stray bullets

Did Bach’s wife write his music?
The Duke in His Domain (Capote profiles Brando, 1957) (via)
The Atlas of Cyberspace (free pdf, beautifully illustrated) (via)
The Ultimate Camper (via)
Rare recordings of some of the 20th Century's greatest writers
A Ferment of World Jazz Yields a Trove of Tapes
Cassell's Dictionary of Slang (fair bit of it)
The Multicolr Search Lab (search Flickr by color; easy and impressive) (via)

Futility Closet: “The Continental Salamander” In the year 1826, one Monsieur Chabert … performed the following feats at the White Conduit Gardens: Having partaken of a hearty meal of phosphorus, washed down with a copious draught of oxalic acid in a solution of arsenic, he drank... (read more)

viddy:
Making ofs (videos about the making of videos, incl. Gondry, Cunningham)
Ways of seeing (John Berger TV documentary) (via)
A Half Century of Video Games (footage of the first video game)
Jeff Mills: Critical Arrangements Interview
Elliott Smith & Friends (“backstage” video)

stray bullets

Pirates die strangely after taking Iranian ship A tense standoff has developed in waters off Somalia over an Iranian merchant ship laden with a mysterious cargo that was hijacked by pirates. Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died. Andrew Mwangura, the director of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, told the Sunday Times: “We don’t know exactly how many, but the information that I am getting is that some of them had died. There is something very wrong about that ship.” (via)

also:
Interview: Matthew Herbert (via)
The International Dialects of English Archive (via)
Carny Lingo (via)

viddy:
Ken Adam talking about the war room set he designed for Dr. Strangelove (via)
Knots - How To Tie A Monkey’s Fist And Heave A Line
Global Air Traffic Simulation (.wmv download; very cool, much better than the YouTube version)
Fridge Monster

blog of the moment: Great Map (always a fun and fascinating journey)

Germany and China: The cultural differences

Informative comparisons.

via Laurent Haug's blog

The Whirl

Visual thinking guru, Dave Gray provides a demonstration of visual language in relation to The Whirl, which is the dense cloud of noise, signal, data and information that swarms and bundles around us in a seemingly chaotic manner. Visual language can cut through this fog and cross lingual and cultural barriers as a sort of global auxiliary language, something we'll need as The Whirl intensifies. (The Whirl is so much more euphonious and comprehensive than terms like 'ubiquitous computing' or 'information overload.')

Images are the primal language. William S. Burroughs's 'Language is a Virus' thread explores the supplanting of the visual with the verbal.

And yet still, we are highly dependent on visual information. So much so, that we often equate our thinking with it. When have you ever heard of a scientific theory based on smell or taste? Studies of sensory data are always conducted with graphical outputs. You don't have an olfactor for your computer. When we communicate verbally that we understand, we often say, "I see." It was a big jump for many of us as kids to go from looking at the pictures to reading the text. We observe holidays and monitor the situation.

As visually oriented creatures, we'd be well served by developing a more methodical and informed skill set for communicating visually. We already do this in many ways. However, as a medium that is understood, mastered and universally adopted, visual language is still in its childhood. I look forward to seeing this kid grow up.