Month: November 2005

This Periodic Table of Elements made with Flash and webMathematica is pretty cool…

Flight Patterns depicts how FAA air traffic control data was used to generate some very cool visualizations:

The following flight pattern visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya and the final piece was highlighted at SIGGRAPH 2005 in the NVIDIA Immersive Dome Experience.

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been citing Digg as a source for some of my posts. For those of you that haven’t come across it yet, Digg is a relatively new social bookmarking site that draws comparisons to Slashdot and other similar sites. Wired Magazine goes so far as to suggest that “Digg Just Might Bury Slashdot:”

Slashdot is put together by an editorial board. Digg uses the collective wisdom of the masses and, consequently, news breaks faster.
…
Critics also say Digg is more chaotic than Slashdot, which often features more technical, detailed conversations. But Digg, with its tight weblog integration and Flickr-like reliance on the collective efforts of its members, is pointing the way to a new wave of socially assembled news initiatives, organized and made sense of by readers themselves.

A post about the Wired article soon appeared on Slashdot, where the topic was discussed in a surprisingly objective manner.

Like many of the commenters at Slashdot, I personally visit both sites regularly, but I generally find that Slashdot stories are more technical-oriented where Digg stories tend to be more entertaining and reflective of current Interweb “buzz.” You can see the stories that I’ve “dugg” here, and if you’re really interested, digg vs. dot details how the sites fare “against” each other.

Update: teknokool.net posts about Diggdot.us, which combines results from Digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us popular. Very nice…

Curt’s Media posts about Apple’s famous 1984 commercial:

Every true Macintosh fanatic has seen, or at least heard about, the famous 1984 television commercial that heralded the introduction of the Macintosh. The spot, with its distinctive Orwellian vision, is indelibly imprinted in the minds of Mac users the world over. Now, for the first time, the whole truth can be told. What you don’t know about the commercial will surprise you, what you think you know is probably wrong.

Besides a lot of interesting and little-known background information, he has made several versions of the video available for viewing.

Check out the video Extreme Adventure (embedded Windows Media Video), in which someone finishes twelve LucasArts games (Maniac Mansion, Zack McCracken, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, Loom, The Secret Of Moneky Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, Indiana Jones and The Fate Of Atlantis, Maniac Mansion: Day Of The Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit The Road, Full Throttle, Dig, and The Curse Of Monkey Island) in 24 hours.

I hope that at least some of you remember Sesame Street from the ‘70s. I came upon an awesome video remix of The Pinball Song and loved it. Check it out above (requires Flash)…

Scrubbles has posted an awesome photoset on Flickr entitled Videogame Ads 1982.

As a minor follow-up to my original post “Tags As Categories,” I wanted to update you on a new feature I’m playing with. As some of you may have noticed, the hand-coded category links in the right sidebar have been replaced by a Javascript tagroll provided by del.icio.us. I like it a lot better, as you can see the frequency of the category by the size and color of the font used. You can customize font sizes and colors, the order in which categories appear, as well as some other cosmetic options. Let me know what you think…

It sounds as if Arrested Development’s days are numbered. I knew Fox would cancel the show as soon as I realized it was one of the funniest series I’d ever seen… 🙁

Hobbes’ Internet Timeline, the “definitive ARPAnet & Internet history,” comprehensively explores the history of The Internet as we know it starting in 1957(!).