LED Out competition!

Laurie is way into inventing random LED gadgetry right now, and look at this!

LED Out! Speed Challenge by Instructables

car on fire!

I came across this scene when I walked home for lunch today.



I have no idea if anyone was in the car or not. It appeared to be parked and empty.

The World Won't Listen

It was about 1 year ago that I visited Sanguinetti A!, who took me to an amazing video installation by artist Phil Collins called The World Won't Listen. My jaw dropped when I found this book available from Yale University Press. I wish it had a DVD included of the video installation, which was so amazingly beautiful and strange.

best guess

I'm conducting an open-answer poll. What is your best guess of where I found this image?

sonoluminescence

Link: 12k
Via: onebyfourbynine

Solar powered horse and Joanna Newsom

I cannot take my eyes off this motorized, solar-powered paper horse walking in tune to the most amazing Joanna Newsom.



Link: James G. Watt
Via: Onebyfourbynine

P.S. If you ever find yourself not knowing what to get me for a birthday or holiday, get me some Joanna Newsom. I heart her.

Web Trend Map

Information Architects of Japan has produced the internet web trend map.



Via: Visual Complexity
Link: Information Architects

UFOs in Texas

It's (somewhat) amazing to me how the residents of Stephenville, TX have made a big deal over UFO sightings. This news story shows images of the many billboards advertising to the aliens.

Visualize the English language

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and New York University have developed a visualization of the English language that uses almost 80 million images.



Via: readwriteweb

Link: Visual Dictionary

Crafts

Wow, I just found this whole world of projects available online from none other than Martha Stewart!

Check them out here. She even has a new project every day.

This is enlightenment.

Get a load of this guy! I just adore him.
BBC Headline: Ballet dancer, 88, takes to stage.
Full story here.

Hugo Minor found my match

OMG! Look at this book Hugo found on Amazon.

Great illustration

Isn't the new cover for Diagram just excellent?

new blog (oh, and love the desk)

I started a new blog! I feel confident in my ability to continually produce content in this subject area: my misunderstanding of all things Minnesotan.

And the desk de-cluttering post is fabulous. My life is infinitely better for it and I highly recommend it to anyone who has a screwdriver and a vice grip.

decluttering the desk

I found a brilliant tutorial for how to declutter your desk over at decluttered.com and Sanguinetti A! and I implemented the plan with a few modifications over the weekend.

This is what the desk looked like before we started.



Then we measured, drilled and mounted four one inch corner irons into place:


The measuring


The drilling and mounting

Then we cut slits in the pegboard to match the corner irons and fit the pegboard into place.



The corner irons stick through the pegboard and we used nails to hold the pegboard into place.



Then we mounted all the wires, routers, switches and cables underneath the table with plastic zip ties.



And now there are no extra things on top of the desk. There are also no extra wires hanging out underneath the desk.

This was very satisfying.

Link: decluttered

how to make a laptop bag from a cardboard box

I really like this!
Link: via Wikihow

This is a painting!

David M. Lenz is the First prize winner Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2006, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian institution.

This portrait, Sam and the Perfect World looked like a photograph until I got my nose right up next to the monitor. It is stunning.



Via: notcot
Link: David M. Lenz

eight amazing treehouses

Here are eight tree houses I could only dream about playing in.




Link: freshome
Via: notcot

Sharpie music video

They timed the illustration to the song. Brilliant.



Via: Drawn

polished junk city

Enoki Chu's incredible city made of polished junk worth a look.



Link: io9
Via: notcot

bird wings

Loved these bird wings found on boing boing.

After I posted about boing boing previously, I found out that it's something like the most popular blog ever, ever, and that my innocent reference to it was "cute." Sharing a blog with techie techie's has that side effect sometimes. I do things that seem totally cool to me that were totally last month to [fill in the blank]. Ego deflated, just a bit. (I'm winking right about now, fyi.)

These bird wings are so great. I still think about my dead bird collection project a lot.

easy screen printing

The next at home project: easy screen printing! From Instructables.

highly entertaining interview

Drawn, the cartooning blog, just posted a link to the Sneeze, which might be my new favorite blog.



This is very important for the enjoyment of this overly fantastic story, interview and illustration evolution. You must read the story in order. There are three parts:

1. Part 1: The mystery of the face on the cake


2. Part 2: How to draw a face


3. Part 3: Face to face, 60 years in the making

Go now. Off you go. Read it all.

Via: Drawn
Link: The Sneeze

mashup of all 25 top songs in 2007

Thanks to Stevie B's Google Reader shared items, I recently subscribed to a blog called boing boing where I read about a mashup of the top 25 tracks of the year. The post says, "The raw material is pretty poor quality (Top 40 has never been brilliant, but it's at a real low this year) but Earworm spins some gold out of the straw." Check it out here.

Lemons to lemonade? Maybe not quite. But it is pretty interesting.