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.
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.
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...
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!
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.
In celebration of Earth Day/Week, I've put together a whole big list of awesome things on the Internet that are environment related.
First off, a blog that I go to every day for news about Global Warming, and probably the most influential climate change blog on the internet: Climate Progress. This blog is great at having very scientific but accessible explanations of climate trends, and also simultaneously delivering some smack-downs to global warming deniers in the Media and on the net. A++ would read again!
Next, Fifty Ways to Help the Planet, brought to you by The Green Line. This is an excellent list of things you can do every day to help the planet - both things you've heard before (about brushing your teeth, or taking shorter showers) and things you probably haven't (choosing matches over lighters, or cutting down on paper napkins). Also, excellent design work on this one; the list is visually nice as well as helpful.
Adding a little humor is Grist.org which is an environmental news site that has a edgy, Stephen Colbert-cum-Jon Stewart side. Hilarious..."If At First You Don't Succeed, Perhaps It Was A Bad Idea" and "Raise Hell, Not Corn" are front page headlines right now. Also, they have a podcast.
Lastly, Al Gore, the man I hold responsible for elevating the issues of climate change to the national discourse. With his Nobel Peace Prize money, he's started an advertising campaign called "We Can Solve It" to promote further action. The ads for this movement are the best part (aside from the whole saving the world bit), as they take two well known polar opposites and sit them on a couch and get them to talk about what a big deal global warming is. Check it out.
I swear, five minutes of playing Patapon, or being in the same room will having you humming "PATA PATA PATA PON" all day long.
A lot of people have spoken about the gameplay of this PSP game (here, and here, and here), and it is revolutionary, but I'm not going to spend time on it here. What I really want to discuss is the game's aesthetic.
(I must give some credit to fellow blogger K. Adam White, as he wrote on this very same topic not long ago, and introduced me to the game.)
The visual style is credited to a French artist named Rolito (his blog). Simply put, his style is about objects in the foreground having their detail obscured in total black silhouette (with a little white for accent), while the background is awash in a highly saturated color or two with patterns done in subtle variations on those colors. It is a captivating style, and will keep your eyes glued to the glossy PSP screen for hours. In fact, for me at least, it's not just the nifty rhythms that keep me playing; it's also the juicy colors and boldly black and white Patapons that are like delicious candy for the eyes.
Since the foreground is so sparse with detail, your eye is draw to the bright colors of the background - but since the background is nothing specific, or at least nothing that you need to focus on, it becomes more of an experience, rather than a depiction. In a way, it resembles JMW Turner's paintings - colors used to convey experience and emotion or just plain ambiance rather than specific objects or people.
In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that my own pet artistic style at the moment is something akin to Rolito's, though less cartoonish and more realistic. Some photos I have taken, like the one to the right, are in the same spirit as Rolito's drawings, though not as "playful".
In fact, to evangelize my own variety of Rolito's style, I've started a new blog: Now Silhouette. A few times a week, I will take a commonplace thing - an apple, an advertisement, google's front page, a Michelangelo, whatever - and redo it in my own style. It should be a fascinating experiment!
In the mean time, three cheers to Rolito and Patapon!
