May 14, 2012
It shows you the relative sizes of a coffee bean, bacteria, virus, piece of RNA…and much, much more. We love stuff like this. This is what The Intertubes were made for!.
Here’s a pic of just part of it:
You grab the slider and go back and forth to go either smaller and smaller or larger and larger. Takes you right in there.
[found on Stumble]
April 12, 2012
This is a fantastic idea. This website lists a bunch of Beatles songs. Pick one, and it shows a ukulele neck, plays the song, and shows where to put your fingers on the ukulele neck in order to play along. Just a great idea.
Here’s a pic of what it looks like. (It’s just a screen-grab.)
This was found on StumbleUpon, which has some just terrific stuff if you’re willing to spend a little time on it.
April 1, 2012
We don’t know why, but we just find this pretty darn cool. As you can see in the image above, it’s a pinball game that looks like it was drawn with a pencil on a pad in a notebook. And you can play it (not this one, you have to go to the link) using the arrows on your keyboard. The promo says this:
canvas pinball is a simple game demo developed by Microsoft using HTML5. It was created in order to show off Internet Explorer’s new HTML5 capabilities.
Check it out. (Hint: Try to get he ball in the little resccent-shaped notch about halfway up on the right.)
March 26, 2012
Whoa:
I recently stumbled onto these amazing mugshots of Australian inmates of all kinds. Whores, gangsters, fraudsters, and crooks of every kind circa 1920. The quality that these were restored to is nothing short of astounding, capturing every detail and quirk of each prisoner. With names like Silent Tom, De Gracy and Montague, this is a fascinating look into the criminal world of yesteryear. 17 more mugshots after the jump!
Just a few examples, and you can mug on over to AwesomeRobo com for the rest.
How’d you like to cross these guys?
And watch out for this guy—we’re pretty sure has a Tommy gun and a small bulldog hidden in his hair:
And the cool thing about this photo:
…is that it allowed us to find out a lot more about this collection of photos – and a bunch more photos as well. I googled the name “Vera Chricton” and found this:
Vera Crichton, 23, and Nancy Cowman, 19, are listed in the NSW Police Gazette 24 March 1924 as charged, along with three others, with “conspiring together to procure a miscarriage” on a third woman. Crichton was “bound over to appear for sentence if called upon within three years”. This picture is one of a series of around 2500 “special photographs” taken by New South Wales Police Department photographers between 1910 and 1930.
More mug shots from Down Under and long ago.
And: These are the kind of people portrayed in the acclaimed 2011 Australian mini-series, Underbelly: Razor.
March 3, 2012
From Roger Ebert’s FaceBook page: “One of the most gobsmackingly gorgeous web sites I have ever seen.” It’s focus is the Ghent Altarpiece:
The Ghent Altarpiece or Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (Dutch: Het Lam Gods or The Lamb of God; completed 1432) is a very large and complex Early Netherlandish polyptych panel painting which is considered to be one of Belgium’s masterpieces and one of the world’s treasures.
You should click on the icon in the upper right and read the ”How To.” Look at one of the options:
You can:
• view the whole altarpiece in four different modes: digital macrophotography, digital macro infrared (IR) photography, infrared reflectography (IRR), or X-radiography…
Note: For simple use, choose an image on the home page you like, and hit the “+” symbol to zoom in. You can get really up close and personal with these astonishing paintings.
“Gorgeous” was exactly the right word. Wow. Have fun.
November 15, 2011
We spend a lot of time on the internet here at the BRI, and, as you know, it’s a barren, loveless wasteland that will suck every last Higgs Boson of your soul out of your body, taken away to be stored in the Devil’s servers (pretty sure they’re in the Cayman Islands) for eternity. But every once in a while we get lucky, and we run into “Internet Wonders,” like this:
Welcome to Tellers of Weird Tales, an online encyclopedia of the men and women, writers and artists, who contributed to Weird Tales magazine and its companion titles,Oriental Stories and The Magic Carpet Magazine, from their founding in the 1920s and ’30s until the revivals of the 1970s and ’80s.
That is just a great idea. It simply features writers (and magazine artists) of stories you’re not likely to come across in a lot of places around the internet, and gives a short bio and a list of their work. Their aren’t examples of the work (except in the case of artists – and those are very cool), but it’s easy enough to use Google with the titles to find the stories.
Here’s a sample:
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Née Elizabeth Stevenson
Aka Mrs. Gaskell
Born September 29, 1810, Chelsea, London
Died November 12, 1865, Holybourne, Hampshire, EnglandFor Weird Tales: “The Old Nurse’s Story” (story, Oct. 1927)
Elizabeth Gaskell, friend and associate of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Eliot Norton, and other prominent people of her age, was a successful and well-loved author despite her short life. With Dickens, Wilkie Collins (see below), and three others, she wrote “The Haunted House,” a collection of interconnected stories set in a haunted house. “Conducted by” Dickens (who also wrote the first and last installments and one in between), the story was published in All the Year Round in 1859. Mrs. Gaskell’s contribution to Weird Tales was “The Old Nurse’s Story” from October 1927.
We googled “The Old Nurse’s Story,” and found it at the Project Gutenburg of Australia. (The Gutenburg sites are another wonder of their own that we’ll have to write about one day.) So that’s two wonders for the price of one.
We approve!
P.S. To see more cool attractions on the World Wide Web we’re highlighted over the years, hit “Internet Wonders” in the tags below this post.
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Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader’s HOLIDAY SALE – 30% of all books (here’s the latest!) – goes through December.
November 5, 2011
Have you heard of Kickstarter? It’s an online fundraising website that more and more people are using to raise money for projects, from musical recordings to films to science projects, and much more.
How it works: People apply to Kickstarter to have their project appear on their website. They have to establish a fundraising goal, and set a deadline to reach the amount. If it gets the okay the project goes up, and, hopefully, people start pledging whatever amount they’d like to give for the project. If not enough money is pledged – no money is collected. If enough is raised, kickstarter takes 5%, Amazon (they handle the money collection) takes 3-5%, and the person with the project gets the rest.
How successful has Kickstarter been? Since being founded in 2009, they’ve s raised more $75 million dollars for more than 10,000 projects. And almost 50% of the people who apply reach their funding goals. That’s not bad.
And check out their highest-funded projects. (They’re listed in different categories.):
• TikTok + LunaTik by Scott Wilson and MINIMAL wanted to design a way to turn iPod Nanos into “the world’s coolest multi-touch watches.” How much did they raise through Kickstarter: $942,578.
• A Comic Anthology created entirely by more than 140 women: they got $109,301.
• A filmmaker got $345,992 to make the film Blue Like Jazz.
Pretty dang cool.
October 12, 2011
This is just danged good fun:
The Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls, Canada, struck viral advertising gold with their online photo gallery of people at the peak of absolute terror.
Our favorite so far:
Look: The girl in the middle is doing an automatic “gang sign” to ward off the scary! Hilarious!
Oh man, their Flickr page is just so good.
P.S. Could be fun to do captions with these, huh?
September 16, 2011
We ran across German photographer Martin Klimas some years ago, so he’s probably made the rounds on the internet a time or two. We think he deserves another one. Here’s an artist’s statement from a 2007 show:
Martin Klimas may carefully control his studio environment, but his pictures are greatly left to chance. With a strobe light and one sheet of film, Klimas captures each individual experience of a porcelain figurine being dropped and obliterated. As the statuettes in his pictures fall to their fragile demise, Klimas is able to capture a new structure that only exists for an instant.
We’ll give you just one example:
(Click on photo to enlarge.)
Much more to see over at the website of Martin Klimas.
