The GigaPxl Project produces super-detailed, ultra-high resolution panorama photography, which “adds a humanizing touch to subject material which otherwise tends to be dominated by its monumental scale.” See the image gallery, San Diego for example. As they mention on the site, I like the preservation and archival potential of this technology. If they care to, future generations could scrutinize these for years.
Category: dailytidbits
In 1919 in the city of Boston, 21 people were killed in a flood of molasses. A reprint from an older Smithsonian article summarizes the day that “a wet, brown hell broke loose,” and why parts of Boston have yet to lose that heavy, sweet smell.
I remember being fascinated with stacking things when I was younger. Dominoes, rocks, cans, playing cards, you name it. If I had had the cash, I could have learned the basics of cantilever engineering by building structures made out of coins. Be sure to see some of the the insane reader submissions on beginning on page 4. I never cease to be amazed with all the time we have on our hands.
I like it better as an impish gag than as Thought-Provoking High Art, but a group has created an exhibit featuring items stolen from other art museums: “By a volitive and intentional disrupt of the existing chain of artist-curator-collector, it undermines capitalistic market orthodoxies and produces an autonomous value zone.”
Jason Kottke points out that Wal-Mart employs 1.8 million people on the planet. And now time for fuzzy math…
The current estimates put world population at about 6.5 billion. That means Wal-Mart employs 0.0276923077% of the entire world, 1 of each 3600ish. About 64% of the world population is in the generally employable age range of 15-64. With that in mind, Wal-Mart employs about 0.0432692308% of the actual working population, or one of every 2311.
Of course, in the US the percentages are higher. There are 1.3 million Wal-Mart employees out of the 299.5 million in the entire States, which yields 0.434056761%. Almost 1 of every 230 people in the US works for Wal-Mart. Of the working population ages 15-64, (67.2% of the total), Wal-Mart employs 0.6459178%, or 1 of every 155, give or take. That’s a lot of folks.
Might as well close with the video showing where Wal-Mart new stores opened and how the network grew each year in the US. You can’t grow like that without satisfying customers… and pissing people off. Comes with the territory, unfortunately.
-From Design Observer: “Operation Iraqi Freedom was planned in PowerPoint — giving “death by PowerPoint” new meaning.”
Reminds me of two other great Laments on Military Presentation. One, the great image of the military regiment on the cover Edward Tufte’s essay The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint. And two, the Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint. We spent a good bit of time on the Address in one of my Rhetoric classes. I love the Organizational Overview in those slides. PowerPoint can be brutal.
–Zap Reader is a little web service that makes speedreading easier on the web. There’s an extension for Firefox call JS Reader that has comparable functionality.
I do some basic speed-reading in the paper world, so it’s nice to see this expand on the web. I like Zap Reader on first look, though it’s always an odd adjustment to make. It’s such a weird sensation to have so many words funneling into your head, while not moving your eyes much at all. The downside of these online “rapid serial visual representation” tools is that you lose quite a bit of context while you’re reading. It’s not really convenient for placing quick pencil marks for areas to check on later, and you can lose the hierarchical cues like headings and indentations. But a tabbed browser like Firefox can help keep the original doc handy for referral.
On the upside, after you adjust, you can really cruise through a document. No pages to turn, no book to hold flat. At speed, you can go through a work a couple times with focus, as opposed to one wandering trip with all the intrinsic linky distractions that make me love the internet. [via mefi]
–Han van Meegeren forged 7 Vermeers in the mid-1900s, raking in millions for false new paintings. “He devised a plan to paint a perfect Vermeer – neither a copy, nor a pastiche, but an original work – and, when it had been authenticated by leading art experts, acquired by a major museum, exhibited and acclaimed, he would announce his hoax to the world.”
-This whole intellectual property thing is getting a bit absurd. The Mises econblog comments on the latest efforts of the Music Publishers’ Association (evil twin of the RIAA?) to stop the unauthorized sharing of their products. Suing the consumer is a bad idea, generally speaking.
-The Free Range Librarian has a collection of photos of big cars in compact parking spaces. I’d like to see some more context here. I wonder about the decision-making in effect. Are big car folks parking out of defiance (i.e. taking offense at the differential treatment) or just lazy convenience? In what kind of situations is compact parking actually respected? I wonder who is supposed to be enforcing this in the end, aside from citizen-liblogger-expos?©-photojournalists.
-A thread on Lifehacker asking the readers’ favorite software ever.
-The BBC reports that soon we may have 3 more official planets in our solar system. To be more exact, we’ll have 8 “classical” planets and 4 “plutons”. I’m sure heated debate will ensue.
-Assembled from various warning signs and postings, here is a Flickr photo collection called Stick Figures in Peril.
-CrunchGear spotlights a gun you can put on a keychain.
-The Skeptics Annotated Bible [and Koran, and Book of Mormon] lets you find all the references to violence, family values, science, etc. Also quick links to the “good stuff.”
-In The Believer: “L.A. has become the finest place in America to think and write about nature.”
Today, a special audio edition:
-If you like British accents, the British Library lets you explore almost 700 English accents and dialects, complete with analyses. [via marylaine]
–Get your fix of old time radio. Abbot & Costello, Dick Tracy, Gunsmoke, and more. I love those old commercials: cigarettes ads beamed right to your ear. There’s another where the announcer talks about Quaker Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice for about 2 minutes solid. [via lisnews]
–OperaCast helps you find current opera broadcasts going on across the planet, for your scheduling convenience.
