Camera Lens Bracelet
In the Swissmiss products serie…
(tags: culture products fashion)

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HP Advanced Photo Paper: Ripped
HP advanced Photo Paper guarantees true-to-life image quality. To highlight this benefit, a standee was customised to give the impression that someone actually walked through a gigantic piece of paper and caused it to tear.

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Artist of the day: The Upstarts

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Mindsmerizing.. Gin, Television and the social surplus. Basically:

“The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. […] It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
[…]
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. […] For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time. And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. […] And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis.
[…]
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year.

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Ads from I believe in advertising
Bic Shave
Centraal Beheer Insurance
Adidas with a big project.

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“Yo Yo Ma and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra will soon submit to a robotic overlord in the form of Honda’s Asimo, which will pick up a baton to conduct the orchestra.

The irony of a Japanese automaker trotting out an advanced robot in the Motor City will likely be lost on most of the attendees…”

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Color changing fabric depending of the heat of the body: AZFN

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Tanya Devereaux: “I will make love with every virgin who defends the Internet.”

“This is not the first time that Ms Devereaux has offered up her orifices for a good cause. Last year she put 40,000 blowjobs on the negotiating table when she ran for a seat in the Belgian senate, as a protest against other politicians’ claims that they would create 400,000 jobs.”

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Earth as art, from the NASA

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Artist of the day: Heiruspecs

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Not that useful but def visually great.. google meets apple coverflow: searchme

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Some more on McDo: “Outdoor posters were turned into large interactive push puzzles that consumers could solve in order to “sort your head”. This was done to promote McDonald’s Large Coffee for only 1 Euro.”

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Copyranter is back.

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A rather good article on Ning and viral expansion loops: “Significantly, viral-loop networks don’t create content — they organize it. They provide an environment that is, in theory, almost infinitely scalable, and then rely on the wisdom of crowds to create or aggregate masses of material to fill it. The more people, the more content, the more powerful the lure for those sitting on the sidelines. “The viral adoption model” is the “cheapest way to grow an audience,” says Union Square Ventures’ Wilson. At no time in history has it been possible to market to so many by starting with so little.”

[…] “[In Ning]…every network creator is a user and any user can become a network creator. Say someone sets up an Angelina Jolie net with 10 members, which grows as each person draws in others. Then an adoption site breaks off, a Jon Voight hate group rises up, and a Brad Pitt love club forms.”

///and the critics of the article

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Businessweek has a good article about vulture investors, particularly Philip Falcone of HBC: The Midas of Misery

“…by early 2007 he had determined that the housing market was on the verge of falling apart. His on-the-ground knowledge prompted him to dump his housing-related holdings and aggressively short any bonds backed by mortgages with even a whiff of subprime financing. He devoted nearly 60% of his portfolio to the bet, telling investors during one conference call that the sector was “completely overvalued.”

Which led me to those standing: the highest paid hedge funds managers in 2007…which is way beyond imagination..

John Paulson (Paulson & Co.) — 2007 earnings: $3.7 billion
George Soros (Soros Fund Management) — 2007 earnings: $2.9 billion
James Simons (Renaissance Technology) — 2007 earnings: $2.8 billion
Philip Falcone (Harbinger Capital Partners) — 2007 earnings: $1.7 billion
Kenneth Griffin (Citadel Investment Corp.) — 2007 earnings: $1.5 billion
…
More from ill magazine

“When we published our inaugural list, in 2002, Soros led the way with $700 million, a showing that this year would have put him at No. 9. Back then it took $30 million to crack the top 25; this year, $360 million.”

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Beermenus lets you, if you in NYC, search for bars by beer names. So practical!

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I’m pointing to Good Magazine each week or so and I was happy to learn that 100% of the amount received from their subscription go to fund NGOs and such.

“Let the secret be known—most magazines do not make money on subscriptions or newsstand sales. In fact, they spend a ton of money just to get people to buy copies or subscribe. So we came up with the idea of giving away all subscription fees and allowing subscribers to choose which organization they would like to support. In other words, we’re putting our money where our mouth is and empowering those who are driving change in the world.”

