Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

via The Guardian.

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  • Predictably / Irrational

    He gave unsigned checks for $10,000 to his children, promising to sign them if he was over target weight by a certain date. Many people use commitment devices to try to keep their weight down, but Buffett’s idea had a big flaw: his children, spotting a rare opportunity to get money from the notoriously frugal billionaire, resorted to sabotage. Doughnuts, pizza, and fried food mysteriously appeared whenever Buffett was home.

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Wall Street on the Tundra | vanityfair.com

Great article about Iceland and its financial collapse with enough side notes about how quirky a place Iceland is to keep it interesting.

Notice that no one asked, What might Icelanders want to do? Or even: What might Icelanders be especially suited to do? No one thought that Icelanders might have some natural gift for smelting aluminum, and, if anything, the opposite proved true. Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.” The other, more serious problem was the Icelandic male: he took more safety risks than aluminum workers in other nations did. “In manufacturing,” says the spokesman, “you want people who follow the rules and fall in line. You don’t want them to be heroes. You don’t want them to try to fix something it’s not their job to fix, because they might blow up the place.” The Icelandic male had a propensity to try to fix something it wasn’t his job to fix.

via Wall Street on the Tundra | vanityfair.com.

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  • Critic’s Choice | Enter/Exit

    Jake Watling, Jared Clark,and Joe Penrod take eccentricity seriously.

    Penrod creates a hybrid painting/sculpture: "Orange and Blue" is a stacked-traffic-cone version of Brancusi's modular war memorial, "Endless Column," here given an Impressionist shadow of blue painter's tape. Enter/Exitruns through March 29 at Swarm Gallery (560 Second St., Oakland).SwarmGallery.com or 510-839-2787.

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Cash 4 Gold would like to melt down and recast their reputation

How about that? A polite letter, with a clear goal: Bury the “Cash 4 Gold” name in my article so that it doesn’t scare off every would-be gold seller with an internet connection. I was kind of thrilled. People approach me all the time looking for ways to promote keywords, but this was the first time someone else was trying to buy me out of their Google search results. This was just like in the movies, right? Guy writes an article exposing underhanded business practices, business leader arranges a meeting to kill the story.

via Cash 4 Gold would like to melt down and recast their reputation.

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Links: Shingles: InteliHealth

  • Shingles: InteliHealth

    Shingles usually begins with a burning sensation, a mild itching or tingling or a shooting pain in a specific area of skin. The affected area usually is located only on one side of the chest, abdomen or face or on a portion of an arm or leg. The skin may be extremely sensitive, so that you may not be able to stand clothing touching or rubbing the area.

    After about five days, the skin becomes red and mildly swollen, and a rash appears. Blisters may cluster in patches or form a continuous line that roughly follows the path of the infected nerve. The blisters may be painful or itchy, and some may be as large as the palm of your hand. Blisters continue to appear over two to seven days and eventually break, form crusts and then heal.

    Shingles also can cause fatigue, a low-grade fever and mild muscle aches.

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Links: Shingles – MayoClinic.com

  • Shingles – MayoClinic.com

    Shingles is a viral infection that causes a painful rash. It often appears as a band of blisters that wraps from the middle of your back around one side of your chest to your breastbone. Other parts of your body can be involved as well, including your neck, face or scalp.

    The pain of shingles can be excruciating, and the cause might not be immediately evident. But once the telltale rash and blisters start on one side of your body, it's more easily identified as shingles.

    Shingles is caused by the varicella-zoster virus, the same virus that causes chickenpox. After you've had chickenpox, the virus lies inactive (dormant) in your nerves. Years later, the virus may reactivate as shingles.

    Shingles isn't a life-threatening condition, but it can be very painful. Sometimes, the rash leads to a debilitating complication called postherpetic neuralgia. This condition causes the skin to remain painful and sensitive to touch for months or even years after the rash clears up.

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Links: 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

  • 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

    "Everyday I receive an email from somebody about how their account was hacked, how a friend tagged them in the photo and they want a way to avoid it, as well as a number of other complications related to their privacy on Facebook. Over the weekend one individual contacted me to let me know that he would be removing me as a friend from Facebook because he was “going to make a shift with my Facebook use – going to just mostly family stuff.”

    Perhaps he was tired of receiving my status updates or perhaps he didn’t want me to view photos from his personal life. Whatever the reason for ending our Facebook friendship, I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy."

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My Brother Has a Show Coming Up!

Joe Penrod – Swarm Gallery Feb 20th–March 29

Here is a nice write up of Joe’s work:

Penrod certainly isn’t the first artist to try to preserve shadows — one might argue that the history of photography has been one long inquiry into the preservation of shadows — but I love the playfulness of the bright blue tape, and the whimsy involved in trying to finish the taping and photographing before the shadow has moved. The movement of the shadows enables some of my favorite pieces, like this one on a Williamsburg street corner:

The Swarm Gallery exhibition, at 560 2nd Street near Jack London Square, will last from February 20th to March 29th. Among the many objects whose shadows Penrod has tried to snare are orange traffic cones, and his Swarm installation will involve traffic cones as well. You can also find more work on Penrod’s blog or his Flickr portfolio (there’s more than just the tape outlines, even though that’s all I’ve mentioned here.) Good stuff, I think, and I definitely plan to check it out in person when the show opens.

via Fragmentary Evidence » Capturing Shadows.

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  • Take Heart (Herz Fassen)

    “A bowl is filled with water. By taking hold of it by the handles, it becomes literally moved by the rhythm of your heart. Water becomes storage for discrete information and makes it visible. It starts pulsating with your heartbeat. When you touch the object with only one hand, the water stays calm. When holding both handles, the water starts vibrating. Your heartbeat is calculated through the handles’ measurement of your skin-resistance and then assigned to the water’s pulsation. The heartbeat is now stored and the water will ‘beat’ with this rhythm until the pulsation slowly abates. At the end the water is calm and discharged again, unless the bowl is touched by a new person to whom whose heartbeat it would set itself to. It then beats with another’s heart.”
    A video clip of the heart beat bowl in action

  • Hurra Torpedo
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    “Please don’t kill him… OK, kill him.”

  • Robot Dance (video)
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Pit bulls are for pansies. More pics here, including a monkey wearing clothes.

  • Creative Home Engineering > Creative Home Engineering is a registered contracting company that adds value to homes by integrating silent, automated, hidden passageways.

Check out the videos section. I can’t tell you how badly I want secret passageways in my house!

Absolutely incredible photo of lantern “hot-air balloons”.

I think my doctor would recommend this as post-back surgery physical therapy.

My Favorite Commercial. Ever.

Commercial for Sony Bravia Hi-Def LCD televisions involving the dropping of an enormous amount of super balls from a rooftop and the bouncing of those super balls down the streets of San Francisco (Big download, but worth the wait).

It isn’t computer generated. Here’s what guys that made it had to say:

How we did it

In an age when CGI is commonplace, this makes the commercial all the more extraordinary. Every single frame was shot over two days – with the main sequence involving a 23-man camera crew and only one chance to get it right. An entire block was closed off and special compressed-air cannons shot the balls into the air, while earth moving equipment poured thousands down the street. Not that you’d know it from the finished product, but these balls can do some damage, so all the cars were props and crew members went so far as to having protective shields and crash helmets.

You can also check out behind the scenes footage.

By the way, if you like the song from the commercial it is Heartbeats, from the Jose Gonzalez album Veneer