Bed in a cube!

Don't know about you, but I'm a big sucker for unusual design.

Plus, this one gives a whole new meaning to the the concept of "jumping into bed!"


Read more about this studio design by architects Emmanuel Combarel Dominique Marrec on Apartment Therapy. And while you're at it, check out the whole site -- it's my favorite design blog.

Tetris furniture...?

Love or Hate?


Check out more Tetris-inspired design here.

The remotest places in the world

If there's one thing I've gained from my sad corporate existence, it's a renewed appreciation for remote places. I think they appeal to the escapist side of me.

So if you're also dreaming of a little escapism from the hustle and bustle of your daily grind (can I fit any more cliches into this sentence?) then this map might come in handy.



It's a world map color-coded based on accessibility by travel, and you can read more about it here.

See you in Greenland!

Seeing is believing!

This one's a bit dated, but it's truly priceless and I couldn't resist!

Imagine a quaint county courthouse, in rural Tennessee, and imagine that its surrounding grounds have been designated as a sort of "free speech zone" -- a space open to outdoor displays and installations of all sorts. What might you expect to find there?

Well, as it turns out: a soldiers' memorial, a Statue of Liberty, a cross-bearing Jesus, a chainsaw-carved sculpture of monkeys and bears, and...

...wait for it...

...a Flying Spaghetti Monster!



To those of you unaware of the deep significance of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, get thyself an education.

To everyone else, may you be touched by his noodly appendage!

You can read more the county courthouse and its inadvertent encounter with Pastafarianism here.

And while you're at it, do treat yourself to the open letter to the Kansas State Board of Education that started it all.

Bleeding jobs

Nothing like starting the day with a little dose of depression, but this interactive map on Slate Magazine really drives the point home.

Yup, we're bleeding jobs all over the place, and you can see clearly what areas have been hit the worst.

Click here to view the interactive version.



Hopefully we'll get to see this republished once the situation finally improves.

Hearing sights, seeing music

I wish I had synesthesia!

It's a neurological "condition" (minus the negative connotations), affecting about 4% of the population, in which cognitive and sensory pathways "cross over" one another, leading to an unusual "blending" of perceptions.

Sight gets mixed in with hearing, hearing with taste and so on... One might experience blue as not just a color, but also as a taste; or the sound of a cello as inherently "green", not simply as a metaphor, but because the visual experience of "green" accompanies the auditory experience of the sound in a very real and literal way.

It's fascinating stuff and truly makes one wonder about the possible differences among people's perception of the world.

So if this has sparked your interest, here are two interesting articles on synesthesia:

In this interview, neuroscientist David Eagleman talks about the synesthesia gene and the The Synesthesia Battery, a free online test for synesthesia aimed at promoting scientific progress in the field.

Even more fascinating: consider synesthesia from the perspective of art. Artist and synesthete Marcia Smilack creates photographs and videos to recreate some of her visual-auditory sensations for non-synesthetes. You can read about her in this Seed Magazine article, The Most Beautiful Painting You've Ever Heard.

Also, check out Smilack's portfolio here.

Follow-up review: RjDj

So I finally caved and bought an iPhone, taking a big ole swig from the collective jug of kool-aid. Oh but it tastes so good!!

And, it gave me the opportunity for a follow-up review to my original post about that quirky RjDj app. Quick reminder:

"RjDj takes in sounds from your surroundings (voices, street noise, tapping on computer keyboards...) and plays it back to you as music compositions in real-time."

That's how I had described it the first time around.

Having now sampled it first hand, I'll revise that description. It's not so much music as a stream of psychedelic-sounding repetitions, as if a sound, rather than merely being heard and registered by your brain, instead lingered there a bit longer, bouncing off the sides of your skull and creating weird reverberating echos.

So... music, no.

But it is extremely interesting and weird and fascinating. I had it running while I was unloading the dishwasher, and the clanking of dishes (among my top 10 most annoying sounds) somehow turned into a strangely fitting noise-pop soundtrack to that most mundane of activities.

There's certainly more that can be done with the app, including sampling different "scenes," which are essentially different algorithms for manipulating the sound inputs.