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Artist of the day is: Santogold

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Kanye West is my main source for today. I mean, you could directly have gone to his blog, but again, why?

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German street performer Johan Lorbeer’s “Still-Life” Performance where he, hum, levitates

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Helga Steppan color compositions remind me of the article about people dressing only in one color that I featured here some weeks ago

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This is Olivier Gregoir Pump Seating, in the same kind of an idea as the suitcase couch I posted some time back

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“Vienna’s excellent Architekturzentrum will be hosting a new photography show, opening this Wednesday, April 24, called Sinai Hotels.
With images by Sabine Haubitz and Stefanie Zoche of Haubitz+Zoche, the show looks at “the concrete skeletons of five-star hotel complexes” abandoned on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. ”

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Young me / Now me is a collection of pictures, one of a young person and the other one now. Which makes me think it’s a pretty self-explainatory title…

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McDonald’s employees had their uniforms redesigned not so long ago. A list of other stuff that McDo is doing to get an edge. From Agenda inc.

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Artist of the day is: Gonzales

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Ad:
Jeep: Traffic lights

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Why New York City’s Iconic Pizza Is So Tough to Replicate
“I’m not comfortable attributing a pizza’s quality to gestalt — it sounds like something a California pizzeria would list as a topping. But Batali’s theory makes sense to David Tisi, a food-development consultant who has spent much of his career studying pizza.”

I think that sentence is funny: who has spent much of his career studying pizza. Hey Chip, waddayado? - Well, you know, I’ve been studyin pizza for the last 25 years ….

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Text Trends, which is. awesome.

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A woman’s diet around the time of conception may influence the gender of her baby, research suggests.

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Data Visualisation Blogs You Might Not Know About

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By blogtime, this is old news but Copyranter is closing down. From the comments: “I blame every shithead who didn’t send tips, including my self. I feel this is the end of a terrible abusive relationship. The lazy, depraved assholes who took Copyranter for granted, are now complaining about him leaving us becuase he finally decided to leave our ass in trailor park, while we try to salvage it by crying “baby, you know I still love you, I didn’t mean it, but you know how you drive me up the wall”

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You can now get drunk in style: “The chemical-cocktail movement grew out of a 2005 symposium sponsored by Dutch distiller Bols. In attendance were Hervé This, the father of molecular gastronomy, and eight of the world’s top bartenders. They created drinks including a boozy ice cream using liquid nitrogen and an ice-cube-like gin-and-tonic jelly. This month Cointreau is introducing a kit to convert its orange liqueur into caviar pearls. Moët & Chandon has created a line of Champagne drinks with foams and caviars that add fruity flavor to bubbly. Science never tasted so good.”

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Interview with Nicholas Felton, famous for its annual report on his life. About being a succesfull freelancer: “If you’ve got a day job and you’re not doing freelance or personal projects at night, you’re not doing enough. If you’re working for yourself, and not working on the weekends, then you’re basically standing still. Experience and a solid body of work takes time to accumulate, and there’s only one way to get there.”

Talking about Felton, he created this piece with fellow designer Matt Mason, called Hard times, for Wetellstories (which has been twice featured here since its beginning…) which is covering internet, teens, consumption, … and is roughly based on Hard times by Charles Dickens: “‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.’”

Damn I love that project. Way too go Penguin!

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“To commemorate World AIDS day on December 1st the South African newspaper Cape Argus used their page numbers on the top of every page of the newspaper to educate the public on statistics relating to the AIDS pandemic in South Africa. All the statistics were collected from UNICEF and the South African Department of Health.”

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Another great product from Swissmiss: Dust your floor: “Wood, tile, and vinyl—virtually any floor is easier to dust when all you do is walk across it. Just think how much easier it to maneuver your foot around than a cumbersome mop.”

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Newmindspace, I guess an equivalent to ImprovEverywhere, organized the 2008 NYC Pillow Fight (video here). Which also lead me to this map of the Freeze events across the world (the 70 of them….)

