I Heart Social Experiments

Why do social experiments make me laugh so hard? Like Candid Camera, where you watch people think they've entered the twilight zone. Or the guy who stuck bubble stickers on posters around NYC and then returned to see who wrote messages in them.

The Voyer Box is the newest discovery to make me smile. Watch the startled looks as people get their picture taken while they walk by. I thought at first the machine cat-called pedestrians, but this is slightly kinder... maybe.

Of course, intrusive technology is BAD BAD BAD, as anyone concerned about ubiquitous computing will tell you. But SO funny.

Dream a Little Dream

Dreams: I wanna be an astronaut. I wanna sing in a rock band. I wanna ... um, write dirty romance novels. Sometimes they actually come true. You land on the moon, you open for Jewel, you ... um, write a dirty romance novel.

Well, today a little dream of mine came true. This is one of those dreams that you almost forget you have, like not having singleton socks in the laundry or rediscovering some forgotten perfect outfit. And then it happens one day — the dream comes true — and, partially because you've forgotten to yearn for it, you're insanely excited.

That's me right now. Insanely exited. Over something really small, but something I've quietly wanted since I was planning out my dream mansion in fifth grade. Today I discovered... [building suspense] ... a speaker system that can play the Same Song Throughout Your Home. Now I can walk from room to room and never lose the melody. Woohoo! But get this: It can also play a Different Song in Each Room in the House. Woohoo again!

The main reason I'm excited is that it was gushingly reviewed on this blog I read that endorses clever technical products. And although the system costs more than $1000, I'm excited for another reason: I don't need it yet. I barely have three rooms to my name — no house. By the time I need it, I expect the technology will be smaller, cheaper and more accessible.

Today's accomplishments? One lifelong dream fulfilled. Whew! I'm exhausted.

find a photo with geography

Using location tags found on Flickr images, Yahoo! has created a map that shows you pictures connected with the locations where they were taken. There are still several rough spots since it's dependent on accurate tagging and the areas of the country presented on the map seem to be pre-selected.

I've heard rumors of a GPS-based camera that can map your own pictures to an interface like this one. You'll never forget again exactly where you took something. Now that is cool, especially as you could compare someone else's picture taken in the exact same spot. Oooh!

Changing the way we look at history

Technophiles and history buffs alike will appreciate this one: a tag cloud showing the words most commonly used in presidential state of the union addresses since John Adams. The bigger the word, the more times it was repeated.

Can you forgive someone 7 times 7?

I'm going to try (emphasis on try) to renew my blogging efforts, insofar as I'll post interesting websites I've come across. More to come!

Chia Pet ... Reborn!

It's cute. It's grassy. It's completely unnecessary in your life. Cha-cha-cha-chia? No, it's Nyokki. Raise a toast to progress.

White Chocolate Maggots

Take a break. Relax. And visit Strange New Products, a site that hunts down the insane and inane. It features everything from white chocolate maggots to corporate sponsored Porta Potties. Yum! Have some fun checking back often.

How close do you live to cement?

Read today on Design Observer:

If your front door opens onto a sidewalk, you're probably a Democrat.

If your front door is more than 25' from your street, you're probably a Republican.

Gasp! She Returns!

Well, it took turning a corporate monologue into dialog to get me to return to blogging. I can't resist sharing this with the few of you still diligent enough to read this (thanks Miss B!). If you've ever walked through the pedestrian tunnel north of Grand Central, you've experienced a distracting advertisement haranging you as you walk. Garble! Grawk! Yell, yell, yell!

Well, designer Ji Lee is fighting back — at least against print advertisements. He launched The Bubble Project whereupon he placed bubble stickers (the kind used in comic books) on ads throughout NYC. Passersby wrote comments in the space provided. The results, both hilarious and unpredictable, were captured in Lee's recent book Talk Back: The Bubble Project.

Now if only there were a mute button in that pedestrian tunnel.

Anybody seen Wag the Dog?

This story about the bumbling Abu Musab al-Zarqawi almost seems too ridiculous to believe. Hmmm... anyboy ever seen Wag the Dog?

Running With Diapers

Read this little tidbit today: 5-year-old runs marathons. I find this more sad than exciting. He's like Little Hercules, who ended up with an abusive dad and claims of steroid drug use before he hit his teens. The article says they're already preparing him for the 2012 Olympics. Shouldn't there be a child labor law against this?

We all scream for ice cream (ball)!

