Joumana Medlej is meant as a tutorial for illustrators, but that description does not give it enough credit. Our faces inevitably give away our emotions. This is their map.
2. However there are those for whom faces seem mostly unfamiliar. Those suffering from face blindness. If people keep greeting you on the street and you have no idea who they are, maybe you have it too. Cambridge University has a free diagnostic test for face recognition, online. It is harder than it looks like believe me!
via i love charts and boingboing
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Antikythera mechanism explained by LEGO
March 29, 2011 § 3 Comments
The Antikythera mechanism is impressive on its own means. If you don’t know or are too bored to check Wikipedia, the Antikythera mechanism is one of the most important archeological artifacts ever found, so mind-blowing that it could very well headline an Indiana Jones adventure.
Discovered in 1901 in the Antikythera ship wreck (in the first instance of underwater archeology) and dating back to Ancient Greece (150-100 BC), it is a very complex calculator for astronomical events, with impressive accuracy. In fact, it precedes any other known clockwork mechanism of similar complexity by more than a millennium! Figuring out what the mechanism does was no piece of cake either. It took almost 100 years and impressive technology.
And it simply takes 3 minutes and a reconstruction made of LEGOs to explain its logic, in this great video that won Best Nature Video, as voted by Nature Network readers.
via GOOD.IS
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Where children’s dreams dwell
March 29, 2011 § 8 Comments
As a child, I always thought that my bedroom was a kind of paradise, my own personal kingdom and it was. But I suppose not every child felt the same.
During the five years he spent crisscrossing the world, English-born photographer James Mollison captured images of children from all around the world -from the U.S.A., Brazil, England to Senegal, Cambodia, China and so many others– and their bedrooms. In his award-winning book Where Children Sleep, he reveals the different locations, where their own personal dreams dwell.
See more photos after the jump
Read it elsewhere
March 29, 2011 § Leave a comment
Jeff Koons gets the video game treatment, Time Zones get analyzed and religion falls out of fashion:
- Jeff Koons Must Die, the video game – Hunter Jonakin via boingboing
- What if Angry Birds were an action movie directed by Michael Bay (video) – the curious brain
- The fascinating and often absurd convention of Time Zones – BBC
- Rare Beatles photos – npr
- Since Radiohead published a newspaper (The Universal Sigh), Guardian writers are challenging them at their game, by covering Creep – Guardian
- Are symmetrical faces more beautiful? – toxel via holykaw
- 50% of tweets come from 0,05% of users – mashable
- Is religion falling out of fashion? – Discovery news
- Sex is no accident (MTV’s safe sex campaign) – buzzfeed
- This blogger asks his favorite authors to sign their books. The twist? Instead for dedications he asks for insults – insulted by authors via flavorwire
- Read it horizontally, read it vertically; the genius of Lewis Caroll – i love charts
Peanuts: the existentialist edition
March 29, 2011 § Leave a comment
Whoever is behind 3eanuts had a brilliant idea. First came the observation: “Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters’ expense”. Then the execution: just omit the last panel of the comic strip and sink in a bleak, black and white world, filled with…
…desperation…
…loneliness…
…doubt…
A true existentialist masterpiece.
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Hand crafted fonts
March 29, 2011 § 2 Comments
Are we typophiles or not? Check out some of the coolest typefaces, made from the most weird stuff, from fingerprints to raw meat.
See more after the jump « Read the rest of this entry »
Tweets say the darnest things
March 28, 2011 § 1 Comment
It’s true. Among tons of trivialities there are some truly witty tweets. Twaggies is a blog that selects and illustrates some of these tweets. 
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If you watch it backwards
March 28, 2011 § 1 Comment
Can you imagine how would things turn up if all the stories you know in life and fiction would start from the end and end up in their beginning? Ifyouwatchitbackwards is a tumblr site which points out the opposite path that life and fiction can take.
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Read it elsewhere
March 28, 2011 § Leave a comment
Pure randomness today:
- What do Liberia, Myanmar and the United States of America have in common? They are the only 3 countries in the world not to use the metric system – Gizmodo
- Our sense of smell might be explained by quantum physics – BBC
- The end of the telephone? – The New York Times
- An argument against earth hour – good.is
- 8-bit deaths (video) – Vulture
- Google.uk’s Think Quarterly: the data issue – Think Quarterly
- Types of typsos – Rosscott, Inc.
It started with the occasional profile update and now you are hooked: social media addiction
March 28, 2011 § 1 Comment
Well we already know that social media can be very addictive. But can you recognize the signs of addiction? Do you need a social media detox?
See if you recognize yourself in any of the symptoms after the jump.
Broken promises: bergamot cupcakes
March 27, 2011 § Leave a comment
A while ago I promised never to blog again about food I made. It’s now time to break that promise. And on good grounds too. You see, this is an original recipe by yours truly. TA DA.
I have a bergamot tree in my garden. Its smell simply makes me happy. But there is not much you can do with bergamot fruits – despite their godly fragrance they are actually very bitter, their juice included. Yesterday we cut all the fruit from the tree because it was ripe and perfect. So there were 4 bags of bergamot oranges in my kitchen. I couldn’t just let them rot. Then the idea hit me: when in doubt, make cupcakes.
So, I used The Hummingbird Bakery‘s recipe for lemon cupcakes as a reference and with a couple of changes and adaptations here and there I created my first recipe. Check it out after the jump. « Read the rest of this entry »
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