As fans of feedback thought you might enjoy this example of one of those exciting moments of discovery.

Christine Smallwood, writing at the Baffler blog, examines the question, “What Does the Internet Look Like?” It’s a long way from the question to the answer, and the journey is well worth it.

After noting that many visions of the Internet rely on images of connectedness, she explores the essentially solitary nature of the Internet search:

We are born alone, we die alone, and we use the Internet alone. You may gather round the screen with friends to watch a video clip (turning the Internet into a television), or hang out while you play music on Pandora (turning the Internet into a radio), or post to your blog, or “comment” on someone else’s blog (turning the Internet into a roundtable, or a bathroom wall, depending). But these are subsidiary Internet uses. The essence of the Internet, the thing it does that nothing else can do, its Internet-ness, is the search. Comedian Dave Chappelle captured this with the skit “If the Internet Were a Real Place,” in which he loitered in a seedy mall like a modern Odysseus, ransacking CD stores, ducking into curtained rooms to indulge various temptations, and running away from spammers. Wandering around the Internet, the thing we are always searching for is the door—the exit ramp off the superhighway, the way home. But it’s hard to find. How do you know when you’re done doing nothing?

Please, read the whole thing.

(h/t to Dr. Hoo for noting that Thomas Frank is one again producing The Baffler in print!)

Get it.

Maybe I’ve just not been paying attention, but in this age of micro-blogging, I’m surprised that Paul Klee’s 1922 The Twittering Machine hasn’t gotten more play.

Embiggen.

uh, cool.

so can i, like, print it out on something…
like maybe,
a real wall?

Serge Brunier has created an incredible 360-degree panorama he calls “The Sky of the Earth:”

The images were collected from two exceptional astronomical sites, the Atacama Desert in the southern hemisphere and the Caldeira de Taburiente in the Canary Islands in the northern hemisphere.

It is the sky that everyone can relate to that I wanted to show — its constellations, its thousands year old stars, whose names have nourished all childhoods, its myths and stories of gods, titans, and heroes shared by all civilisations since Homo became sapiens. The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera.

You have to check this out.

Every cub reporter learns that a news story has to answer the five ‘w’s (and one ‘h’): Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How?

Google has answers:

Looks like someone already beat Eric to the punch line:

Yes, that’s Will Smith playing NES, circa ten million years ago.