Monday, December 22, 2008

Ron Arad and Moroso: Pixels Make Beautiful Furniture

from apartmenttherapy:

121908 arad moroso .jpgIt seems that Moroso has a thing for pixels. First it was the fabric choice for this sofa and now it is this Ron Arad creation being exhibited in the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

There isn't really much to say about this piece. Practical in a residential setting? Not really. Would we be drawn to it and love to stretch out on it if we ever came upon it in person? But of course. Add this wallpaper and these lights and you've got one 8 bit room.

Read more here.

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

Review From Powells.com

Do You Hear What I Hear?
A review by Doug Brown

Music is ubiquitous in our society. Films and television shows always have musical soundtracks, music plays in stores and shopping centers, and when you go out to eat or drink music will almost surely be playing. Parades and football games have marching bands, and most indoor sporting events have music playing over loudspeakers. If not, the crowd will provide their own, as with songs sung by UK football fans, or the omnipresent stomp stomp CLAP of Queen's "We Will Rock You." We even accompany our wars with music, both as a way of rousing our troops and demoralizing everyone else's. But what is music? Why does it move us so? What does it have to do with memory or emotion or language? Was music a precursor or antecedent of language? Are we wired for it, or is it completely socially acquired? Those subjects and more are the focus of This Is Your Brain on Music. . . .

Read the review online at: Powells.com

Sunday, December 07, 2008

Remove Tourists from Photos with Tourist Remover [Image Editing] from Lifehacker

from Lifehacker:
tourist-remover.png
Online photo management application Snapmania's Tourist Remover gets rid of unwanted gawkers and traffic from your photos by compositing two or more pictures of the same scene. All you have to do is make sure to take more than one of the same picture of a scene, assuming the people or cars you want to get rid of are moving. Once you've taken enough pictures so that every piece of the scenery is visible, just upload them to Snapmania and let the Tourist Remover do the work. Keep in mind that the more steady your hand when taking multiple shots, the better results you'll see, so ideally you'll be using a tripod or at least a wall to steady yourself. Alternatively, if you've got some GIMP or Photoshop chops, you can do the same thing yourself.
Tourist Remover [Snapmania via Photojojo]

Thursday, December 04, 2008

MuppetWiki

Muppet Wiki is a collaborative encyclopedia for everything related to Jim Henson and the Muppets. The wiki format allows anyone to create or edit any article, so we can all work together to create a comprehensive database for Muppet fans.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

History of History

History - the rational and methodical study of the human past - was invented by a single man, Herodotus... more

Thursday, September 11, 2008

social wallpapering

Dress Up Your Desktop at Social Wallpapering [Wallpaper]

socwall.png
There are a few great desktop wallpaper sites out there, and many crappy ones—but a new one (to us) called Social Wallpapering goes into the good pile. Browse through thousands of eye-catching images for standard monitors, widescreens, and dual monitors. The minimum resolution at SocWall is 1280x960, and all images are categorized and rated by users, so the "Most Popular" list is a good bet. (Get to it under the Browse menu, Everything.) For more desktop eye candy, see our top 10 sources for free wallpaper, fonts and icons.
Social Wallpapering

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Idealist.org

Gain valuable experience and learn something -- by volunteering! Idealist, a project of Action without Borders, is a global clearing house of nonprofit and volunteering resources offering a comprehensive directory of volunteer opportunities. It provides information and links to 20,000 nonprofit and community organizations in 140 countries.

Visit the site
http://www.idealist.org




CAREER PRO NEWS Weekly
Connecting career professionals to today's opportunities

July 4, 2008

Career Pro News is published by Bridges Transitions Inc. on the web
every week at: http://careerpronews.bridges.com/

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Plan a Room Redesign in 3D with Mydeco

from lifehacker.com, Plan a Room Redesign in 3D with Mydeco:

mydeco_cropped.jpg
Feel like giving a room in your house a new and improved look, but find yourself aimlessly wandering the aisles of your home improvement store, hunting for inspiration? The Mydeco website offers a free tool that lets you visualize almost every aspect of a room—either built in Sims-style 3D or recreated from an uploaded photo—from floors to furniture to wallpaper, down to what you'll put on your coffee table. Once your room is set up, you can view it from any angle, check out other users' rooms and (of course) see purchase recommendations. For a free online tool that requires no CAD-like skills, Mydeco is a pretty helpful style solution.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Scan the Day's Headlines with Wordle

from utne.com


Scan the Day's Headlines with Wordle

Visual learners can thank Wordle, a site that creates a word cloud from text or RSS inputs, for making the printed word a little more palatable.

