From 3AM on Wednesday November 25, 2009, until 3AM the following day (US east coast time), WikiLeaks is releasing over half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

The messages are being broadcast "live" to the global community — sychronized to the time of day they were sent. The first message is from 3AM September 11, 2001, five hours before the first attack, and the last, 24 hours later.

Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center

The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism and war.

That's right - this is where the magic happens.

This is where you get to find out more, read the rules (they're pretty awesome) and sign up to take part in what may be the biggest Secret Santa in the history of the world - but is indubitably the coolest.

A great article about our desire to recognize faces in objects:

“Pareidolia” “[a] psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.”

Jeans makers Cheap Monday will open their first store ever in Copenhagen. The 400 square meter store is designed by uglycute and will offer complete Cheap Monday collections as well as a screen printing studio producing limited edition prints. The brand was recently acquired by H&M and the first collection of its new head designer Ann-Sofie Back will, when ready, be previewed in the new store.

French designer Patrick Nadeau has created an installation for Italian brand Boffi, consisting of hanging domes covered in living plants.

Called Rainforest, the installation comprises a series of Corian frames held together with cable ties.

A type of hanging Spanish moss called Tillandsias usneoïdes, which doesn’t need soil, is draped over these frames.

The domes are suspended from the ceiling and used to light the Boffi product displays.

The installation was displayed during Designer’s Days in Paris, the London Design Festval and Milano Design-in-the-City.

More on the new Issey Miyake concept store

New concept shop “24 ISSEY MIYAKE” Shops opened at deparment stores in Tokyo. It offers a brightly coloured selection of items chosen from each of the Issey Miyake lines, alongside new, original items specially created for the shop.

Each item comes in 20 different colours, and the shop’s lineup is renewed every two months. The overall concept derived from the Japanese convenience store, with its constant state of dynamic, fluid change.

To highlight this association, the shop’s name is ‘24′, and its logo features the kind of stripes you might expect to find on the facade of a convenience store. The packaging, too, comes from food packaging. The idea is that as the items change, the shop itself will change character dramatically.

Since the products themselves are so brightly coloured, we used no colour whatsoever for the shop itself.

Copenhagen studio WE architecture have completed the interior of a tea shop in Copenhagen, Denmark, which features an image of a teapot picked out in back-lit perforations on the counter and shelves.In the evening, the Teapot glows in the dark, attracting people’s attention.In the shop WE has designed a scents wall, where all the 40 different tea varieties is exhibited in small glass flasks, so the customers can smell their way to his or hers favorite tea.

PICS INSIDE

Construction has begun on a combined residential project and market hall in Rotterdam, designed by Dutch architects MVRDV.Called Rotterdam Market Hall, the building will comprise 228 apartments forming a tunnel over the market hall, glazed at each end.The market hall itself will house 100 market stalls, shops and restaurants.1,200 parking spaces and a supermarket will be located underground.Each apartment will feature a balcony on the exterior of the building and a window onto the market hall below.

It's a unique concept according to its creators, a hotel in the French town of Nantes is offering the chance for people to become a hamster.

For 99 euros ($148.10) a night, you can eat hamster grain, run in a giant wheel and sleep in hay stacks in what is called the "Hamster Villa."

The Japanese retail brand MUJI and LEGO teamed up to develop a set of 4 different boxes. Inside those boxes you’ll find the classic LEGO bricks but also a few sheets of paper. No big deal. But when you also have the right punch hole tool, you can combine both to create something new. I really like this concept. You can order a set here (follow the link - when you speak sone Japanese).

German sports brand Adidas is planning to make "one-euro shoes" to offer to people who can't afford to buy shoes, with pilot production to begin next year in Bangladesh.

The project has been inspired by Nobel Peace Prize winner Huhammad Yunus, who suggested the social business project to the company.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool in action. It’s not much to look at, but it has the power to safely guide migrant workers from Mexico to the US and back.

Foodspotting

is a visual local guide that lets you find dishes, not just restaurants, thanks to foodspotters who report sightings of foods they love.