-The ever-resourceful Library of Congress hosts a collection of Edison’s early cylinder and disc recordings. Check out the 12th Street Rag performed by the Imperial Marimba Band.
-The Observer suggests 50 albums that changed music. Which doesn’t necessarily mean for the better.
—“Color film was non-existent in 1909 Russia, yet in that year a photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii embarked on a photographic survey of his homeland and captured hundreds of photos in full, vivid color.” His original negatives are available through the Library of Congress. Sometimes you forget the world had color way back when.
—Julian Beever creates pavement drawings that look three-dimensional.
—Scott Adams wants tax breaks for small people. [via mises]
–As of this writing, Almost 700 people have commented on Tuscan Whole Milk at Amazon.com. A recent 1-star review : “I had a problem where my roof was leaking. I poured some Tuscan Whole Milk over it to seal it up and it just flowed right into the hole and didn’t do anything.” And a sample 5-star review: “The spirit of wholeness and light will radiate from you in whiteness, and flavor will speak the name of redemption. “
—Make your own motivational poster. [via lifehacker]
—31 ways to tie your shoes, out of the trillions of possible methods.
—The video indicates that bike messengers might indeed be on crack, but it’s still a good argument for cycling v. motoring in the city.
—Scientists rethink the collapse of Easter Island society. Spoiler: It wasn’t just environmentally rapacious islanders, but the rats they brought along. [via ptdr]
—Anil Dash gathers the best of Zidane Headbutt spin-offs, “dedicated to the head-first fight against alleged racism, the grand tradition of ridiculous memes on the net, and the premise that “Yakety Sax” is always funny.”
–Here is another entry to compliment the two earlier links in my ad-hoc Scalar Series: take a look at the atom and relative size of proton versus electron.
–The concept book for the Seattle Public Library, where the vision was introduced: “to redefine / reinvent the Library as an institution no longer exclusively dedicated to the book, but as an information store, where all media – new and old – are presented under a regime of new equalities.” I’m not sure about the actual content, but it certainly came out beautifully. [via ic]
–Via 54 Monkeys, an article in New York Times Magazine about rebellious branding:
…The supposed counterculture nature of his brand might arouse some suspicion. Manufactured commodities are an artistic medium? Branding is a form of personal expression? Indie businesses are a means of dropping out? Turning your lifestyle into a business is rebellious?
…Perhaps theyÄôre trying a new tactic in the eternal war against the corporate suits who co-opt the rebellion, style and taste of every youth culture and sell it right back to the generation that created it. Perhaps the first lesson of the brand underground is not that savvy young people will stop buying symbols of rebellion. It is that they have figured out that they can sell those symbols, too.
–A girl photographs herself every day for 3 years, resulting in a short film. See also Diego Goldberg’s Arrow of Time. It would be cool to do project like that, but I know I would forget.
—Rebecca Blood has posted an interview with Jason Kottke of kottke.org. Good stuff. Her whole Bloggers on Blogging series has been quite a treat.
–Eggcorns are those phrases that “arise when a writer knows an expression well enough to employ it in an appropriate context, but is mistaken about the term’s or its constituents’ meanings, origins or the underlying metaphors”–intuitive mistakes like “free reign” or “ten-year track position”.
–Georgia Tech has an online gallery & text of Edward Emerson Barnard’s book A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way, published 1927. Check out Plate No. 5, a Nebulous Region in Taurus or Plate No. 14, Dark Lanes in Ophiucus. Aside from the photos, you can also access images of the text and the various hand-drafted charts, like this one for the Nebulous Region in Taursus. So much information, but such elegance.
—Test how well you know your 80s lyrics. Yeah… I failed mightily…
—Some crossword afficionados lament the popularity of Sudoku, and look for ways to regain their lost attention. [via waxy]
–Read up on what exactly information is. When I see a person like this who obviously loves math, I can’t really help but be at least a little bit enthralled.
–Stephen King tells us everything we need to know about writing.
— A small collection of vintage photos of the Mideast back before things got hairy. [via mr]
If you are a young man and you pick up the book section, your primary impression of literature in English is going to be the kind of thing your mother’s book club reads. . . . Literature has veered away from story to be about psychology; male writers are as responsible for that as women . . . but I do think men are interested in things, why things work, why things happen, and men look for more comedy in fiction. We are bored by the earnestness of contemporary fiction.
One researcher also suggests that “the predominance of female teachers from daycare through grade school, and the preference for fiction as schoolroom reading material, has given boys the impression that reading is for girls.” That’s a depressing thought.
—The Time Fountain uses a strobe light for all kinds of cool effects, e.g. water drops drip backwards or float in mid-air. Bonus points for anyone who can name the soundtrack for the video.
—A nice write-up examining the Atlanta Aquarium with a designer’s eye. I wouldn’t have noticed it on my own, but the use of all those different typefaces and the lack of design uniformity does put a few warts on an otherwise pretty cool place.
–If Man and Dinosaur once walked the Earth together, you might wonder why dinosaurs aren’t mentioned in the Bible. Ah, but they are. For more information, consider a visit to the Creation Museum.
Mark Larson 
