From The Register:
the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every [...]
The Carrington Event was an awesome solar flare that is the starting point for Stuart Clark's book The Sun Kings
In September of 1859, the entire Earth was engulfed in a gigantic cloud of seething gas, and a blood-red aurora erupted across the planet from the poles to the tropics. Around the world, telegraph systems crashed, [...]
Color scheme picking widgets, as far as the eye can see:
Steel Dolphin Creative Color Scheme Tool
Color Schemer Online V2
Color Wheel by Antone Roundy
Color Scheme Generator 2
Instant Color Schemes using Yahoo image search
ColorBrewer - Selecting Good Color Schemes for Maps
Planetocopia, the World dream bank:
Planetocopia is a group of model worlds supporting intelligent life. Some of these worlds are set in our future, some are alternate Earths, some are purely imaginary experiments in planetology, biology, sociology. They fall into four series: Tilt!, Futures, the Biosphere Variations, and Caprices.
[via Kenneth Hite]
The geology and the maps are [...]
KinderForest - Growing a Playground is an animated short made by my brother to promote our friend Ezekiel’s ficus start-up. There’s a better version (Quicktime) of the video on that site.
The R.A. Maguire Cover Art gallery features lots of lovely paperback covers from the 50s and 60s, mostly in tawdry genres like crime, detective, exploitation and even science-fiction. The site also has a gallery of photos the artist took for reference to draw the covers.
The overwrought blurbs on these books are sometimes hilarious:
Perfume and Pain [...]
This is cool: strange maps is a blog about maps (doh), from Britain re-conceived as six new USA states, to the planet Mongo and an upside-down south asia.
What If 9/11 Never Happened? - a collection of scenarios from New York Magazine.
This is a couple of weeks old, but well-worth reading. From the Los Angeles Times: A Primeval Tide of Toxins
Runoff from modern life is feeding an explosion of primitive organisms. This ‘rise of slime,’ as one scientist calls it, is killing larger species and sickening people.
[via jwz ]
Look, it’s Mar Kav! [ via chadu, who calls this Osvaldo Cavandoli's La Linea cartoons. Whatever - Po-ta-TOH, Tapuach Adama ]
Requires windows media thing.
In a discussion of music recommendation sites (like Last.fm and Pandora) over at jwz’s livejournal, someone mentioned UpTo11.net, which builds its recommendations by looking at what stuff people are sharing over P2P networks. Seems to work pretty well.
Also in that thread, a link to a blog that seems devoted to music search and recommendation technology. [...]
A French scientist suggests that maybe viruses are the origin of DNA (yes, viruses, not virii). That is, that the whole DNA->RNA thing (and the RNA->DNA thing that viruses do so well) started in part as a way to evade early cells’ anti-viral defenses. This could explain why DNA replication enzymes are different between bacteria, [...]
Big sweaty men! Big noisy guns! Dozens of people getting beaten and slaughtered–per scene! Entire cities razed to the ground! Liberal wimps beware as simple handguns become judge, jury and executioner!
And the only repercussion is that the Stupid Chief takes your badge and gun for the weekend…
— The Ruthless Guide To 80s Action
… Scroll [...]
Two freaky tech stories I ran across: I posted a link to a story about a neural interface located on the tongue back in 2002; I found it interesting because in this embarassing Cyberpunk story I wrote eons ago, I’d figured this was a pretty kinky place to put a neural interface. But it turns [...]
15 Best Skylines in the World. Pretty.