MAKE Japan is having a meet up, check out this iPhone instrument! It looks like 3 iPhones mounted to a laser cut body and the player "blows" to produce music!

PSFK stopped by the annual Wired Holiday Pop-up store in NYC. This time the venue moved to a former gallery space in the Meatpacking district. As in past years, products are presented in vignettes based on a theme. Adjacent to the door is a green products area dominated by a Zero S Supermoto EV motorcycle. Other areas present fashion, gaming, outdoor, and of course electronics products. In a nod to the location, smaller products are presented on circular industrial conveyor racks. Overall the product range is either on the expensive side (several hundred – several thousand dollars) or fairly affordable (under $50). If you happen to be in NYC before December 27th, the Wired Store is a good place to stop and check out lots of the new products blogged about in the past year.

The 20th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray and DVD of Say Anything came out yesterday, and to mark the occasion, numerous men with lots of free time dressed up in trench coats and hoisted boomboxes above their heads and marched throughout New York City serenading people with the strains of Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," and a cover version of the same song by The Lloyd Dobler Effect. Check them out in the gallery below.

Artists that produce photorealistic sculptures, for the most part, aim to show us our bodies and life as it really is.

Technically, artists who strive for a high resolution level of detail in painting or sculpture are called “hyperrealists”, although all hyperrealists are also considered to be photorealists.

Every detail is slavishly recreated as close to the real life model as possible, even if the sculpture is larger than the original scale.

Photorealistic sculptors create truly amazing sculptures that will make you feel wonder, revulsion and the sense of looking in someone else’s mirror.

In this post we feature sculptors Ron Mueck, Evan Penny, Jamie Salmon, Duane Hanson, Sam Jinks and Adam Beane who produce sculpture that seems alive in every detail, right down to veins and rashes on skin. This compilation should give you a cross section of modern photorealistic sculpture.

In the summer of 2007, a team of Stanford graduate students dropped a mouse into a plastic basin. The mouse sniffed the floor curiously. It didn’t seem to care that a fiber-optic cable was threaded through its skull. Nor did it seem to mind that the right half of its motor cortex had been reprogrammed.

One of the students flipped a switch and intense blue light shone through the cable into the mouse’s brain. Instantly, the mouse began running in counterclockwise circles.
Then the light went off, and the mouse stopped. Sniffed. Stood up on its hind legs and looked directly at the students as if to ask, “Why the hell did I just do that?” And the students whooped and cheered like this was the most important thing they’d ever seen.
Because it was the most important thing they’d ever seen. They’d shown that a beam of light could control brain activity with great precision. The mouse didn’t lose its memory, have a seizure, or die. It ran in a circle. Specifically, a counterclockwise circle.

Stella Artois is crafted with centuries of brewing tradition. But there is an equally rich tradition in how the beer is served. To celebrate this, Stella Artois commissioned a group of New York City painters to bring the pouring ritual to life high above the city streets. Step by step, they are painting the perfect pint.

DDB Worldwide has released a “yellow paper” to inspire Planners (and advertising/brand marketing professionals at large) to “unlock the simple, yet untapped” idea that could mean the difference between a wounded recession casualty and a brand that evolves along with consumers where they currently are – figuratively and literally.

Starbucks is testing a new logo and store design in London. Chris Osburn spotted the new store and took these photos. It’s interesting to see the return to the old style logo, the manual coffee machines and retro furniture. The store is on London’s Conduit Street.

PICS INSIDE

Have you ever slept at the airport? I sure haven’t. The very idea scares the pee out of me. Some people do, though, and those people are crazy. For those of us who want the convenience of sleeping at the airport, without so much of the crazy, there’s these amazing things right here! “Sleep Box” they go by the name of, designed by Arch Group for those who need private time in strange, unfriendly places!

The box itself is 2mx1.4mx2.3m. The main bed is 2×0.6m, equipped with an automatic system which changes the linens (think Fifth Element.) The bed is a soft, flexible strip of polymer and pulp tissue.

