who's line is it anyways?

In an effort to better understand what the organizations is that publishes videos with masked men, with guns, and in front of a banner with logos we are unlikely to have seen before Ironic Sans decided to post a very interesting piece right here, which explains who is behind the logos.
Logos are grouped by Stars, One Gun, Two Guns Crossed, Crossed Bones, Animals, and Other. I would like to use the same disclaimer here as Ironic Sans:
"I picked these terrorist groups from a list of designated terrorist organizations on Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia is a user-edited website, I can’t verify who decided these groups are terrorist organizations. So if it turns out one of these groups is an actual army or a legitimate non-violent organization, don’t blame me."
(tk)

bridging the gap

Came across this while surfing the web the other day - Make Me Sustainable.
MakeMeSustainable are trying to solve something I have been trying to get my head around as well: to bridge the gap between our ideas about helping the environment and what we actually do about it.
Their website describes it best:
MakeMeSustainable was created to fill the void between how we feel about our environment and what we do about it. We bring you the tools to take action. Our Carbon and Energy Portfolio Manager enables you to visualize and contextualize your individual impact. MMS' sustainable solutions empower you to act upon your knowledge. We can help you to become a more environmentally conscious and efficient individual or business. MMS empowers you to spread the word and encourage friends, family, and co-workers to join the collective effort.
MMS wants to create a community of people concerned with their environmental footprint in order to network, spread the word and effectively mitigate their individual and communal impact.
To be sustainable is to consciously and systematically strive to improve our environmental, economic and financial future for an individual, family and community.
Individually each of us is a drop in the bucket. Together we make a splash. This is the importance of infusing the ideas of sustainability into a community movement.
(tk)

Work for NASA! (well, sort of...)

Always wanted to be an astronaut? Well keep dreaming Buzz, but you can help out some scientists in documenting the Universe. Volunteers are needed to "help classify the galaxies as either elliptical or spiral and note, where possible, in which direction they rotate." Sign up at www.galaxyzoo.org and get briefed on the mission! (bp)

Make a "Blidget" at Widgetbox

Widgets have been enjoyed by computer users but the creation of them has been reserved for developers...until now. The great folks at Widgetbox have made it easy to create your own "blidget" or Blog Widget (in case the connection escaped you). They take about 2 minutes to make unless you are having color choice issues.

Download the Guerrilla Sushi widget here and have our updates delivered right to you.
(nc)

WWF Billboard

The World Wildlife Fund demostrates the effects of global climate change in this brilliant billboard!
Check out the video below. Thanks to designboom
(tk)

Ambient Media - Nationwide Insurance

Driving through downtown Columbus, OH, this scene brought us to a screeching halt. What first appears to be a billboard for a paint company gone wrong turns out to be a great ad for Nationwide Investments "Life Comes at you Fast" campaign. The paint drips down the side of the building, onto two cars below and covers a large area of the parking lot, located just a few blocks from Nationwide's headquarters.
(nc + ms)

Universe

Universe is another masterpice by Johnathan Harris and like he explains it best, it is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone's path through Universe is different, just as everyone's path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world's contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world — a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place — and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.

Various "Stages" within Universe

Universe is divided into nine "Stages", titled: Stars, Shapes, Secrets, Stories, Statements, Snapshots, Superstars, Settings, and Time. Stars presents a cryptic star field; Shapes causes constellation outlines to emerge; Secrets extracts the most salient single words and presents them to scale; Stories extracts the sagas and events; Statements extracts the things people said; Snapshots extracts images; Superstars extracts the people, places, companies, teams, and organizations; Settings shows geographical distribution; Time shows how the universe has evolved over hours, days, months, and years. In the top left corner is a search box, which can be used to specify the scope of the current universe. The scope can be as broad as 2007, as recent as Today, as precise as Tobias on July 5th, 2007, or as open-ended as War, Climate Change or Happiness. The exact parameters of each universe are entirely up to the viewer, and unexpected paths unfold with exploration.

Universe does not suggest a single shared mythology. Instead, it provides a tool to explore many personal mythologies. Based on the chosen path of the viewer, Universe presents the most salient stories, statements and snapshots, as found in global news coverage from thousands of sources. Through this process of guided discovery, patterns start to emerge. Certain stories show up again and again, and they become our great sagas. Certain people start to shape the news, and they become our heroes and villains. Certain single words rise from the chatter, and they become our epic themes.

In Universe, as in reality, everything is connected. No event happens in isolation. No company exists in a vacuum. No person lives alone. Whereas news is often presented as a series of unrelated static events, Universe strives to show the broader narrative that contains those events. The only way to begin to see the mythic nature of today's world is to surface its connections, patterns, and themes. When this happens, we begin to see common threads — myths, really — twisting through the stream of information.
(tk)

Blackle

Blackle, which is basically Google Search in a different looking window, saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen." Roberson et al, 2002

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

Whatever you want to make of it, I think it is still worth a mention, as they say "God is in the details." Thanks to Christina for pointing it out!

(tk)

"Mr. Simpson, pay for your purchases and get out...and come again!"

A dozen 7-Eleven stores across North America have now been temporarily morphed into the fictional convenience store "Quik-E-Mart". The transformation is slated to last for the month of July to help promote the upcoming Simpsons movie which is due for release on July 27.

The 6,000 or so other 7-Eleven stores that weren't converted have also jumped on the promotional Canyonero by selling Simpsons-related snack items such as Buzz Cola, KrustyO's cereal, and - you guessed it - the infamous Squishee. In fact, one flavor of 7-Eleven's own Slurpee will be sold as "WooHoo! Blue Vanilla" Squishee for the month.

Oh and before you even ask, no, they will not be offering Duff Beer. I know...I was crushed, too. (al)

we feel fine

I better let the Mission Statement of artists Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvan speak for itself for this awesome (!) exploration of human emotions on a global scale called We Feel Fine.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

(tk)