The Roaring 1920's on google ngrams

The huge corpus of google ngrams covering 4% of all books ever printed (cf. some scientific background) neatly illustrates the impact of the 1920's.
See "rational vs. emotional" and "Work vs. Party"

Jerry Blossom now twitter- 'n' tumblr-ing

I just understood how twitter works - I guess that makes me a "late adopter".

From now on, little Jerry Blossom tweets can be found there.

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Addendum 17/12/10: For reasons of completeness, I'm also (redundantly) tumblr-ing.

Personal Stats for Annual Reports

New York-based graphic designer Nicholas Felton statistically evaluates and visualizes data from his everyday life. Ever since 2005, he publishes annual reports of the activities he records in painstaking 15 minute segments. He even developed Daytum, a tool which allows you to do the same. A video describing his approach can be found over at Slate (via Mo's twitter).

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Addendum 15/12/2010: Cf. also the third section of Radiolab's "Fate and Fortune" episode covering computational linguistics on for example personal email archives.

(picture from Le Monde, Nov 17, 2010, via the Feltron tumblr)

3D Multiverse Multitouch

Tellinya - Cyperspace-Metaverse is just around the corner: The ubiquity of fast internet, remote interaction in real time, (quasi) 3D perception - and now this: Multitouch handling in real space (cf. Minority Report) and 3D reality reconstruction has become feasible by hacking the Kinect depth camera system. Now we just need to hook up more than one and we're ready to evade real reality.

Portraits of the Mind

Carl Schoonover:
Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century

"The brain is an endlessly fascinating topic for those who have one..."
(Betsy Mason's review on Wired, 11/15/2010)

Don't Believe the Hype

Round 1: Mexican Coke 3 - 0 American Coke (Justin Wright)
Round 2: The taste of coke is all in your head (Jonah Lehrer, Frontal Cortex)
Round 3a: Hipster, hör die Signale (Johannes Thumfart, Die Zeit, German only)
Round 3b: What was the Hipster? (Mark Greif, NY Mag)
Round 4: What is it about 20-somethings? (Robin Marantz Henig, The NY Times)

jerryblossom Geocities-ized

Digital travel to the times of Web 0.5: How this site would've looked in the Geocities era (by Geocities-izer which makes "any webpage look like it was made by a 13-year old in 1996")