my site looks like this:


Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Faces in Places

Faces in Places

George Orwell's "1984" forever popularized the phrase, "Big Brother is watching you." This blog believes others are watching you, too, but these commonplace siblings are less judgmental. (At least, we like to think so.) The collaborative collection highlights faces in such unexpected places as a roof, your front door, a hot iron, or even that muffin you had for breakfast. From screaming faces to friendly ones, angry features to those more fowl, visages with crazy eyes or beady peepers, or the vast array of purse faces—there's a mug here for everyone. Still having trouble picking facial features out of the ordinary? A tour through the gallery may illuminate new ways to see food, buildings, transportation, garden tools, everyday gadgets, and familiar things around the house. Even the red jacket zipper fish is much more fun than Big Brother.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Juiciest Religious Factoids

from the Steven Waldman blog:

For someone who is both a religion junkie and a numbers junkie, the fabulous new Pew Religious Landscape survey has left me a bit giddy. Every page tells an amazing story. Eventually, we'll parse this more thematically but for now...[read the rest of the story]

Sunday, June 01, 2008

I like Georgia O'Keeffe




I really like Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings, and especially the red canna. I have copied her paintings twice, once in watercolor and once in pastels. This is my copy of her painting in pastels.

Monday, May 19, 2008

TripIt

from Lifehacker.com:

tripitlogo.gif

TripIt takes all the work out of storing your travel plans in one place. Instead of making you enter all the details like places and times by hand, just forward reservation confirmation emails to TripIt so it can do all that heavy lifting for you. Register for a free account at TripIt and start forwarding travel plan confirmation email messages from "virtually any" online travel site to plans@tripit.com, and the web service will parse out dates, times and locations and generate your itinerary with lots of additional information, like a calendar, photos, weather, maps, online check-in links and even collaboration with fellow travelers. Check out a sample TripIt itinerary that came together by fwd'ing a few emails from online bookings. Now, this is a travel organizer I might actually use (versus just saving all my trip-related messages in my email software.)

Saturday, February 16, 2008

UC Berkeley lectures on YouTube

from Ars Technica:

Ever felt like learning about physics from a professor at UC Berkeley? You may have been able to listen to those lectures before, but now you can watch them through the university's new public channel on YouTube.

Read More...

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Proppian Fairy Tale Generator

from Yahoo!Picks

Trickery! Villainy! Violation! Pursuit! In the 1930s, a Russian scholar named Vladimir Propp studied the "basic plot components" of his country's folk tales and came up with a list of the mythic stories' "series of actions"—or "functions." Though the Eastern European thinker surely didn't imagine the rise of the Internet, an imaginative class at Brown University has brought Web and academic together with the Proppian Fairy Tale Generator. This ingenious online game presents the basic structures of the fables Propp dissected. You, the reader, select which functions you like. Click as many as you want: Mediation? Branding? Reconnaissance? Hit "generate" and a fairy tale based on your choices will appear before your very eyes. Note: Disney these ain't. Even the "preset" versions of Cinderella, Snow White, and Hansel and Gretel read like nothing you've heard (or seen) before. The legends woven by this raconteur of a generator are imaginative, richly detailed, and undomesticated. The Grimms would approve. So, we like to think, would Vladimir Propp.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Give Thanks with an Appreciative Note

from lifehacker.com:

Good manners start with good intentions. Etiquette experts postulate that writing thank you notes increases the frequency and quality of gifts you receive. But what if you're stuck and don't know what to write? The Thank You Note Samples site covers nearly every imaginable topic to give thanks for, from acknowledging the receipt of charity donations to expressing appreciation for hospitality arrangements to thanking your potential employer for an interview. Multiple letter formats are available to add variety (especially if you're spending the night writing the same monotonous notes due to a recent wedding). Additionally, the suggestions go a step beyond just the written word. Why not give thanks, for example, with a gift basket? If you want to express your gratitude and feel like you are not inspired, the Thank You Note Samples site will definitely get you back on your toes and you'll be filled with ideas for expressing appreciation.