Visualising CO2 emissions
Australian eco-awareness ad, via O’Reilly Radar
And let them see what they do
Usually we think of the consequences of our actions after we act. Or maybe it’s not even us who acts, we just give them a silent permission. And maybe the consequences are unobservable if not looked for specifically.
The way the latest major US democracy export incident was conducted could have been evaluated more rationally by ordinary people, immediately after it began. If only what is pictured below had been installed in sufficient number of places.
That’s a Matthew Gale’s concept of a living memorial. The black liquid is oil and a gallon of it is added to the pool with every battlefield causality. The more cruel is the war — the more apparent, noxious becomes the memorial and the harder it is to ignore it.
Also be sure to check out Ambient devices and Nuage Vert which materialised just recently.
Visualizing music lyrics
They’ve gathered a big Flickr set of infographics related to music lyrics. The above is my favourite — Madonna’s “Don’t cry for me, Argentina”. Click the image to explore more than a hundred others. Via Information Aesthetics.
Hang drum
Sounds wonderful. Invented in the XXIst century. Art in its commonsense meaning is not dead yet. Wikipedia about hang drum
Really no excuses
Apple now offers 2 million more DRM-free songs at iTunes Music Store, and guess what, they now offer it in 265 Kbps, for $0.99 per song. Thank you, Amazon. Why this matters.
Betagel
Japanese guys at Geltec invented betagel. On the video, they throw an egg from the roof of a 22 meter building (that would be about 7 floors) on a 0.02-meter thick layer of betagel (that’s less than an inch — thiner than MacBooks!) (Update Feb 2008 — OK, Macbook Air wins here). As you’ve probably guessed, the egg does not break (although it is likely to have been internally damaged). Remember that famous MBA problem?
Technology is for solving problems.
Content-aware image resizing
Brady Forrest points us to a video demonstrating content-aware image resizing. Basically, it allows you to resize an image without scaling or cropping it, beautifully cutting out unimportant stuff (automatically!) without usual scaling distortions or dumb cropping. Just watch the video — 4.5 minutes and it’s stunning.
2084
You know, robots will never take over the human kind. Never ever, because they can’t be intelligent enough to have a clear purpose of existence. We [humans], however, may well live just for the sake of life. That’s possibly our greatest competitive advantage, apart from the ability to modify the environment.
No excuses
It’s half a year already that Apple started selling DRM-free music at its iTunes music store. Soon it will start selling music with higher bitrate — 256 Kbps probably (my prediction). The reason for this is dead simple — eliminate all excuses for downloading music illegally »»»
