Archive for February, 2005

You’ve never seen a tennis court like this. To promote the Dubai Duty Free Men

Hunter S. Thompson’s wife Anita describes his last day in a very detailed Rocky Mountain News article.

A new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 11% of American adults have iPods or MP3 players. That’s 22 million people.

The Globe-Jungle project by Japanese artist Yasuhiro Suzuki takes a popular Japanese playground structure and harnesses the energy of children playing in the daytime to make an interactive installation piece by night. While kids climb on the Globe-Jungle’s round steel frame, cameras records the children and their surrounds. Then after dark, the the days images are projected on to the structure’s spinning frame.

Fontleech is a nice free font blog.

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe, writes Mathematics student Sam Hughes. He has gone into great detail to debunk the 16 major and several minor ways to destroy the earth. Highlights include blown up by matter/antimatter reaction, gobbled up by strangelets, hurled into the Sun and eaten by von Neumann machines. This last one is so crazy it might just work, Hughes suggests.

35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the trading floor of the International Petroleum Exchange in London yesterday blowing whistles and sounding fog horns in the hopes of stopping oil trading on the first day of the Kyoto Protocol. While they met little resistance from security guards, they were immediately attacked by the young traders themselves. We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs, said one protester. Kicked and punched indiscriminately by the traders, two protesters were sent to the hospital.

Typographica lists their favorite fonts of 2004.

A survey by the Earth Policy Institute says that China is now the world’s largest consumer of grain, meat, coal and steel. And the number of PCs in China is doubling every 28 months.

Jin-Yo Mok and Ahmi Wolf have created a Light Bead Curtain, an interactive sound installation that reacts to a person’s touch by lighting up and emitting a unique sound. People play with the curtain by weaving their hands through it, touching it with their faces, and moving through it with their body.

The New York Brain Bank at Columbia University provides a handy online guide on how to pack a fresh brain for shipment. Step A: Put the fresh brain (A) in the first ziploc bag.

Matt is dancing around the world.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, his wife and collaborator, this morning unveiled The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979-2005. More than 1 million square feet of fabric was hung by the artists over 7,500 gates, each about 16 feet high and at least 5 1/2 feet wide, to create a visual golden river running along 23 miles of Central Park’s footpaths. It will last only 16 days. Watch a video about the piece or a a slide show of photos.

In the past six months the works of more than 20 Seattle artists have been stolen from galleries and homes by a group of artists known as Fillistine. And now the group wants to give the works back by staging a one night show where the artists can come and pick up their art works. The only trouble is that no gallery in town will host the Repo Show that Filistine wants to put on. “We were getting to the point that it was like a hijacked plane, one Filistine member, who goes by Snesley Wipes, says. We wanted a place to release the hostages, but there was no place to land.

Andre Stubbe and Markus Lerner, students at the Berlin University of the Arts, have created a type of curious robot. Their project, called Outerspace, explores its surroundings for light, motion and contact. It interacts with people as they interact with it. Watch as it entertains a crowd.

The Times of London has an incredible piece on the devistating violence in the barrios of Colombia by Martin Amis.

In case you need to, you can now put some shizzle in tha houze.net. Props to gizoogle.com.

It’s Fat Tuesday. If you can’t be in NOLA, then fix yourself a Pimms cup and watch online.

The gold standard in web mapping is now shiny new Google Maps.

In the nearly two years that the U.S. military has been in Bagdad, a dearth of 13-foot tall concrete walls have been added around most sensitive buildings to protect them from suicide bombers. While this has added to the already grey palour of the city, it has also provided a new bounty of blank canvases to some of the Bagdad’s artists. Outside the French embassy, just two doors down from the BBC bureau, there is a profusion of images - wild horses, flying carpets, impossible towers and minarets, as well as a simple scene of an Iraqi farmer in a tractor coming back to his wife and children at the close of the day, describes the BBC’s Roger Hearing. See more photos of the artwork here.