Yes We Can

Rosa sat so that Martin could march; Martin marched so that Obama could run.

Kara Walker

Kara Walker is an artist whose style is reminiscent of my own artistic habits. She primarily makes silhouette art dealing with the culture of slavery, and has become quite controversial as a result.

She paints large, black silhouettes on tall white museum walls, and occasionally lights the rooms in unexpected ways. Her figures are simply amazing...they are black silhouettes of slaves, but they have so much life and vigor to them. They are stylized just enough to make them look more alive than real people, but not so much that they do not seem realistic.

It's all definitely worth a look.

Stephen Hawking Facts

You thought Chuck Norris Facts and Bruce Schneier Facts were cool? Well you obviously haven't seen Stephen Hawking Facts.

Yes, I made this. Not alone. Yes, I'm promoting it relentlessly. I know. Get over it. Just lol, please.

I Love the World

Quick post: awesome Discovery Channel commercial....please proceed to turn Boom De Yada into a meme.

Also, as my friend Sean pointed out notice the Stephen Hawking cameo at the end for epic lulz.

As linked to by this XKCD comic, another awesome thing in itself.

Where the Hell is Matt?

This one has been around the internet quite a bit recently, but nevertheless, I think it's awesome. And as this blog is about awesome things, he deserves a place.

Matt, of Where the Hell is Matt? has made himself a web celebrity by going around the world and recording himself dancing in various locales. Not waltzing or tap dancing, but just sort of a funny, happy, silly dance. He did this first in June of 2006, and set it to delightful world-new age music. He just spent the last two years going around the world again, and produced a longer and more people-filled video.

But really it's his story that's so awesome. He started as a coder for computer games, without a college degree. After some time doing this his company opened up an office in Australia and asked for volunteers - he went. With a few trips to surrounding countries while there, he decided that he was tired of being a Code Monkey. He quit his job, pooled his cash, and traveled around the world on the cheap.

I want to do this myself, in fact. He had balls, and he made it work. Travel doesn't have to be expensive.

He soon got a sponsor for his dancing videos: Stride gum, which more or less pays him to see the world. God bless the wonderful people at Stride for thinking this is a good advertising scheme.

The biggest benefit from Matt's videos in my mind is the sense that you get from them that people and places are not as different and foreign as we're led to believe. That silly little dance somehow makes people understand that people around the world are, in fact, people. It makes the heart swell with pride for humanity's beauty...

Wordle

Every wanted a tag cloud all to yourself? Well, meet Wordle, the online tool that makes tag clouds in second, using whatever text fodder you have available.

I've not had this much fun with an online tool in quite a while. It doesn't just make tag clouds - which are those maps of words with their sizes based on their frequency in the text - but through a java applet allows you to play around with their font, their orientation, their color and their composition. This produces some fun like The Raven and Tear Down This Wall.

Jonathan Coulton put one up a while back, the input of which was "duck duck duck duck duck duck duck goose". The result was, expectedly, entertainly.

Play around with it!

Earth Day/Week, Post Script

I don't know how I forgot to mention this, but NPR has been doing an amazing series about climate change in conjunction with National Geographic, called Climate Connections. Most recently, they were in Egypt and did a whole series of stories about Egypt, how it will be affected by climate change, and what the people of Egypt are doing about it.

One of the most amazing stories I've heard on the radio in ages was a part of this series, about how the poorest people in Cairo, the garbage collectors, are working together to recycle and cut their energy consumption. It's a marvelous piece of journalism, and I recommend everyone take ten minutes out of their day to listen to it. It will inspire. Listen here.