Automating Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Click “Read more here >>>” link at the top for an explaination.

An amazing list of concepts that will support your thinking.

An essay/talk by Maciej Cegłowski, about privacy, online advertising, and the state of the Internet.

“This started out as a list of negative and pessimistic comments about new ideas, but, to provide some balance, I’ve begun to add a few overly enthusiastic and optimistic comments.”

Some good advice concerning life in general

The most interesting text about design (in the broadest sense) I’ve read.

“Human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. (…) this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry.”

WBW explains: 1. how the brain evolved, 2. how can we try to interface with it via a computer, 3. what does it mean for the future of humanity

Some nice vimeos

A great interactive documentary about privacy and the condition of the Internet

A Swiss mask theatre troupe who perform in a surreal mask- and prop-oriented style.

The precursor of 4D cinema

20Hz observes a geo-magnetic storm occurring in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

A chain reaction by Fischli & Weiss

Absolutely mesmerising.

Short lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on the ‘simple shapes of stories.’

A short film by Adam Butcher

Berlin, 1945. There is a foley soundtrack added to this movie, but whoever did it did not add any voices. Berlin in 1945 seems so silent, like no-one is talking any more – there are just sounds of people walking and vehicles passing.

“These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen by anyone but YOU.”

A skeptical view on the seductive, apocalyptic beliefs that prevent people in tech from really working to make a difference. A talk by Maciej Cegłowski.

Photographer finds people he photographed in subway on social media with an image-processing algorithm. Partially about the creepy world of non-privacy, partially a look at how we want to be perceived.

“Being big and distinctive is not enough to be seen. The unusual and huge thing must be expected” – Rolf Dobelli, “The Art of Thinking Clearly”

A talk about Endorphin, Dopamine, Serotonin, Oxytocin, and Cortisol – chemicals that make humans human

“There was abundant clean food, water, and nesting material. The Universe was cleaned every four to eight weeks. There were no predators, the temperature was kept at a steady 68°F, and the mice were a disease-free elite selected from the National Institutes of Health’s breeding colony. Heaven.”

“a heart wrenching technicolor spectacle that raises questions about gender stereotypes, mob mentality, and violence in America.”

A playable post on the shape of society

Here’s just the fun stuff, google “Conway’s Game of Life” to learn more and dive deeper.

A small collection of amazing puzzles

See how websites looked over the years.

A huge archive of visual samples

Miniature crime scenes, reproduced for educational purposes.

3D Scans of art objects and other objects, devoid of colour and texture. Would be tough to see the whole world this way by some vision impairment.

“In 1946, Dr. David P. Boder, a psychology professor from Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology, traveled to Europe to record the stories of Holocaust survivors in their own words.”

A huge collection of great articles and essays.

Old magazine covers

Super-high-resolution scans and pictures of artworks

Very old pictures

Photographs

Photography collections

Site de découverte sur la photographie, la science, les arts et tout ce qui est insolite.

Illustration

Old books and illustrations

Graphic design ephemera

All of the World’s Money and Markets in One Visualization

Markets are sometimes very emotional

A small table comparing the means of payment used by our civilisation

A talk by Kevin Slavin

Visualising money

From the times of Zimbabwe Hyperinflation, the largest denomination of currency ever issued.

collaborative drawing

Chains of visually similar images. It’s like a Google Image Search’s stream of consciousness.

Known as ‘Das Tierbuch des Petrus Candidus’ (animal book), this 1460 Vatican Library Manuscript by the Italian humanist, Pier Candido Decembrio, continues the tradition of early natural history books in the manner of Pliny the Elder, the Physiologus and Thomas of Cantimpré which served as Candido’s sources. Commissioned by Ludovico Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, ‘Das Tierbuch’ describes all known real and mythical animals, but the wonderful illustrations were a 16th century addition.

“Ion Barladeanu is on his way to becoming an important contemporary artist, but in May 2008 he was still an anonymous tramp on the streets of Bucharest”

‘Isochronic beats produce very strong cortical responses in the brain.’

What can you hear while floating away from the Earth

all the radio from Earth

A delightful, musical prank call

Make beats with ASCII characters

Symphonies Of The Planets

crickets audio recording slowed way down

Music from the childhood

Police Radio from Saint Petersburg. Other cities are also worth listening to.

It pulls the latest posts from Twitter, and reads them aloud using Speech Cloud text-to-speech.

Listen to music from a particular time and a particular place

Turns out that “ninety percent of everything is crap” theory has a name.

There is such a thing

A member of the United States Cabinet who will run the country if the President and the country’s other top leaders are all killed.

Turns out Nietzsche’s writing style was greatly influenced by this ingenious and odd invention.

“This would be pushed above the parapet while other soldiers watched by periscope.”

Need a zero-volume bottle? Searching for a one-sided surface? Want the ultimate in non-orientability?

The product is as interesting as the website itself.

“The discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources.”

Just open in browser window and watch the evolution.

about improving privacy in the age of mass surveillance - from browser plugins, through Tor, to burner phones

“The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”

“Histography is an interactive timeline that spans across 14 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to 2015”

Two days before the end of the Second World War, two former french prime ministers, a tennis star, and de Gaulle’s sister defend a castle alongside a handful of American and German (anti-Nazi) soldiers against a whole SS division. The question remains, why has it still not been made into a movie?

PTSD takes it’s toll

Multiplayer Minesweeper

It’s a game in which changing the rules is a move.

Become a big bubble. Online rendition of “Osmos” game idea.

Best on a touch screen

interactive music piece with pretty visuals

An incredible talk about Victor’s work with interfaces and, more importantly, why he worked on them. Also answers the question “how to live your life?”

A site to play around with

A more interesting rendition of the Internet idea

go places

drop the google maps guy to walk around this abandoned settlement

A village partly destroyed by Nazis in 1944 and left untouched since as a permanent memorial.

Search for places

A funny cementary in Romania

on Iceland

The world biggest directory of online surveillance security cameras.

A set of complex puzzles and alternate reality games to recruit “highly intelligent individuals” from the public.

A strange CD arrives in the mail to a small Swedish tech blog…

a beautiful subreddit

a superb troll

find your cursor

To get the context search for ‘NSA ANT Catalog’.

Ie. US spending on science, space, and technology correlates with suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation.

Turns out Pollock, Motherwell, de Kooning and Rothko were subsidised by the CIA

Video from the paper “Male dance moves that catch a woman’s eye”, published in Biology Letters

Smoking pot in 1689

About art in art galleries.