Chris Glass recreated this excellent, alternative NYC subway sign:

I will now have to watch Stefan Sagmeister’s TED Talk, “Yes, Design Can Make You Happy.”

It’s awfully nice to have an administration that embraces science, and not just because of what it might mean for my scalp.

I know I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but ThruYOU is incredible. Nothing but YouTube videos mixed together to create new (and fantastic) songs. I like to leave it open in another tab while I work because the music is so good.

your.flowingdata: Collect Data About Yourself via Twitter. Like Nicholas Feltron’s personal annual reports (and his related service, Daytum).

National Geographic on blue whales:

The blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, is the largest creature ever to live. Linnaeus derived the genus name from the Latin balaena, “whale,” and the Greek pteron, “fin” or “wing.” His species name, musculus, is the diminutive of the Latin mus, “mouse”—apparently a Linnaean joke. The “little mouse whale” can grow to 200 tons and 100 feet long. A single little mouse whale weighs as much as the entire National Football League. Just as an elephant might pick up a little mouse in its trunk, so the elephant, in its turn, might be taken up by a blue whale and carried along on the colossal tongue. Had Jonah been injected intravenously, instead of swallowed, he could have swum the arterial vessels of this whale, boosted along every ten seconds or so by the slow, godlike pulse.

New trailers recently dropped for Star Trek and Terminator Salvation. Terminator wins the trailer battle, and nice move going the Battlestar Galactica route, but it’s damn near impossible to think McG will do a better job than Abrams.

You can ask Matt Held to paint your Facebook portrait photo:

With the development of social networking sites, I’ve developed an interest in how people take simple or complex snapshots of themselves, post them to their page as a representation of who they are and what they want people to see. It is an interesting form of control and, in a way, self-preservation. However, there is a strong likelihood that many people who don’t know you will see this photo representation and make passing judgments as to who you may or may not be, much in the same way we make passing judgments on people we see in our neighborhoods every day.

Take a collection of these portraits and put them into the context of a gallery space or like setting, and you see a community of individuals- their likeness elevated and memorialized like the original commissioners of portrait painting; the rich and powerful - displayed as a portrait’s original intent: expression of an individuals' character and moral quality.

To apply simply join the I’ll have my Facebook portrait painted by Matt Held Facebook group. (via andrew sullivan)

Hollywood gone and screwed up your sense of what constitutes normal body image? Naked People to the rescue. Click a clothed person and watch the clothes fade away. NSFW, obviously, although also not at all titillating. (via josh spear)

I just stumbled onto Photochaining, where you can leave a camera memory card with photos on it somewhere for a stranger to find, hoping they will follow your instructions, leave it for a subsequent stranger, and so on. This got me thinking about similar “tag and release” style sites or projects, like:

• Geocaching
• Disposable cameras on park benches
• Bookcrossing

So I started a thread on Ask Metafilter, and will repost examples here (and anything else I find):

• Letterboxing
• The 1000 Journals Project. Interestingly, one of the related links there, www.1000journals.com, gets flagged as an “attack site” by Firefox.
• Where’s George? (US), Where’s Willy (Canada), Canadian Money Tracker, and Australian Money Tracker.
• Postcrossing
• The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk (see also the tgimboej flickr tag).
• Tim Knowles' Spy Box.

Semi-related and very cool, but no real Internet and/or feedback component, so I’m not really counting them:

• Leaving personal secrets inserted between the pages of PostSecret books in bookstores and libraries.
• Leaving mix CDs behind in Zipcars.
• Time capsules and messages in bottles.
• Carl Sagan’s plaque (jury’s still out on the feedback aspect).

The Cult of Done Manifesto. I love #8: “Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.” James Provost’s poster version rocks.

Y’know how you can stretch Silly Putty slowly, but if you yank it apart quickly it snaps like it’s brittle? d3o labs has taken that to the extreme. They have a gel that is looks and acts like a gooey Silly Putty, but that hardens instantaneously on impact. Discover says the military is taking a look to see whether it can be made to stop bullets. This stuff really needs some HD, high-speed video online, but until then, thankfully, we have Japanese talk shows.

Michael Lewis, always a must-read, on Iceland. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Just after October 6, 2008, when Iceland effectively went bust, I spoke to a man at the International Monetary Fund who had been flown in to Reykjavík to determine if money might responsibly be lent to such a spectacularly bankrupt nation. He’d never been to Iceland, knew nothing about the place, and said he needed a map to find it. He has spent his life dealing with famously distressed countries, usually in Africa, perpetually in one kind of financial trouble or another. Iceland was entirely new to his experience: a nation of extremely well-to-do (No. 1 in the United Nations' 2008 Human Development Index), well-educated, historically rational human beings who had organized themselves to commit one of the single greatest acts of madness in financial history. “You have to understand,” he told me, “Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund.”

Looks great if you run it through the Readability bookmarklet, which you really must install if you haven’t already.