Filmmaker Rick Madsen follows around Modest Mouse as they finish up Lonesome Crowded West, stopping off to interview a half dozen post-grunge Seattle icons like Elliott Smith and Doug Martsch of Built to Spill. A super-intimate look at the nascent band that gave me warm tinglies all over.

An example of a visualization produced by ‘Many Eyes‘, here visualizing the number of ip addresses allocated to a country:

Many Eyes is an interesting info vis application from IBM which allows you to upload datasets and then choose various methods of visualizing them. I haven’t had a moment yet to look at the Terms of Service, but I wonder what IBM does with the data that you’ve uploaded. Do they claim it to be theirs?

Found from this post at Dan Cohen’s blog.

I almost never use GMail’s web client, so I only just noticed that their Web Clips feature fetches recipes for everyone’s favorite pork-like jelly cube whenever I’m look at my spam folder. So useful! Why would anyone turn this off?

Strong Bad Explains Interface Aesthetics and some HCI too. It’s amazing that, in making fun of the subject in 3 minutes, SB touches on many classic faux pas and implicitly indicates the reason for a lot of them, over exuberance!

Damien Weighill doesn’t believe real people read blogs, so to prove him wrong, you can send him a picture of yourself and he will draw a picture of you and post it on his blog, your face. Someone other than me do this so we can see if it actually works.

Via Drawn!

Yesterday I attended an interesting event with k7, mcd, and Jill: a live conversation between author, journalist, and professor Michael Pollan, and John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. Pollan has criticized Whole Foods for failing to adhere to the pastoral, humane, and environmentally sound image they tout in their marketing, but over the past year he and Mackey have been engaging in a public dialogue on the issues (which I still have to read). Last night was another, more public step in that dialogue.

Anyway, I think many of us are interested in food (most of us, I think, eat it), so maybe we can use this space to register thoughts, answer questions, and try and validate some of the assertions made. Editors, feel free to add stuff to the body of this post if you don’t think content belongs in a comment.

Continue reading ‘Pollan & Mackey: Thoughts and Fact Check’

Hey y’all… my sources tell me that SB 113 made it out of the last California Legislative committee yesterday. It will be on the governator’s desk by the end of the week. In case you’re not an election geek like me, SB 113 would change the presidential primary in California to the “first Tuesday in February in any year evenly divisible by the number 4.” The primary used to be in June, at the same time as state primaries and local elections.

So, what does this mean for you? It means that California will have more of a voice in presidential elections. However, some states are going to be jealous of the attention our large population will get during primary campaigning. To be sure, the schedule of when presidential primary elections are “allowed” to happen is tightly constrained by political parties.

What does this mean for election officials? Lots and lots and lots of stress. This will mean they’ll have four elections in one year (November 2007, February 2008, June 2008 and November 2008). Election officials and their staff typically work 12-hour days, weeks on end, without days off to prepare for elections. Sigh. We reap what we sow yo.

Ok, a little moronic and a little late, but the inventor of the electric slide is claiming and attempting to enforce copyright over his dance (which, by the way, is “for professional dancers only”). He’s also trying to use the DMCA to go after videos of the dance. Being unfamiliar with and nominally averse to the bizarre practice of “dancing” you hu-mons seem to relish so, losing the electric slide to the clutches of copyright does not concern me greatly. If Ignignokt tried to copyright flipping the bird, however, things might be different.

Also, fantastic (but copyrighted) diagrams of the electric slide can be found in this book.

Via NPR

“damnit anna”
by
the morning benders

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via stereogum

woo!

This is a pretty cool idea: map all the instances of “X is the new Y” in a set of documents and see how things interrelate. No mention of what the documents were, or what the arrow lengths mean, but it’s still fun to look at, and would be cool to replicate, esp. on a corpus of blog posts, marketing blurbs, or product reviews.

Via VisualComplexity