--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.

--If you've already found out how popular your first name is... then you can also find out where your last name currently ranks. Smith, Johnson, Williams, Jones, and Brown claim the top five. "Larson" comes in at #233. --Photos of more modern, more intricate crop circles.

--According to the latest statistics, blogs are growing like weeds.

--Here's some evidence of 1st-world perception bias, from living in a country on some kind of technology buzz: I'm still surprised at how little the internet has spread. The internet's reach is only to about 1 of every 6 people on the planet. There's an enormous amount of stats there for the hyper-curious.

--I've enjoyed the New York Times series on the "New Gender Divide". Nice infographics, to boot. These recent articles in particular: one discusses that men without college degrees are not marrying as much as in years past, and one that really blows my mind, an article about men choosing not to work. I suppose if your lady will put up with it, why not? The scary thing is financing all that sloth with new debt. Bad idea.

Today, August 6, the Internet celebrates its quincea?±era. 15 years of interconnected pandemonium. A bit of personal trivia: on my first tentative leap onto the "Information Superhighway," the first website I went to was www.vw.com. I had a thing for Volkswagon back in middle school. It only took about 26 hours to pull up the site over our blazing 28.8bps modem. Those were the days, eh?

--In praise of boxer-briefs. A pair of boxers are the "classic preppie choice—looks sharp, underachieves." --Who wins where? Pop vs. soda vs. coke.

--The PocketMod turns an ordinary 8.5"x11" sheet of paper into a hi-octane customized personal organizer. And by extension, turns the ordinary you into a Person Who Makes Things Happen. Or you could make a 100-page notebook. Go ye forth and produce!

--Lose weight by following The Hacker's Diet: How to Lose Weight and Hair Through Stress and Poor Nutrition. Written by an engineer/ programmer/ entrepreneur--who needs nutritionists?

--The Economist on differences between the sexes. I think this is wild: "a one-day-old girl will look for longer at a face than at a mechanical mobile; a boy will prefer the mobile." There's a table in the sidebar to summarize some areas of difference found by one study. Men were much better at mentally rotating an object and physical aggression... and women were better at spelling and "indirect aggression". There's a can of worms for you.

-A very, very, very, very large webpage. See also my earlier post about being only 1 pixel.

--Here are some links & photos to some of the worst-named government documents. I'm particular fond of "Distinguishing Bolts from Screws," and would gladly recommend "Everything you always wanted to know about shipping high-level nuclear wastes." --The age-old "medical honey" trick is proving itself superior to many antibiotic wound treatments.

--An interview with Paul Buckley, book cover designer for the Penguin Group.

--Now you can goof off on the internet at work peacefully and free from anxiety. WorkFRIENDLY makes websites look like Microsoft Word documents.

--Paul Graham on "Good and Bad Procrastination."

Over the past couple weeks I've been flipping through Kate Ascher's book The Works. Ascher's expos?© draws on her experience with the Port Authority and with the NYC Economic Development Corporation. The result is a very cool macro- and micro-scopic view of the city that never sleeps. The book is decorated with all sorts of diagrams, labels, charts, cut-aways, and nice commentary. You can see everything from historic street lights, to analyses of pedestrian crosswalks, to the complex networks for planes, trains, and automobiles (and boats and subways and everything else). The folks at 37 Signals mentioned an aspect of Edward Tufte's new book, Beautiful Evidence that they appreciated: the "self-imposed constraint". With that observation in mind, I noticed the same thing in Ascher's work. Each page is like a self-contained essay on its unique topic. Instead of trailing off onto the next page, each spread is complete and self-contained on its own. You can pick it up anywhere and learn something. This book reminds me of those wonderful books like the Eyewitness Books series I used to devour when I was younger. If I had a coffee table, well, that would be a good place for it: out in the open, always offering another little moment of fascination.

--We may be raising a nation of wimps. Perhaps this a curse/opportunity afforded by wealth? My own brainstorm: it seems like weakness, like environmentalism, is a luxury good. That is, parental overprotectiveness would not happen to such an extent in a less prosperous nation. This small bit in particular is one of the most interesting: "Children are far less integrated into adult society than they used to be at every step of the way". --Emotionally stunted, perhaps... but we're larger and healthier than our ancestors even just a few generations back. Another benefit of wealth and productivity. [via mr]

--A large archive of free (out of copyright/ public domain) movies, including a nice little selection of the old Bugs Bunny and Superman cartoons. [via digg]

--College athletes are "ethically impaired". Interesting notion here: "In measurements of college athletes' moral reasoning, players of team sports — and in particular, team contact sports — fare significantly worse than those who play individual sports... partly because team-sport athletes often do not make as many decisions during games."

