Neil Gaiman strikes just the right tone in his promotional monologue for Coraline on buttons. Our family is split on this one. Two of us can’t wait, and the other two are totally creeped out. (via twitch)

I watched the demo of Sumo Paint on YouTube and thought, “wow, that’s a pretty cool paint program, I wonder how much it costs?” So I visited their site to check it out, and… wow, it’s a free Flash application that runs in the browser, and you can save your paintings locally or to their community space! Impressive. (via core77)

Interesting article in Wired on MDM, a prop shop artists employ to turn their ideas into reality. I had no idea artists might outsource to such a high degree! I guess it seems obvious in hindsight, when you consider pieces that require heavy-duty engineering and safety considerations like Jericho:

Sometimes Schofield gets assignments that seem to defy the laws of physics. Two years ago, artist Anselm Kiefer set out to erect Jericho in the courtyard of the Royal Academy. A pair of towers would be built from concrete slabs balanced on top of each other with no supports or fasteners—and the public would be allowed to step inside the chambers at the base of each stack. Schofield worked with a structural engineer to calculate the ideal weight and pitch of the slabs, then arranged motion-sensitive lasers around the perimeter of the courtyard to detect any movement that might presage a collapse.

I’ve linked up Dolores Labs before (when they tackled The Trolley Problem). They do fun stuff employing the anonymous army at Amazon Mechanical Turk. Their latest is getting Turkers to judge twitterers on how smart vs. interesting they are.

P.S. From there, I happened to stumble on Cursebird, “a real-time feed of people swearing on Twitter”, and another DL project, FaceStat, where you can upload your photo and have random strangers make snap judgments on you. From here, a fairly amazing coincidence: I get almost no blog-generated e-mail, but within an hour of finding FaceStat I had an e-mail from a fellow who put up a similar, simpler site where you can have strangers guess your age based on your photo. Strangely addictive, and I suck at it. I’m usually off by six years or more.

Dodge: a game with much mayhem, and yet you are completely defenseless. Who knew being unarmed could be so much fun? (via jig)

Mathew Honan spends some logging his whereabouts to every geo-aware service he can muster up. At one point, to determine how much privacy he might be giving up, he tries a little experiment:

On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score—a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior—a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives.

The article also uses the phrase “anonymous geoshagging,” if that piques your interest.

The Anthem Project: citizens of one country sing the national anthem of another country. France does great with ours. (via ted)

The full web pilot for The Remnants, starring Ze Frank (and Justine Bateman, remember her?). Too bad it’s looking unlikely it’ll go anywhere.

The Big Picture’s Inauguration photos are up. I wish I could requisition satellite shots like this one.

So moving. Who knows what the coming months and years will bring, but I was thrilled to witness this, and to be able to put my political cynicism aside for the day. Three other notes:

• Joseph Lowery kicked Rick Warren’s ass (stole the show, really).
• Dick Cheney in the wheelchair! Aside from the obvious symbolism of the decrepit and tired exiting the stage, there’s the fact that he now physically embodies the Bond villain he has always been (or, even better, the HH take).
• How ‘bout that kid in the front pew in Chicago? Asleep the first time we cut to that location, and struggling to stay asleep the next time. Awesome.

The Fifty People One Question folks have a new video up, where would you like to wake up? It doesn’t doesn’t quite capture the magic of the what would you want to happen by the end of today? question shot in New Orleans, but it still has some nice moments.

Today’s time sink: Gravity Pods 2. (via jig)