Mark Newman at the Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan generated this awesome collection of election maps. My favorite is above.

H/T Andrew Sullivan

UPDATE:
As Steve and Josh commented, the red/blue colors can give a biased visual perspective. Here’s the same map with the hue rotated 120 degrees.

Mr. Mul-zany shared this incredible Flash video site with me today via email. Too freakin’ awesome!

Here’s a new version of the open source documentary by Four Eyed Monsters on net neutrality and the tragic history of the public’s loss of access to media…

My friend Jay Schuster just pointed me to a really fun graphical description language, which can produce beautiful images with remarkably small amounts of code.

I encourage you to check out the galleries at contextfreeart.org and try it yourself if you’re inclined.

To give you a taste of what it’s like, this snippet of code:

startshape SeedOfLife
background { b -1 }

rule SeedOfLife {
DotCircle {}
6 * {rotate 60} DotCircle { y 1 }
}

rule DotCircle {
180 * {rotate 2} CIRCLE { y 1 s 0.025 hue 120 sat 1 brightness 1}
}

… produces this image:

Great news!  Now the Air Force can successfully drop 500-pound bombs from unmanned aerial vehicles!

An MQ-9 Reaper successfully dropped its first GPS-guided GBU-49 missile during a live-fire test May 13 at the Naval Air Warfare Center, Weapons Division, at China Lake, Calif.

Manned U.S. aircraft have frequently dropped the 500-pound bomb loaded with a GPS kit in Iraq and Afghanistan because of its accuracy and ability to reduce collateral damage.

Pilots and sensor operators with the 658th Aeronautical Systems Squadron flew three Reaper sorties and dropped six GBU-49s on target, according to an Air Force Material Command news release.

Author and professor Clay Shirky has an amazing essay posted on his blog about what he calls the “cognitive surplus” – all the extra time and mental energy we have in our society, and why we don’t realize it.

Thanks to his new book, Here Comes Everybody, he was being prepped by a producer to appear on a TV talk show. He was talking about the participatory nature of Wikipedia, and the amount of activity on the discussion pages, and so on…

She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

I have that tingly feeling that I only get when a new, clear articulation of an idea has been introduced into my noggin. I love that feeling. Thank you, Clay!

Rocketboom has a short video edit of Jason Scott’s “Before LOL” presentation at this weeks ROFLCon conference. Jason als produced the 2005 film BBS the Documentary.

Site devoted to development of actual programming language based on LOLspeak.

To wit:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

Check out John Whitney’s demo reel of work created with his analog computer/film camera magic machine he built from a WWII anti-aircraft gun sight. Also Whitney and the techniques he developed with this machine were what inspired Douglas Trumbull (special fx wizard) to use the slit scan technique on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Fellow Glitchie, Sean Stevens, helped create this amazing remote-control, robotic, music system.

ABSOLUT QUARTET
(2008)
Jeff Lieberman and Dan Paluska
Part of the Absolut Machines campaign.

Visit http://absolutmachines.com to interact with the machine. As seen in the beginning of the video, the visitor to the site enters a melody on their computer keyboard. The machine then uses this melody to generate an original and unique 2 1/2 minute piece of music. The web visitor also recieves a link to a webcam video of their piece being played.

You can also visit the machine in person. It is on display @
186 Orchard st
(between Stanton and Houston)
NY NY 10002

until April 25th, 2008.

Find more information at http://bea.st/sight/absolutQuartet/.