--Escape from awkward situations with the Popularity Dialer.

--The New York Public Library offers a digital gallery of almost 500,000 of their photo and print collections. I could spend all day in there, and come back the next day for more.

--Here's the story of a guy that deposits a fake check from a scam company--and comes out $95093.35 better. [via grs] --Photos from a tornado chaser. Supercells, lightning, twisters, even aurora borealis. It's all there.

--Scientific American weighs in on expertise and experts. It's not all genetics:

The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert--in chess, music and a host of other subjects--sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in [that] kind of effortful study...?

--And the New Yorker reflects on the arguments about that massive project of non-experts [micro-experts?], Wikipedia.

This Sunday I read Michael Pollan's book, The Botany of Desire. The book is a natural history of man and four plants: the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato. Now that I think of it, this might be the only life-science book I've ever for recreation, but there are certainly worse places to begin. Michael Pollan is not only a writer, but a gardener. Throughout the four sections he draws on history, biography, genetics, economics, biotechnology, and culture at large in a delightfully consilient manner. The high botanical drama of man's Apollonian quest for order versus his yielding to Dionysian revelry is interwoven with Pollan's own personal experience.

While it is not a dedicated study of eco-issues, the work is nicely book-ended with thoughts on the man-environment interaction--the plants we domesticate, and the ways we are subtly domesticated in turn. I particularly like the discussion of "wildness" and "wilderness," and some provoking thoughts on intoxication. I thought the apple section was the most interesting, but Pollan reaches his most filligreed and gushing moments in the chapter on the tulip. The potato section was a bit bland, but perhaps that is to be expected. Overall, the book is an interesting romp.

--One man's trash is another man's trumpet. A gallery of weird musical instruments--some are handmade from scratch, some are nicely constructed from materials at hand. The organ-in-the-cave is just amazing. --Romance, coffee, cigarettes, fashion... a photo-essay about Parisians. [via coudal]

--Nothing like the excitement of toppling dominoes. This group gets bonus points for 1) variety of toppled materials [soap?!] and 2) creative use of apartment space. [via do]

--So a gentleman bought a car, drove it home, parked it. The next day it was gone. The dealer took it back: all most sales are final. [via digg]

--Conundrum: how to sustain a religion in which all members are celibate. It's a tough problem evidenced by the fact that soon there will be no more Shakers.

--Kazaa is slowly getting out of its legal quagmire. That's good news for everyone who cares. I have to wonder how it will hold up in the face of mass-market online retailers like iTunes, and allofmp3.com, mostly free services like Last.fm and Pandora, and the torrent venues like BitTorrent. The more the merrier I suppose. The industry moguls can't sue everyone. --Can videogames make you cry? Interesting little article on the potential of the medium. My answer is... umm... *coughyescough*.

--An article in the New York Times points to the decline of independent music stores[$]. The clientele is older and the tastes more esoteric. This seems to match up with my experience in the local store called Wuxtry. It was me, and a couple of 40- and 50-year-old guys. I did manage to walk out with some classic Moby and Sasha on the cheap.

--Here's a trio of guys who walked 600+ miles across the most remote wilderness in the United States without any outside support.

--PC Magazine previews Sony's forthcoming e-book reader, or at least a slightly less-than-full-featured proto. Accepts not only e-books but PDF files and RSS feeds as well. Looks great. This little guy could be wonderful for people like me who are almost always reading something and/or plotting what to read next. --Well, it looks like I've stumbled unknowingly into a series of Russia-related posts. I'll round out the mix with a collection of a couple thousand posters from our dearly-departed USSR. Propaganda, advertising, all kinds of good stuff. On a side note, this is also the only post I've suggested that got Kottke'd, which makes me 1 for 2. For a brief moment, I was a star.

--A fine collection of photos of an old-school Russian submarine base. Looks like it's straight out of a videogame. [via bb]

--Six-and-a-half billion people on this planet. And I'm only one pixel. --Here's an interesting essay & audio piece in the New Yorker on Mozart, written by a guy who has spent some time listening to the master's works--all of them. "A hundred and eighty CDs... reissued in a handsome and surprisingly manageable array of seventeen boxes. During a slow week last winter, I transferred it to an iPod and discovered that Mozart requires 9.77 gigabytes."

