Mapping Twitter Traffic
Eric Fischer has been mapping Twitter traffic in major cities, resulting in beautiful cartographic representations of our information flow. It’s all faintly reminiscent of blood vessels or a network of neurons. I think there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
(via Animal New York)
Speaking of Kottke …
He has a great post up about John Tyler’s grandsons still being alive, which is insane to think about seeing as how Tyler was the 10th President of the US and was born in 1790.
He suggests coining a term for someone or something that bridges a huge span of time, in this case almost two hundred years of history.
There’s also this 1956 game show appearance of a Lincoln assassination eyewitness and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935) shaking hands during his lifetime with both John Quincy Adams (b 1767) and John F Kennedy (d 1963), one man spanning 200 years of American history.
Jason suggests “history bridges”. I suggested “minding the history gap“. His is more of a noun, I suppose mine is more of a verb — as in John Tyler’s grandson is minding the history gap. Neither really hits the nail on the proverbial head, so to speak. But doesn’t there need to be a coined phrase for this sort of phenomenon.
Phonograms
Patrick Feaster studies the culture of early phonography (the recording and reproduction of sound) and blogs at Phonozoic, where I’ve been hanging out for the past hour or so. At the 2011 conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Feaster shared “Phonogram Images on Paper: 1250-1950.” You can listen to his presentation and download slides here. Just scroll down a little ways and you’ll find the links.
(via Excavated Shellac)
The Titanic Taxonomy of Wrestler Names
From Pop Chart Lab: A celebration of 382 noms de guerre from the world of professional wrestling.
dear clusterflock
What are the rules?
Beautiful Geological Maps of Volcanoes
This one’s Crater Lake.
The colors on geological maps represent different rock units of different ages. With an active lifespan of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years, volcanoes produce many layers of ash and flows of lava that will end up as different colors on the map. And with the circular shape of many volcanoes and the radiating rock units, the maps can really be striking.
from the comments
I don’t mean to be a troll here or anything, but one does not need a penis in order to fuck and/or pee.
List of science-fiction films
Andrew tweeted this, and I thought it was worth passing on. A Wikipedia science-fiction films list of lists.
Sign Language
From a photo-graphic of various hand signals the maitre d’ at New York’s Eleven Madison Park uses to signal the waiters.
exotic hand gestures from around the globe
Meaning: “You are a dickhead”
Used in: United KingdomBring the fingers and thumb together as if holding a phallus near the forehead.
From Romana Lefevre’s Rude Hand Gestures of the World, with photographs by Daniel Castro, The Atlantic put together a handy clutch of rude gestures to carry with you wherever you go.
(thanks, Casey)
quote out of context
It’s not clear how many klutzes want to notify their insurers that a doctor visit was a W22.02XA, “walked into lamppost, initial encounter” (or, for that matter, a W22.02XD, “walked into lamppost, subsequent encounter”).
(via the browser)
it needs to stop
Click to enlarge. (thanks, Rich)
The Oracle
Dear Google,
How are you? I am fine. I have a couple of queries, so back the hell off with the auto-fill answers for right now, okay?
So, seriously, how do you know so much? If I could access useless information as quickly as you do, I would get totally laid. Lightning-quick responses to trivia questions are an absolute panty-dropper—everybody understands that women can’t resist a guy who can do that.
from the spam
2. Miller Light can sit in the garage safely until the next storm.
What does Google mean by evil?
Aaron Swartz lays it out clearly, it’s about user experience:
Now part of the joke is that Google seems to be using it rather loosely. If you look at their examples of evil deeds, they seem rather mundane compared to cackling supervillains and mass murderers. They specifically name three: only showing relevant ads, not using pop-ups or other annoying gimmicks, and not selling actual search results.
Hardly the stuff of comic books. But what do these three have in common? They’re all instances of refusing to make things worse for your users in order to make more money. Perhaps that still seems like a mundane conception of evil, but I think it gets at something important. Evil isn’t just about doing terrible things — it’s about doing terrible things for bad reasons. The evil villain cackles and brags about how they’re on the side of evil — they explicitly oppose doing good. And this definition of evil is all about that: if you’re working against your own users, you must have crossed the line and joined the other side.
(via everybody)
The London Riots
Word.
Via Alan Phelan, who wrote: 21.40 Matthew Moore, the Telegraph’s assistant news editor, filmed this extraordinary speech by a fearless West Indian woman in Hackney, East London. Contains obscene language.
Artifice and foam rubber
In fact, so much artifice and foam rubber is often used to create the sexually alluring woman that it’s sometimes difficult to know where the lady ends and the foam rubber begins.
Via dangerous minds by way of Roger Ebert.
cinemetrics
Graphic designer and creative coder Frederic Brodbeck has analyzed movies to create a visual “fingerprint” for them, analyzing information such as editing structure, color, speech or motion and transforming them into graphic representations that can be compared side by side.
if the world’s population lived in one city
(via @mattyglesias)
from the comments
This has always been my approach. I see little point in filling my mind with meaningless facts. It sometimes plays out in odd ways, though. I’ll get the same question repeatedly in a crossword puzzle, and each time I won’t remember it–I have to work around it to learn the answer (again). I don’t see this as inefficient, though. My many years in libraries have shown me that access to information is key, not ownership of it. I’m convinced that this practice on my part is why I seem able to do so much mental work in a concentrated period of time. My mind is free to do what it does best, without having to navigate a bunch of obstacles.
None of this is to say that there isn’t much knowledge that we should hold to. It just has to be relevant to something of importance in your life. Like my ability to quote Beavis & Butthead. That’s important.
dear clusterflock
Show us your desktop.
density and difference
Mule Design Studio compares Twitter and Google+ designs.
from the comments
Oh, and I was bored so I wanted to rank the different clusterflock categories in order of frequency, and see how “boners” stacked up. I learned a whole lot about Excel’s ranking function (in particular how to work around its frustratingly unorthodox method of ranking ties) as well as a new cure for boredom. I won’t list all 219 categories, but here are the top-five rankings for the most and least frequently used categories as of this post:
Most Used
1st – uncategorized (1789)
2nd – video (1650)
3rd – music (1631)
4th – history (1528)
5th – photography (1523)Least Used
1st – 3-way tie between boogers, fish poop, and honk (2)
2nd – 2-way tie between sleep and tits (4)
3rd – watercolour (7)
4th – 2-way tie between clusterflock book club and Meet the Apostles (9)
5th – illustration (11)FYI: boners came in 120th out of 177 (tagged 133 times)
world’s greatest pop-up menu
(via I’m sorry I forgot)
Everything is a Remix – Part 3
Part 3 of Kirby Ferguson’s amazing series Everything is a Remix is out. As far as I’m concerned, it’s even better than parts 1 and 2.
