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His & Hers ~ Love the design... from the Garden State music supervisor, Amanda Scheer-Demme! Oasis, and The Dandy Warhols to The Postal Service, Daft Punk, Goldfrapp, and Nina Simone. Read More...

I have monkeys, now I want skulls. Read More...

These are setup sheets, which are used to test and tune printing presses. The resulting overlays of random images are fascinating Read More...

I want a wallpaper suit! Read More...

nice small collection. click the "Upstate New York “snowflake” pic for more. Read More...

Forest Roll ~ the ultimate in textured/roll-away rugs? From Aguiniga Design Read More...

For anyone who loves octopi and women... here is a series of 98 mini paintings of 100 of each... by zak smith Read More...

Jen Stark's construction paper art. It's like origami on ecstasy. Read More...

"toothpaste meet fashion. fashion meet toothpaste." When rembrandt went for the rebrand ~ they really went all out on the lifestyle branding. Um, in addition to the new packaging, they are also the official sponsor of an Ohio Singer Songwriter named Griffin House. strange. Read More...

Australian artist, Mark Vaarwerk, reuses plastic bags and other throw away domestic plastic containers such as shampoo bottles, to create beautiful jewel-like brooches and rings. Of course this is not going to single handedly solve the worlds plastic bag problem, nor are we saying it is totally sustainable jewelery, (gold is also used), but this jewellery does give rise to alternative and thoughtful uses for discarded plastics. Read More...

or rather, 'foglia graffito' by Abigail Doan Read More...

from the site: "The Plastic-Fantastic series represent an unique styled in and outdoor furniture collection which have been provided with a special rubber coating and can be delivered in a variety of colors. The furniture which al unique are restored and conditioned at a very high level before they are threaded with a coating. The series are designed to resist all kinds of weather conditions so they easily can be used as garden furniture! The Plastic Fantastic range will exist of chairs, sofa's, fauteuiles, tables, closets etc." Read More...

Dream Bag is a lotus shaped, inflatable (and portable) cushion. I love this. It folds into itself like a flower and the bottom circle is the carry bag. Click the pic for more, Read More...

porridge papers is an awesome little papermill that makes the best handmade paper ever. they also have a knack for letterpress printing.
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just a few designs, but they are all demented and interesting. Plus, they own the domain "thehandsomesausage.com" Read More...

Many thanks to Monica via Roland for this, a recent video by the Sunderland, England band Field Music. Most of the video is a tight shot of a hand drawing a nearly continuous line with a sharpie to the beat of the song "In Context". At the end of course the camera pans out and it's clever and well done. Read More...

When coastal engineers decide whether to dredge sand and pump it onto an eroded beach, they use mathematical models to predict how much sand they will need, when and where they must apply it, the rate it will move and how long the project will survive in the face of coastal storms and erosion.

Orrin H. Pilkey, a coastal geologist and emeritus professor at Duke, recommends another approach: just dredge up a lot of sand and dump it on the beach willy-nilly. This “kamikaze engineering” might not last very long, he says, but projects built according to models do not usually last very long either, and at least his approach would not lull anyone into false mathematical certitude.

Now Dr. Pilkey and his daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, a geologist in the Washington State Department of Geology, have expanded this view into an overall attack on the use of computer programs to model nature. Nature is too complex, they say, and depends on too many processes that are poorly understood or little monitored — whether the process is the feedback effects of cloud cover on global warming or the movement of grains of sand on a beach.

Their book, “Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future,” originated in a seminar Dr. Pilkey organized at Duke to look into the performance of mathematical models used in coastal geology. Among other things, participants concluded that beach modelers applied too many fixed values to phenomena that actually change quite a lot. For example, “assumed average wave height,” a variable crucial for many models, assumes that all waves hit the beach in the same way, that they are all the same height and that their patterns will not change over time. But, the authors say, that’s not the way things work. Read More...

Continuing the trend to bring back real materials into the consumer electronics arena, this concept is by Joseph Graceffa at IDEO:

"The spinning CD, displayed as a table saw blade slicing through a rich piece of walnut, draws our attention to an element of elegant activity within a simple, tranquil object." Read More...

LifeGem offers mourners the opportunity to carry on their deceased loved ones' legacies within a man-made diamond crafted from the carbon captured from a lock of hair. The diamond does not necessarily have to come from a corpse--LifeGem also suggests this process for those who "purely want to create a symbol of [their] precious bond with someone [they] love." Let's leave this post with a sampling of their mush-mush vocab-filled sales pitch:

Love. Life's single greatest risk. Life's single greatest reward. Intangible and unexplainable, yet ever so real and powerful. Love captures your heart in a second and holds it for eternity...To desire a LifeGem diamond can mean only one thing. You have experienced a love without equal. You have had someone truly special in your life and mere words simply will not do.