I'll do some more exploring and post a follow-up if I discover anything nifty.

Check out the app here, and my original post here!

Of icons and iconoclasms

Great article in The Economist's Intelligent Life magazine.

The topic: the word "iconic". And it manages to draw a parallel between Jesus, Hitler, Stalin, stadium rock and Marmite, all in the first sentence!

Enjoy!

Sleep: simplifying synapses?

A recent study seems to support the controversial theory that sleep preserves brain function by weakening or even severing connections between brain cells.

Counter-intuitive, at the very least.

Scientist theorize that this weakening in synapses serves to "save resources ... and boost the signal of important memories over the noise of unneeded connections." It basically clears up the brain for new thoughts and memories.

The findings are by no means certain - indeed there have been past studies suggesting the precise opposite: that sleep strengthens rather than weakens synapses. However, it's still and interesting thought.

It also echoes a similar and equally surprising finding in urban planning: that removing roads and traffic lights actually speeds up traffic. Whether you buy into the roads/synapses analogy, it's a fun article to read: touching upon all sorts of topics from mathematics to economics to game theory.

For more on sleep and synapses, check out this digest on Discover Magazine's blog.

Trauma and the spotless mind

Seems like selective memory deletion is really the hot topic of debate nowadays, and obviously I am fascinated. This recent article, on Wired Magazine, touches upon the possibility of using memory editing drugs to treat post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) in soldiers.

The moral and ethical issues related to memory-editing drugs of course are numerous, and I've touched on a few of them before. My question here is a more practical/functional one...

On a very simplistic level, the case for using memory deletion to treat PTSD is that absent the negative memories from which they originate, the stress symptoms will subside. However, I wonder if there are cases in which knowing and dealing with the source of one's anxiety might in fact be the best way to cure it... Exposure therapy, for example, has proven fairly effective in treating PTSD.

Consider also this article in Scientific American, which suggests that PTSD is over-diagnosed among soldiers, when depression or social and reintegration problems might be equally to blame. In these situations it's hard to imagine that memory editing could possibly be a solution.

Nothing but flowers

At New York's Nyehouse gallery, Alexis Rockman's exhibit depicts an eerie, post-apocalyptic world dominated by plants and animals -- beautiful, but strange, like three-eared rabbits and conjoined daisies.

According to Rockman:

“In my mind, that had to do with mutation and pesticides... The idea of the perfect lawn.”

Check out the slide show and commentary on Seed Magazine.

Movies worth seeing

This week my Netflix queue bestowed upon me two very unusual French films: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and La Moustache. One thing I like about Netflix is that, since I tend to set up my queue on a whim, when the DVDs finally arrive in my mail I am almost always surprised (and, on occasion, appalled by my own lack of taste). And often, as in this case, they are films I know very little about.

On this occasion, it turns out that I was entirely unprepared for what was to come.


The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, once an editor of Elle Magazine, who suffered a serious stroke and found himself not only fully paralyzed save for his left eye, but a victim of "locked-in syndrome." He could hear and see as normal but was incapable of speaking, gesturing, or communicating with the outside world in any way other than by blinking his one functioning eyelid. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the book he wrote about his experience living life as a prisoner in his own body. To do this he had to painstakingly dictate the entire text one letter at a time to a transcriber who would say the alphabet until Bauby blinked, indicating what letter he wanted.

It's a tragic but fascinating film, well worth watching and all the more incredible considering what it must have been to live with such a condition. Bauby passed away just days after the book was published.


La Moustache is an altogether different story, in which a man who sported a mustache all his life finally decides to get rid of it, only to discover that nobody can tell the difference. In fact, everyone seems to believe that he never even had a mustache in the first place, sending him into a serious crisis of identity. Things get even stranger as more of his beliefs about himself and his life are called into question, causing him to doubt his own sanity and his life to rapidly unravel.

The tone feels very much like Kafka, with the angst that comes from feeling trapped in a dysfunctional world where everything seems to make sense to everybody except you.

So, though perhaps not the best cure for cubicle-induced cabin fever (unless schadenfreude is your cup of tea), both film are nonetheless highly worth seeing.