Amazing strobe-scupture from Gregory Barsamian.  Click on the sculpture link.

A critics case for critics who are actually critical (NYTimes Mag)
A couple weeks old, but a good read, as is the supplemental commentary from DesignObserver

Peter Saville on his classic Joy Division and New Order album covers

The Revolt of the Rich (the American Conservative)
I do not mean secession by physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens from time to time—for example, Erik Prince, who was born into a fortune, is related to the even bigger Amway fortune, and made yet another fortune as CEO of the mercenary-for-hire firm Blackwater, moved his company (renamed Xe) to the United Arab Emirates in 2011. What I mean by secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot.

Apparently, MIT has moved past rigging bets at blackjack tables (This American Life) to bulk-gaming state lotteries - with more than a little help from the State of Massachusetts Lottery.

Cardboard bike? (slvimeo)

Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco: Drawing America's invisible poor

What would happen if you tried to hit a ball pitched at 90% the speed of light? (xkcd)

The Money-Empathy Gap (NYMag)


“While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff says, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”

Does anyone know if there are any operational automats left in the U.S. running as a regular business?  Bamn in NYC is now closed...

Rooms photographed from above

A huge list of movies that are available to watch for free, online.
(openculture)

A billion stars revealed
Astronomers have today released a picture containing more than one billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. It combines data from two near-infrared¹ telescopes – the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii and the VISTA telescope in Chile ... The full image contains 150 billion pixels, and the detail it contains is only revealed by the three zoom levels, centred on G305, a large and complex star-formation region: the innermost zoom covers a tiny fraction of the full image, but still contains more than ten thousand stars.

America, you should be mad as hell about this (businessinsider)
An intuitive, statistical look at us and them.

The Hobbit production video blog

To conclude, the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause.
from Nassim Taleb's forthcoming book about the diminishing value, and eventual harm, of too much information.

InstaCRT is brilliant
Take a digital photo, it gets sent to Stockholm to be photographed off of a CRT screen, and sent back to you.
youtube of how it works

Peter Brings the Shadows to Life 
A beautiful little piece of skateboard film.

 115MPH Superbus is just plain ridiculous

Slinky on a treadmill.  That is all.