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Martin Frey, a Munich, Germany-based experimental interface and interaction designer, has developed SnOil, a physical interactive display that utilizes ferrofluid, a liquid that reacts to magnetism. Frey has integrated SnOil with classic arcade game Snake (get it? snake + oil = SnOil) to illustrate game actions via the ferrofluid display. Read More...

Bored? Here's a nice place to go and go watch old episodes of Xena or Arrested Development that people have hidden on YouTube. Fun! Read More...

it's a podcast, it's a music showcase, it's a streaming internet radio station...

from the site: Our aim is to expose you all to deep beautifully strange music that will help you in the every day, as you view the world around playing out like a silent color film, the music soundtrack in your ears. Your on your way to work on the subway or bus, waiting at an airport or just walking down the street, maybe your standing looking at the most inspiring view as you reach the top of Ankor Wat in Cambodia, as you watch the sun set over a tropical beach or ride around on a bike at Burning Man. There are those moments in life that you attach to music, that help you remember them many years later, we like to call it "Music For Strange Moments." Read More...

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The NanoNuno umbrella has been nominated as one of the best inventions of 2006 by Time magazine. This umbrella does not allow moisture to penetrate through it's fabric, and hence there is no tedious drying to do after a walk in the rain.

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Dolores Piscotta, of Piscotta Cashmere, New York, has been selling clothes and accessories made from milk for the last two years. The eco-friendly milk cloth T-shirts, pants, camisoles etc are available online and are sent to boutiques across U.S.

The fabric is made by a Chinese company, Cyran, that Piscotta discovered online while on one of her searches to discover innovative materials. The process of making cloth from milk involves extracting the milk protein which then undergoes a chemical process to create usable fabric. And this is something that surprised me the technology to create milk fabric was known since World War I! The inhibiting factor however, was the high cost of production. The process remains expensive even today inspite of advances in technology the proof lies in Piscotta's T-shirts retailing at $110 a piece.

Advantages of milk fabric? Velvetiness for your skin that beats even the finest quality silk. And Cyran claims that the 18 amino acids that milk protein contains are healthy for humans. Read More...

Yahoo finally did something as cool as Google! Pipes is sort of a mash-up tool for RSS news feeds. People are making fun and interesting web mash-up tools with it. It's still in Beta so you might just want to look around.

"Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant." Read More...

Who is the biggest nerd you know? ok, multiply that person times 1000 and then click the pic to see Ian's Shoelace Site. "Bringing you the fun, fashion & science of shoelaces" pretty amazing. Read More...

Interesting (and artsy) explanation of what the web is becoming and what it will evolve into. Read More...

Crazy lighter sized 3 flame Butane Torch, looks like a light saber can melt soft metals. for under $6. Read More...

If you register your access point in their system and give FON members access, you too can get on any FON member's wireless network. cool. click the pic to visit the site.

snip: "FON is the largest WiFi community in the world. Our members share their wireless Internet access at home and, in return, enjoy free WiFi wherever they find another Fonero’s Access Point.

It all started as a simple idea. Why should you pay for Internet access on the go when you have already paid for it at home? Exactly, you shouldn’t. So we decided to help create a community of people who get more out of their connection through sharing.

We call members of the FON Community Foneros. It’s simple to become a Fonero. You just need to buy La Fonera, which enables you to securely and fairly share your home broadband connection with other Foneros.

Then when you’re away from home and you need Internet access, just log on to a FON Access Point, and you can use the Internet for free. You don’t need to take your router with you – you just need to remember your Fonero login and password." Read More...

Bloomframe is a window that can fold down into a balcony. Love it. click the link for more. Read More...

A bored web programmer who was addicted to the flickr "interestingness" tag wrote a javascript that pulls 500 flickr thumbnails from any day of the year. You can click any photo to see it full size on the flickr site. You can pick any tag you want and do a search, it will pull 500 new pics with that tag. It's very zen. Read More...

Cool long exposure photos of video games by Rosemarie Fiore. Also on her site she has funny ceramic recreations of scenes from RoadRunner cartoons re-imagined so the Coyote wins and kills the RoadRunner... original and strange!