Ventilation system, sound alerts, built-in LCD television, wireless internet access, power sockets, extra luggage space under lounges. Payment is made in time, anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours.

Even amid the recession and real estate bust, businesses are still investing in architecture. Their goals: energy efficiency, heightened productivity, and, not incidentally, providing an economic catalyst for their neighboring economies. The eight winners of this year's BusinessWeek/Architectural Record awards include the Waltham (Mass.) office of software maker Autodesk (ADSK) (seen here), which is intended to encourage collaboration among employees and clients, and Barbie Shanghai, Mattel's (MAT) first flagship store for its iconic doll and meant to introduce the brand to Chinese consumers.

London based street artist Decapitator recently hit up New York City with his headless ad-intervention artwork.

Bicycle commuters in Washington D.C. have a striking new Bike Transit Center to use at Union Station. The facility features 150 parking spaces, a repair shop, changing room and bike rentals. At a dollar a day, or $100 for a yearly pass, it’s an affordable service that should help encourage green travel in the city.

Would that be accepted as a defintion on the modern hipster? e.g. "Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don't care — Time, July 2009"

Sprezzatura is an Italian word originating from Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”It is the ability of the courtier to display “an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them.”Sprezzatura has also been described “as a form of defensive irony: the ability to disguise what one really desires, feels, thinks, and means or intends behind a mask of apparent reticence and nonchalance.”

Because that closes a somewhat important part of the Internet culture!

Speculation about the author’s identity has been rife for six long years. Belle is the blogger who was never busted, though nearly every media organisation in Britain has thrown its resources at outing her. Was she really a call girl for 14 months? Was she writing fiction? Was she a man? Or was she, variously and among others, the chick-lit novelist Isabel Wolff, the journalist Toby Young or Rowan Pelling, former editor of the Erotic Review? And so it went on, FOR YEARS. And still nobody knows. Who is Belle? Is she even real?

She’s real, all right, and I’m sitting on the bed next to her. Her name is Dr Brooke Magnanti. Her specialist areas are developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology. She has a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science and is now working at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health.

A great review of what's auto tune and its history (so far) in music.

More on Guantanamo businesses from Wikipedia

In 1986, Guantanamo became host to Cuba's first and only McDonald's restaurant;[25][26] currently, the restaurant is seeking an assistant manager and offering special benefits including payment of half of the successful applicant's monthly rent and utilities.[27] A Subway sandwich shop was opened in November 2002.[28][29] Other fast food outlets have followed. These fast food restaurants are on base, and not accessible to Cubans. It has been reported that prisoners cooperating with interrogations have been rewarded with Happy Meals from the McDonald's located on the mainside of the base.[30]

In 2004, Guantanamo opened a combined KFC & A&W restaurant at the bowling alley and a Pizza Hut Express at the Windjammer Restaurant.[31] There is also a Taco Bell, and an ice cream shop that sells Starbucks coffee. All the restaurants on the installation are franchises owned and operated by the Department of the Navy.

The NYT's The Lede blog digs deeper, uncovers an In These Times article, and reminds us that there's also a "Starbucks, a McDonalds, a combined Subway-Pizza Hut, a Wal-Mart-like big box store called the Nex and a gift shop" on the Guantanamo base.

From the Las Vegas Sun: It’s the ultimate advertising vehicle, said Larry Beard, marketing director for Déjà Vu Showgirls. Having run the truck up and down the Strip late at night and into the wee hours for only the past 11 days, he claims it has doubled business at the all-nude Déjà Vu and Little Darlings gentlemen’s clubs.

“It’s just a great idea that really works,” Beard said.

The reaction, and effectiveness of the advertising, “has been phenomenal,” said Fred Robertson, whose company, Rolling Ads, provides the truck. “Most people don’t pay attention to billboards. We go out and people are just waiting to see it.”

Stephen Colbert VS Miracle Whip: Tonight.
Colbert insults MW, MW strikes back by placing an ad on every commercial break on tonight's Colbert Report. In a newspaper ad, the marketing team of MW (see the link) "We're raising Hell, man." I love that!