from the spam
Who knows anymore, things are getting realy wierd lately.
dear clusterflock
REM.
BERU F1 Systems’ Factor 001
What happens when F1 designers apply themselves to road bikes?
Without having to comply to the regulations of any particular cycling series, BERU was able to start from scratch and design the bike the way they best saw fit. The carbon fiber monocoque frame is painstakingly built according to the customer’s specifications and measurements and features carbon-ceramic brakes and an LCD touch-screen that displays biometrics and various other readings.
BERU will only produce a few hundred examples of the Factor 001, which may come down more to the time factor: each example takes six engineers a week to build.
chatroulette explained
This video has been making the rounds.
context kills
A study on the effect of context on art.
“Providing contextual information led to participants perceiving examples of the various styles of art as matching less well with their internal standards than when no contextual information was presented,” Bordens writes. In other words, they were more likely to feel a piece conformed to their personal ideas about art — and thus more likely to enjoy or appreciate it — when it was presented without interpretation.
(via marginal revolution)
Allow myself to introduce . . . myself!
Former Dallas Maverick Marquis Daniels commissioned this homage to himself.
Forged in the fires of Mordor from 1,300 grams (or 2.9 pounds) of 14-karat gold, this head is an exact replica of Daniels or possibly Whoopi Goldberg. Either way, it’s both amazing and terrifying.
games designed by artists
That is to say, non-programming artists:
Here’s an interesting curveball, though: what if someone who isn’t a game developer is let loose on tools this powerful? Sjoerd “Hourences” De Jong, better known as the guy behind the splendid Unreal 3 mod (and soon to become commercial and standalone) The Ball, has been leading a Unreal Development Kit course at Stockholm’s fascinating FutureGames Academy. The course lasted six weeks, all-in: three of tuition, and three spent creating games. The clincher? None of the students had any game design experience. Moreover, no programmers were allowed – only designers and artists. They couldn’t possibly make a game on their own, could they? They bloody well could. Several, in fact.
Some of the videos in the link look just fantastic.
spam name
Dick Gay.
Faking It
Among the many trends covered by the NYT Freakonomics blog, this is certainly one of their most interesting:
We are agnostics living deep in the heart of Texas and our family fakes Christianity for social reasons. It’s not so much for the sake of my husband or myself but for our young children. We found by experience that if we were truthful about not being regular church attenders, the play dates suddenly ended. Thus started the faking of the religious funk.
Do our resident Texans attest?
Weekly Picture 177
Shrub with Snow, Office Max, Austin, TX 2.23.2010
Gruber at Macworld
That little girl from Texas
People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.
(via Austin Kleon)
Fire On Ice
A girls of curling calender. Some of the photography is NSFW.
one pad to rule them all
Alan Kay, a designer at the legendary 1970s Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, on the iPad:
When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.
Shit William Shatner Says
Twitter sensation Shit My Dad Says is becoming a TV pilot with William Shatner set to play the larger-than-life dad at the center of it.
What will they call the show if the pilot makes it?
reptiles of concern
Next month is Python hunting season in Florida.
The special season, created by executive order, will allow anyone with a hunting license and a $26 management area permit to take reptiles of concern — including Indian python; reticulated python; northern and southern African rock python; amethystine or scrub python; green anaconda; and Nile monitor lizard. Hunters may use rifles, pistols or shotguns, but no centerfire rifles. They may not bring reptiles out alive and must report all they kill to the FWC within 36 hours.
Loudon Wainwright III – One Man Guy
Ditto.
Plan Grotesque by Nikola Djurek
A new typeface available at Typotheque.
The T
An acquaintance of mine took this photo on the T, which is Boston-speak for “subway.”
Mimeo and the Kleptopus King
Shaun Inman, developer of Fever, has a new game in development:
Mimeo (even the name) started as a Mario clone with a twist: instead of power-ups affecting the player, they affect the entire game world. A story and mythos quickly developed. The so-called Mimeoverse consists of two 16-bit demiverses sharing 32-bits between them. When the evil Kleptopus King, an 8-bit octopus with an inferiority complex, discovers a portal into Mimeo’s realm and begins to syphon off its bits, Mimeo is sucked in and downsampled to 2-bit. So begins Mimeo’s quest to restore balance to the demiverses.
Mimeo collects carts to upscale himself and the game world and enables switching between acquired resolutions to solve platforming puzzles. He will find guidence from nearest-neighbor and native rabbit Gaido. Collected bits translate into 1ups. Disposing of certain types of enemies leaves behind hoodies that grant Mimeo special abilities. The Quantum Glove puts Mimeo’s bits in a state of quantum supposition; enemies can’t hit him but they can’t dodge him either. “It’s so bad.”
No, We’re Investigating YOU
The Church of Scientology has hired a crack journalism team to investigate the St. Petersburg Times, which ran some damning features on them last year:
[A] Pulitzer Prize winner, a former “60 Minutes” producer, and the former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors — are taking the church’s money to examine the paper’s conduct.
The reporters hired for the study are Russell Carollo, who won a 1998 Pulitzer for Dayton, Ohio’s Daily News for a series on medical malpractice in the U.S. military, and Christopher Szechenyi, an Emmy-winning former television producer who has worked for the Boston Globe’s Web site.
pepper
As our landscape has gone from crisp frozen white to gray, brown, rust, charcoal, dripping with rain and the slush that gets over the edge of your shoes, leaving you with wet socks, and more freezing rain in the forecast… I look inside the house for something brighter.
state of the union
Hate to tell you that blacks were not allowed into combat intell 1947, that fact. World War II ended in 1945. So all that feel good, one black man killing two dozen Nazi, is just that, PC bull.
Um
correction
An earlier version of this post misquoted Mr. Remnick on his comparison between the book and a New Yorker article he had previously written. He said the book would not be a “pumped up” version of the article; he did not say that it would not be a “pimped out” version of the article.