Also don't miss the Scambler Drawings, paintings created by connecting a gas generator and air compressor to buckets of paint secured into the seats of a Scrambler amusement park ride. Once the ride was in motion, paint sprayed out of the benches onto vinyl tarps placed underneath. The result is a series of enormous hypocycloid designs which recorded the hidden patterns created by the ride as it turned. Read More...

Semi-submersible ships are the only vessels in the world which provide the capability to load, transport and offload extremely heavy cargo, such as oil drilling rigs, gas refineries or even warships. Their large, free and open deck makes them the largest heavy transports in the world. They are capable of loading lifts from approximately 50 to as much as 45,000 tons. Read More...

For decades, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has shared the remarkable sounds of birds and other animals with the public through audio guides featuring recordings hand-picked from the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds' vast collection. Now anyone can explore the archive's holdings on his or her own. For the first time, more than 65,000 sound clips and some 18,000 video clips of birds and other animals are accessible for no charge at the Macaulay Library's Web site. Read More...

click it for more by swedish photographer sannah kvist Read More...

Mad TV parody "The Sopranos" edited for Christian TV Read More...

The internet is finally becoming what I always dreamed it would be... an open forum of ideas and knowledge that people are willing to freely share with others to make the world a little better. This guy is giving away useful and practical knowledge he learned the hard way so you don't have to. Mostly Windows and Linux info, with plenty of Vista tips. Good stuff. Click the pic for more. Read More...

Toasts skull images into slices of bread. For yuppies who feel like they need to hang onto their "edge" Read More...

The Chair of Textures is as rich in motivations as it is in detail: designed to directly contrast with purely economical and functional design, this metal chair is laser cut with patterns that include flames, butterflies and flowers. Heterogeneity and dynamism is the ultimate goal here, and it largely succeeds in creating a chair that is overflowing with nuances. Read More...

The Chase series of coat hooks are both highly functional but drastically different in terms of appearance. The Chase W is curvy and hollowed out, essentially hiding the hangers and minimizing its visual profile. Read More...

Often using subjects which lie on the border of science and philosophy, Conrad Shawcross's structural and often mechanical sculptures, question empirical, ontological and philosophical systems ubiquitious within our lives. While at first appearing rational and functional, his often complex mechanised systems in the end deny all rational function and so the viewer is forced down philosophical and metaphysical avenues to deduce a 'rasion d'etre'. From early works such as The Nervous System, 2002 - a monumental spinning machine that endlessly weaves a length of coloured rope into the form of a double helix, the shape of DNA - to his recent giant spiral work Continuum, 2004, the artist has attempted to visualize, among other things, the incomprehensible of human concerns, time. Read More...

Wouldn't it be nice to spend an evening under the stars, regardless of the weather? Thanks to the Laser Stars projector, you can watch in amazement as the ceiling and walls in a room of any size take on the depth of the night sky, with thousands of stars and moving cloud formations. Prepare to be mesmerized by this system, which uses green laser technology combined with holographics and two precision glass lenses to recreate the universe, complete with magical shooting stars and moving cloud formations. click the pic to see it at ThinkGeek.com $200
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I'm disrespectful to dirt!

Can you see I am serious!

Get out of my way, all of you!

This is no place for loafers.

Join me or die.

Can you do any less? Read More...

I think this is a little before it's time, but when computer graphics and haptic technology is so good that virtual reality is better than reality... there will be an entire subculture of people who will live in these things and stay "jacked in" 100% of the time.

The Oculas is a new multi-sensory, multi-purpose, & multi-tainment isolation pod where you can go to work, play, relax, sleep, hide or get your Darth Vader helmet changed (maybe not). Would you pay $45,000, for a luxury pod with the latest technology, comfort and audio-visual wizardry? click the pic to buy one from Hammacher Schlemmer. Read More...

Canova is a dual display touch screen notebook concept created by V12 Design, an industrial design and engineering studio in Milan. Canova is a notebook which has dual LCD touch screen display that can do almost everything from a sketch pad, music score, graph paper, watching a movie and so on. It has the same usage as other notebooks. The thing that makes it special is it going to have everything in touch screen, for example touch screen keyboard and it doesn't require any mouse. The electronic pen and dedicated hardware of the notebook brings the machine to life and make viewers glued to it making everything accessible on two massive touch-sensitive screens. Read More...