--Russia not only has a lock on the club scene, it's also got the biggest hole in the world. I hope they do something cool with it when the mining peters out, like a waterslide. [via digg] Update: I ought to have done some fact-checking. The biggest man-made hole in the world, Bingham Canyon, is actually here in the States. That's 4000 feet of hole-ness outside of Salt Lake City. I still think the Russian one looks cooler, but they are both begging for a water park. Or some trees.

--I'm a sucker for conspiracy theory and revisionist history. The Associated Press reports on a newly-discovered copy of a letter written by Abraham Lincoln, a letter urging governors to support a Constitutional amendment to protect slavery. But then again, as historian Thomas DiLorenzo writes, this isn't really news. I'm not usually much interested in biography, but I'm looking forward to DiLorenzo's new book arriving this fall.

--Says Vanity Fair, no one does late-night like the Russians...try clubbing in Moscow. --"Advertising has forgotten how to be subtle". [via ald]

--All about books in the bathroom. Is it "a symbolic way to replace what’s lost through the act of voiding," or more like "listening to music while you’re vacuuming"?[via pt.i]

--It seems like people like to click on eyes and brightly-colored things. I'm not sure what this means for society in the long run. --USA Today reports some religious demographics in the United States, highlighting those who don't belong to any church. Apparently, Washington is where all the heathens go, with some 25% in the "no religion" category. Close on its heels were most of the other western states in the 20% range. I was surprised that 97% of the respondents in good ol' North Dakota claimed a religion of some form. The Glenmary Research Center also does studies of this type, providing some maps for religious populations, so you can find all the Amish hot spots. [via digg]

--I suppose this is reason enough to go to Hong Kong. What an incredible skyline.

--Emporis went through the trouble to rank skylines drawing on a little formula and a database. Atlanta makes #32. Hong Kong wins easily.

--I've always liked the Georgia font, especially those dropped numerals (1234567890). Lately it has become the "in" font for websites. One student finds that Georgia helps him get better grades. --Steve Pavlina lists "10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job". I've enjoyed his website quite a bit, minus the more out-there, new-agey essays (for example).

--I just love this political cartoon with Al Gore. The set-up (so perfectly in character), the wit, the cynicism... Gets me every time. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to read his book or see the movie yet. Though I've heard that his lecture circuit presentation is a barnburner.

--Composer Philip Glass and IBM teamed up with IBM to create the Glass Engine. I absolutely love the interface used to explore the range of music, allowing you navigate by title, year, style, emotional content, and more. I'd really like to see stand-alone software with the same functionality. I'd add in the ability to customize and create your own categories, and of course personalize the metadata for each of those. My other idea for this would be to run the software through a wall-sized touchscreen...

Some sad news for Atlanta arts today: the Atlanta Ballet will no longer perform with live music. They have decided not to renew the musicians' contracts for the 2006-2007 season, so all performances will be done with recorded music. I'm guessing the musician's union wouldn't budge, and there just ain't that much free money for the arts laying around. It's kind of a bummer. There's always that intangible 'something' that live music brings. Whether it's just the little humming and tooting before the show, or appreciating the not-so-simple act of coordinating dancers and musicians--the orchestra adds a lot to the productions. Two productions I really liked, Dracula and Hamlet [music by Philip Glass] wouldn't have been nearly the same without the live music. It really felt like something special, an Event.

Surely there's another way? I'll bet there are some highly-qualified college students and highly qualified amateurs in the Atlanta area that would be glad to play for much lower fees. Heck, I would have played for free when I was doing percussion back in college. Some of my favorite concerts were the dual-department music/ dance productions. Hopefully, the orchestra will have only a brief absence. Or perhaps it will free the ballet to collaborate with other, smaller ensembles. We shall see. I'm still a bit bummed, though.

--Music is louder than it used to be. These days the record and music broadcast industry is stuck in a louder=catchier mindset. I've also noticed the lack of range and nuance. Outside of the mass pop albums, one that sticks out in my mind is Coldplay's latest. It was really good the first time I listened. But after a few dozen times around the block, it just didn't have the range or staying power of the first two. It felt just a bit stale. --How is your brand? See the trends for names over the past century.