Olivo Barbieri takes aerial photographs using a tilt-shift lens, which he says “allows me to choose what I really like in focus: like in a written page, we don’t read [it as an] image but one line at a time.” The result makes city landscapes look like intricate models.
The Sundance Film Festival has over 50 documentary, film, and animation shorts available to watch on their website for free, with more on the way.
Google Earth, for space. Celesita overlays modern telescope and spacecraft photography on a surprisingly detailed working model of the known universe. You can fly around like a flight simulator and change the flow of time — watching cities light up as the night sweeps across Earth one minute and zooming out past the Milky Way the next.
Treemaps are a method for visualizing information that completely and recursively subdivide a given area into cells, where each cell’s area corresponds to certain attributes in the data set. In other words, you can look at an otherwise large set of data, and instantly distinguish trends and patterns from the wealth of information in front of you. (…)
Building on that idea are Michael Balzer and Oliver Deussen from the University of Konstanz, Germany, who use an algorithm based on Voronoi tessellations, a method which allows for organizing data into more complex shapes like shown in the image above, producing a more intuitive and flexible treemap that closely resembles the patterns formed by soap bubbles or living cells.
“Ice Cream Creatures music is vocal, dreamy, experimental electronic glitched up guitar ballads for space children. The sound can range from soft and ambient drones to songs composed only of manipulated vocals to full on drum and bass.”
Understand how and where zip codes are assigned and located in seconds. Just load the website and start typing your zip code; it will narrow your search the more you type and widen it when you hit backspace.
Created by Ben Fry at the MIT Media Laboratory. Check out his website for other interesting information design as well.
These images were taken by Harold Edgerton, seven miles from the blast, with the shutter speed set to 1/1000,000,000 of a second, capturing the explosion before mushroom cloud formation.
I’m freaking crying her comics are so funny. Her blog is just as good.
“Can you imagine what it must have been like back then? Not only were we afraid of cats, and leopards - you had to watch for aerial attacks from these ferocious predators preying on your young.”
short film/sketch
Apple’s newest iPod ad features Wynton Marsalis, fresh colors, and is in my opinion, hands down, the coolest one to date.
Ever wonder what would happen if a power transformer failed and exploded?
What If I told you it’s actually home video of me going Super Saiyan?
Andy Serkis, the voice actor and CGI model for Gollum/Smeagol and King Kong, was on Conan recently and acts out a fight between the two.
I promised ninjas a year ago and by god I will deliver.
Enter the hilarious series and video podcast Ask A Ninja, from Beatbox Giant Productions.
An Ikea TV spot by Spike Jonze that won ad of the year at the International Cannes Lions Advertising Festival in 2003. A little older, but new to me.
Newsvine is a new social news aggregator which combines live Associated Press content and user submitted articles. It’s in a similar vein as CommonTimes [previously] and digg, with all kinds of extra functionality like the ability to view your news submissions as a column, and earn revenue from ads on your column page (ads will be added once Newsvine goes public).
“Fueled by a surging economy (…), China will soon be home to the world’s largest airport, the world’s first fully sustainable city, and the world’s highest outdoor observation deck, to name just a few of its innovative architectural feats.”
“I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theatre of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.”
Plug in some headphones and listen to the following recording. You’ll hear a match being lit, then a matchbox shaken and moved around you — behind and in front, then above and below. I’ve heard clever effects like this before, but nothing so realistic, and nothing that captured vertical space with just left and right channels. You can almost see the sound moving about — but only with headphones — speakers will simulate planar movement but not the full 360 degrees.
Every year since 1998, the Edge Foundation has published one question, and the answers to this question from esteemed scientists and thinkers from around the world. This year’s question is “What is your dangerous idea?”, with 117 original essays in response.