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Public acceptatnce of evolution theory in 34 countries

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Transportation:
Enthusiast spends years building 30ft dream boat - but it is now too big to take out of garden: “It’s not as though I’m some idiot who got the measurements wrong and is now stuck with a boat he can’t move,” he said.”I knew from the start that once the boat was finished I would face some problems getting it out of the garden. ”
That’s way better…

Designer Ben Wilson has produced a monowheel - a cycle where the rider sits inside a large, spokeless wheel.

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No longer Yuppies, they are now “Arppies” - that’s short for asset rich, penny poor. They just traded in their Porsches for property, their freedom for families and their spendthrift habits for school fees… Where once they were young and upwardly mobile, now they’re middle aged and standing still.

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“Head & Shoulders gives the Argentinean consumer a rude awakening: a bird’s-eye view of his or her scalp, right in front of a dandruff shampoo display. When shoppers stand under an aerial camera, they can view the top of their heads on a TV screen in front of them and, if they don’t like what they see, reach out and grab a bottle.”

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In local cities all over Europe are people already paying attention to the giant AEG-Electrolux posters, which are measuring and displaying ambient noise levels. In London, the kids are deliberately shouting at the poster to raise the noise levels! AEG - Electrolux and blowUP are hosting this campaign to raise awareness on the issue of noise in and outside of the people’s homes and offer AEG laundry products as a solution to minimise it.

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MSNBC Reported today that online ad spend will overtake TV in 2009 in the UK.

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There was a debate last wednesday between Obama and Clinton. It was really liked by the press:
” Will Bunch (Philadelphia Daily News) - “By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, [ABC] disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself.”
More quotes here.

…an open letter from more than 40 journalists lamenting the petty, nearly substance-free debate ABC hosted on Wednesday night in Philadelphia.: “The questions asked by Mr. Stephanopoulos and Mr. Gibson were a disgrace, and the subsequent attempts to justify them by claiming that they reflect citizens’ interest are an insult to the intelligence of those citizens and ABC’s viewers. Many thousands of those viewers have already written to ABC to express their outrage.”

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A digital photography project has started in which a snapshot of London is taken every five seconds from the banks of the River Thames.

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Star wars - Empire Strikes back sweded and a list of sweded movies

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Flogos makes logos in the sky, like, clouds, but it’s logos. I’m wondering, since the site’s so 90ies (and the slogan so cheezy…), if it’s true or not …

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The BBC launched Thread, a magazine/site for the eco-conscious. I like the navigation.

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The Droste effect is a Dutch term for a specific kind of recursive picture[1], one that in heraldry is termed mise en abyme. An image exhibiting the Droste effect depicts a smaller version of itself in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. This smaller version then depicts an even smaller version of itself in the same place, and so on. Only in theory could this go on forever, practically it continues only as long as the resolution of the picture allows, which is relatively short, since each iteration exponentially reduces the picture’s size. It is a visual example of a strange loop, a self-referential system.

More examples

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From Kottke.org:
RealScoop’s software analyzes statements made by public figures in audio or video and plots the results on a scale of believability that runs from believable to highly questionable.

“For instance […] here”s Bill Clinton’s infamous “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” statement. The Clinton audio and associated metering is really pretty good…it spikes in all the right places.”

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Yummy: “Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts’ project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock . saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion.”

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Kellog’s Cereals launched a street wear clothing line. -Not- kidding. Adage is making fun of them, just a bit: “And, yes, the model is wearing a Toucan Sam shirt as well as black baggy jeans sporting Froot Loops branding on the back pockets. I’m finding it really hard to decide between the Froot Loops line and the Honey Smacks line.”

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Sea Cowboys. If you think you’re job is not exciting enough, or not well-paid enough. Don’t read this. And when you thought you knew most of the jobs opportunity …

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Trendwatching.com trend of the month is: Status stories. “As more brands (have to) go niche and therefore tell stories that aren’t known to the masses, and as experiences and non-consumption-related expenditures take over from physical (and more visible) status symbols, consumers will increasingly have to tell each other stories to achieve a status dividend from their purchases. Expect a shift from brands telling a story, to brands helping consumers tell status-yielding stories to other consumers.”

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Johnny Lee hacking the Wii at TED Talks

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Have a great weekend!

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