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.
Protein Synthesis Dance
Thanks to Paul B., who says, “Don’t ask me about the biology. And remember, 1971 really occurred in the late ’60s. Downside: No music credits.”
Today’s Countdown
123, 124, 126, 128 129 backers. 52 hours to go.
R. Luke Dubois: “A More Perfect Union”
The Web Urbanist on A More Perfect Union, a project by R. Luke Dubois:
Touching and, at times, hilarious, these keyword maps by R. Luke Dubois associate each town with the terms most often used by locals to describe themselves and their desired partners on their online dating profiles. Dubois joined 21 dating websites and analyzed the language used in 21 million profiles to come up with the data, which was then displayed on maps. Chicagoans say things like “prankster”, “pizza”, “smoker” and “synagogue” while Central Texans are all about “churches”, “boundaries”, “barbecue” and “Madonna” – the latter presumably referring to the Virgin, not the pop star.
1. Make List; 2. Do Stuff
This is a flaming brilliant concept for an exhibition. (It’s based on a recently published book.) At the Morgan Library & Museum through October 2, 2011. Drawn from the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.
The more you study the Morgan exhibition, the more you realize that lists are everywhere, and that list making is an essential human activity — a way not just of keeping track but also of imposing order on what would otherwise be chaos. Your address book, a restaurant menu, the instructions on the MetroCard machine, prescription-drug ads spelling out possible side effects: they’re all lists. So are those annoying thoughts at the back of your head reminding you that you have books overdue at the library and still haven’t sent a thank-you note to Aunt Gert. Artists are no different, no less preoccupied with keeping track, though most of them have better handwriting than the rest of us, and their lists tend to be a little neater.
from the spam
Find a Lady, Email her. Have Fun with Her Tonight!
James Gleick, The Information
I’m only a couple chapters into James Gleick’s The Information, but already it deserves a recommendation. It is both a straightforward history of the transformation toward information culture and a poetic and metaphorical exploration of it. I could give dozens of examples — the chapter on the talking drums of Africa comes to mind — but if the subject of how we came to transform ourselves into thought is interesting to you, you will want the pleasure of unfurling it for yourself.
Previously on clusterflock:
Also, women were the first computers
dream name
Austin Derwatt.
Is this right?
Self, room, house, neighborhood, city, county, state, region, country, continent, hemisphere, planet, solar system, galaxy, local group, super cluster, observable universe, universe.
from the comments
A few of the things I learned this weekend:
1. A certain kind of cheese smells like chlamydia. So I’m told.
2. Josh does not wear eyeliner.
3. Amanda Mae can drink anyone under the table. Anyone.
4. Some people can poop at will.
5. Generic brands cost less than name brands.
6. Horse sex is very straightforward.
892 Unique Ways to Partition A 3×4 Grid
Bad Lip Reading
So I guess this is a thing now.
Philosophy Referee Hand Signals
(via marginal revolution)
from the comments
Cindy and I bought some flowers recently at Central Market here, and one of the bunches was several stems of Pussy Willows. It had one of those plastic strip labels on it that is attached by the whole thing slipping through a slot in itself. Sometimes the slip-through doesn’t extend to the whole length of the label, and in this case it stopped short in a way that caused me to show it to Cindy. As exposed, the label read: Giant Pussy.
When we look back through history, we can see that a lot of different stories all turn out to be stories about information
Kevin Kelly interviews James Gleick about his new book The Information.
Gleick: Shannon said that the notion of information has nothing to do with meaning. A string of bits has a quantity, whether it represents something that’s true, something that’s utterly false, or something that’s just meaningless nonsense. If you were a scientist or an engineer, that idea was very liberating; it enabled you to treat information as a manipulable thing.
Kelly: And how would you define this thing?
Gleick: Scientifically, information is a choice—a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world—writing, painting, music, money.
Kelly: And as we came to understand how information works, that impacted our understanding of how our bodies and minds operate, too, right?
from the comments
Note to norteamericanos: Aggbrig is what we we might call something like a village within something called Wakefield, which is in something called West Yorkshire, which is in England, which . . . you know. But don’t ask me to explain. My postal address is Galena, Illinois, but in truth I live in something called Guilford Township. Before that my postal address was Murphysboro, Illinois, but I lived in Somerset Township. Which all sounds very English to me. Life made more sense when I lived in Chicago.
Ngram This, My Pitbull
Not sure if this has made the rounds on Clusterflock, but google has this addicting new tool called the Ngram viewer which lets you mine the history of language patterns. When you enter words or phrases into the Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how often these words occurred in a “corpus” of some 18 million books (depending on language chosen), by the year the book was published.
[via the sadly soon-to-be-defunct On Language column of NY Times]
How long do animals live?
From a post at Information is Beautiful about the history of information graphics:
Then there’s ISOTYPE — the International System Of TYpographic Picture Education. It was an early infographical form, originated in the 1930s by Austrian philosopher and curator Otto Neurath “as a symbolic way of representing quantitative information via easily interpretable icons.” Again, it’s eye-popping how modern these images look. Despite being fashioned from woodcuts and hand-printing methods. Gorgeous.
(via @GKellyDesigns, via Erstwhile & dear)
You are listening to Los Angeles
Okay. My 24/7 soundtrack. Ambient music and live LAPD police radio.
(Thank you, Mr. Ledgerwood.)
dear clusterflock
What are the names of your hard drives?
Not quite an image out of context.
What you’re looking at is the compressed image of every frame of Requiem For a Dream.
What Not
My friend Paul, who is (yes) a law librarian (in an academic law library) floated this inspired notion:
The Outlook calendar needs a feature to tell where NOT to be at certain times. Two weeks in a row I’ve mistakenly thought I had reference desk duty on Friday at 3:00, and gone out there. I don’t. I’m leaving it to all of you to remind me of this next week.
This idea has legs, don’t you think? I’m already contemplating my Not to Do List.
Mrs. James McLurdy
in front of a structure strung with small animal figures at White City amusement park. Chicago Daily News. 1905.
What more is there to know?
White City was located at East 63rd Street and South King Drive (formerly South Park) in the Greater Grand Crossing community area of Chicago, Illinois.
(Library of Congress/Chicago History Museum.)
If you have Parkinson’s, pee like a girl
Signage spotted in the bathroom of a restaurant somewhere in Puglia (in the heel of Italy) … it says “if you suffer from Parkinson’s disease then sit down”:
I had no idea Parkinson’s was contagious, let alone transmitted through urine.
Also, the yellow sign above it I’m assuming reflects the Arabic influence of Puglia (only in Muslim countries have I noticed footprints on toilet seats).
(Mostly I’m posting this just to beef up the Piss category).
Analogue hyperlinks for a book on dreams.
Maria Fischer. “Traumgedanken.” Final year project at University of Applied Sciences Augsburg. 20 × 28 cm. 76 pages. Japanese binding.
The book “Traumgedanken” (“Thoughts about dreams”) contains a collection of literary, philosophical, psychological and scientifical texts which provide an insight into different dream theories.
To ease the access to the elusive topic, the book is designed as a model of a dream about dreaming. Analogue to a dream, where pieces of reality are assembled to build a story, it brings different text excerpts together. They are connected by threads which tie in with certain key words. The threads visualise the confusion and fragileness of dreams.
(via @pruned)
