when it’s the work of a guy named ernest pignon-ernest. stunning. cool… graffiti? can’t read french, so can’t say. be patient and check it all out, certainly worth a look.

the first commonly applied use of teleportation in society will be… ultrafast domino’s pizza delivery? easy world wide commuting? the creation of hideous half man / half fly creatures whose penises fall off? nope. it will be used for encryption if this story is any guide.

found this old interview with ron mueck, whose work you’re likely familiar with whether you know it or not. before hitting it big with dead dad at the sensation show he was a special effects guru who worked on labyrinth among other things (which ain’t no dark crystal, but you get the point). anyhow the interview is interesting mainly because he talks process, and there are some images of untitled (big man) being made. here’s a profile of mueck as well. o.k. that’s all.

interesting article at the telegraph uk about the surprising limitations of our capacity to take in information. “our stone age brains may simply be unable to cope with the pace of modern life” is the gist of it. through some pretty funny experiments involving, among other things, gorillas, researchers show how blind we can really be to what’s going on around us. check out their web page to see example videos and test your own capacity for “change blindness” and “inattentional blindness”. although now that you’ve been prepped you probably wont be so easily fooled.

the oldest known printed text to have survived to present day is called the Diamond Sutra. it is a buddhist text dated to may of the year 868. it is housed at the british library. anyhow, they have a nice online exhibit dealing with the Diamond Sutra, the history of early printing, and the the silk road. they include many images and it’s all very interesting. but even more interesting is the larger collection of texts which they have digitized. using a shockwave method they call “turning the pages” you can flip through these old texts at your leisure. includes, among other treasures, one of leonardo’s notebooks. very nice.

came across this site. a very large collection of anti iraqi war posters, from folks around the world. from a design standpoint, it’s par for the course, some are pretty cool, some are funny, some are elegant, but most are just awful.

as we all know very well the future that our parents were looking forward to never arrived, and i don’t mean all that hippy-free love-activism-peace stuff they all so willingly forgot about the second they jumped a tax bracket. i mean that other future. so file this under the “where the hell are our flying cars and robot butlers?” category. found a couple sites which show that delinquent future in all its demented glory. future past and retro future. both well worth a nice long visit. on an ostensibly related note: article about nasa funding for R&D of science-fictional ideas. maybe that future will arrive after all?

found this rather high minded screensaver project called electric sheep. on going since 1999, it makes use of sleeping client computers to evolve unique “fractal flames” (like this and these). users decide which sheep are most desirable, and those sheep go on to be “cross bred” with others, keeping their “genes” in play. it’s an interesting process with nice results. if your not already a seti@home user you might want to check it out.

oliver is an unusual bipedal chimpanzee with a very small head, and as such underwent much prodding, poking, and parading, after his discovery over twenty five years ago. our search for origins did oliver no favors. he was called the missing link so many times i bet he started believing it himself. (he even made it onto the ape-o-naut, famous monkeys through history list.) but, alas it wasn’t true. as it turned out he was just an unusual bipedal chimpanzee with a very small head. poor guy. he’s now retired, and though reporters track him down now and again to recount his life, it seems he’s doing ok in his present digs.

still making those corny, kitschy, pop-culture-of-the-past inspired tee shirts a-la grand royal 1993? printing piles of flyers for some awful, way-past-relevancy rave? need reference for your piece of shit painting of guys with afros doing kung-fu? well, no matter what your irony dependent needs this site serves up the heapingest pile of movie images you could hope to find. that’s right, i said “heapingest”. whatchu gonna do about it sucka?

nice resource for your amateur scientist pleasure. lots of stuff to peruse, if you can keep your eyeballs from bursting at the ugliness of it all. check out the authors self proclaimed “better stuff” to start. but don’t stop there. hidden within you can find goodies pertaining to tesla coils, ball lightning, maglev, time-shift detectors, remote biodynamic sensing, zen fluid dynamics, and hundreds of other scientific do it yourselfers. i guess i ought to warn you that not only is much of this information drawn from decades old sources, but also that the subjects shift seamlessly between the scientific and the decidedly pseudoscientific. anyhow, looks like fun stuff.

alright well meaning parents and self proclaimed dj’s, get out your blank cd’s… extremely whacky and sample-able songs ahoy! science lessons on wax. awww shit.

very long but informative article about the troubling trend toward secrecy in washington. i initially titled this post the bush administration sucks giant cocks, but since all sucking of giant cocks was only inferred, i thought it might be libelous… might be… so i self censored. anyhow, it’s a good read.

a collection of album cover spoofs, goofs, tributes, send ups, near misses and coincidences? evidence of the endless creative laziness of shitty graphic designers? the inevitable result of a yucky, hero worshiping culture? who cares?

the people i guess. found this online project which is creating vast, fully illustrated old and new testaments using submitted illustrations. might bring some fresh meaning to this troublesome tome through shear bizarreness alone…  pick a verse and break out the crayons! 34513 spots still up for grabs.

saw this somewhere yesterday… on going project (called a game, for what reason i don’t know, to fool people into participating i guess) which seeks to add keyword data to all those millions of loose, nameless images on the internet. seems like a cool idea. do your part, put your unique intelligence and well honed name calling skills to good use… or not.

saw this mentioned yesterday at boing boing i think… the oxford english dictionary has had an ongoing project to fill in some of its blanks by mining science fiction, and science fiction fandom, and to trace back existing sci-fi language to it’s sources. the resulting entries, still being hammered out, have been posted here, here, and here. many of these words are so commonly used now that they elicit no thought of fictional origins at all. interesting. there is also a graph showing the origin dates by decade. by the looks of it we are well passed the glory days.