Chalk this one up as awesome but useless: today I learned about this cool ice cream ball from L.L. Bean. You put the ingredients in one end (cream, sugar), the chemistry in the other (ice, rock salt) and move the ball around for 20 minutes. Voila! You have ice cream. Totally cool, right?

Problem is, when I tried to think of someone who could use this cool gadget, I couldn't think of a single person. Sure, it'd make an entertainment group event for one party, but would the excitement last for 20 min? And what about subsequent parties? Wouldn't your friends get tired of you forcing them to work out just to get dessert? Sigh. Excitement dissipates...

Hanging Head in Shame (But Bopping to Good Tunes)

OK, I was just about ready to give this up. Things got busy at work, and I just wasn't focused on my Cool Stuff blog anymore. But then I come across something like Pandora and can't keep it to myself. Credit Dora for the link. This is the coolest music service: name one song or one artist and, using the research from the Music Genome Project, the site predicts other music you'd like and plays it for you as streaming radio.

I typed in one of my favs, Metric, and have subsequently listened to "Unsatisfied" by Nine Black Alps, "Rock & Roll Queen" by Subways, and Slip & Slide by Tiny Amps, none of which I've ever heard before.

Now all they need is a desktop widget so I can always check there to see what song I'm listening to (instead I have to figure out which web browser window it's sitting in). Nonetheless, this is brilliance of technology in its simplest form.

This appeared on the This Is Broken site, a place where people report wacky things they see that don't work. I thought this was too funny not to share. Once you understand the explanation, it becomes even funnier.

This is Not an Advertisement

So I don't go in for product recommendations, and I have unfortunately not gotten the chance to test this out, but Microsoft's new mobile PC is, at the very least, a product to watch. Looks fairly innovative anyway. Not quite the iPod of portable computing, but maybe that's iteration #2. For more details, CNet has answers.

Is Your Site Red or Yellow or Green?

When searching on Google or Yahoo or whatever, you can now get a sense of the safety of the site you’re going to visit before you go there. Site Advisor tells you how often a site will e-mail you (i.e., whether they could be a source for spam), whether downloads are clear of adware, and whether they link to other sites rated green for OK to go. I’m a huge fan since it saves me from having to guess whether a site is legit from a security/privacy standpoint. This plugin is for Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Holy Magma, Batman!

Did you know a giant collapsed volcano is called a caldera (think cauldron). You know one better as Yellowstone. Here’s the Wikipedia jaw-dropper: “When Yellowstone Caldera erupted 630,000 years ago it released 1000 cubic kilometers of material, covering half of North America in up to two meters of debris.”

Understand Racism in the '60s

I find that, having not lived it, it's hard to truly understand the Civil Rights Movement and just how awful things were. For a taste of that, view these photos uncovered recently by The Birmingham News. It's time, as a nation, that we face our past and have a national dialog about how far we have left to go.

Boingboing.net has a brief summary of the photos' origins.

Two Scientific Ideas Dramatically Shift Thinking

These two discoveries blew me away. The first argues that the Black Death plague in Europe contributed to a 300 mini ice age. The theory argues that after such a huge number of people died so quickly, trees sprang up on unused farmland, lowering carbon dioxide levels.

This gives some awful sense of balance to the way global warming, cited as a possible cause of the destructiveness of recent natural disasters, has taken so many lives — some kind of tragic buffering capacity.

The second discovery also requires an adjustment in thinking. Viruses may have been part of the evolutionary origin of life. Woah. I can't describe it as well as the Discover article can. Stuff in there made me feel like we're still in the Dark Ages. But I can quote this stunning statistic:

Scientists estimate that they have discovered and documented less than 1 percent of all the living things on the planet. But for every organism in that unidentified 99 percent, at least 10 times as many unknown viruses are thought to exist—the vast majority of which are harmless to life and yet integral to it.

I'm Seeing Red! (And hearing techno.)

Based on research that humans are able to associate music with color, a student at the University of Birmingham in England has created a music player where you create playlists based solely on the color (or as he would say colour) that you've assigned to the song. Once you've assigned enough songs, a color palette up top tells you where you're collection falls in the color scheme. Eventually, he's hoping to match people's musical palettes and allow you to download color associations from other people who categorize songs the way you do. I sense a match.com / iTunes cross-sell in the future...

This is very very very beta, but it's kinda fun to download, explore and create playlists with similar songs. I think it works because colors have moods, as do songs.