Porro is an Italian manufacturer of modern furniture that features works from several great designers. Jean-Marie Massaud, a French multidisciplinary designer, offers his new Truffle chair, which works as well indoors as out. It comes on a stand, or can be used directly on the floor. And it comes in several colors. To see the range on the Porro site click on the pic, select english, products, chairs, truffle. Read More...

The Book of Bunny Suicides: Little fluffy rabbits who just don't want to live anymore is a collection of black & white cartoons showing one or more rabbits in their creative attempts to end their lives using a variety of items. The hilarity that ensues marks the authour, Andy Riley, as a comical genius. He's aware of the fine balance between unlikely gore and straight-up comedy. Where else will you see a Bunny impaled on a light saber? This book might not be for everyone, but for those that will find it funny, will find it ridiculously funny. Read More...

PLAY+SOFT is the result of a four-year research project conducted by a team of twenty-eight innovative international designers, with the art direction of ZPZ Partners and with the pedagogical consultancy of Reggio Children. The dialogue between pedagogy and design and the theoretical reflections that were developed have created a unique range of soft play furnishings and play equipment that is open to interpretations, but is founded in a celebration of imaginative play and the idea that furnishings can be a protagonist in the construction of identity and ideas. Play+ provides a foundation for creative environments that are multisensory, enjoyable and beautiful.

The PLAY+SOFT furnishings comprise a wide range of product types including soft three-dimenional "landscapes", micro-places, transformable seating, play structures, mats, modular forms, burrows and shelters. They are made of eco-friendly materials, fire-resistant but soft to the touch, in a broad range of colors and textures. They are designed for use in any place inhabited by children, not only infant-toddler centers and preschools but also shopping centres, restaurants, airports, waiting areas, and other public places. click the pic for more info.
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A free "manifold mesh modeling system" that is a kind of computer aided sculpting tool for PCs. it was written by Ergun Akleman who works as an Associate Professor at Texas A&M. Read More...

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HEL LOOKS is selected street fashion from Helsinki, the capital of Finland. The pictures are taken in the streets and clubs of Helsinki from July 2005 onwards.

HEL LOOKS is a hobby project of Liisa Jokinen and Sampo Karjalainen. The project is a tribute to Fruits and Street magazines, the pioneers of street fashion photography. Shown here is a woman wearing clothes made from curtains. Very "Sound of Music!"

click the pic for more. Read More...

A lot of this might be common sense, but it delivers structure and a plan to follow for anyone who feels financially "lost". click the pic for the whole article. Read More...

There is some great stuff here including a nice article on "Living with Continuous Partial Attention" and another called "The Accidental Influentials" which argues that social contagion is the effect of individuals and the right conditions. "The principal requirement for what we call “global cascades”—the widespread propagation of influence through networks—is the presence not of a few influentials but, rather, of a critical mass of easily influenced people, each of whom adopts, say, a look or a brand after being exposed to a single adopting neighbor."

snip: Our annual survey of emerging ideas considers how nanotechnology will affect commerce, what role hope plays in leadership, and why, in an age that practically enshrines accountability, we need to beware of “accountabalism.”

click the pic for a full list of ideas Read More...

Rakku, a stylish, clever, and very useful way to keep closets and hallways clear. Using a radial design, the Rakku shoe wheel is covered with elastic bands that stretch as you insert your shoe into the adjustable pockets, keeping everything visible and easy to access. Selecting a shoe is just a simple.

Poised on four locking wheels the Rakku is ideal for quick shuffling, making rooting through a wardrobe in a morning rush frustration-free. What a great alternative to conventional shoe racks and storage systems! Read More...

Whonu is arguably one of the very first semantic Web search engines available. It offers over 300 search sources and a smart interface that contextualizes what you enter. For example, enter a US ZIP code and whonu presents a set of links to geocode tools including maps, weather maps, and even public events in Google Calendar. There are so many features that the demo screencast video is 26 minutes long. Information is double partitioned by file type and source. The variety of options might be a bit intimidating, but for power research, whonu looks like one of the most promising search tools available, with an effort made to present structured meaning. Killer feature — saved query history using a row of dots. Read More...

Think of all the waste we generate and how much of it ends up in land fills. Imagine if even a fraction of that could be disposed of responsibly. Well it might be worth taking a look at BioBags. Made of Mater-Bi, a material produced by Italian research company Novamont, and the first completely biodegradable and compostable bio-polymer ever invented, BioBags have a commercial and retail line with a variety of uses.

For example, do you compost? Well if you do, BioBag makes a food waste bag that is ideal for that purpose, as well as a ventilated countertop container which cuts down on odor and mess. Read More...