On May the third I tweeted an opinion about the Dutch Pavilion on the Shanghai 2010 Expo. The opinion was that it looks like a cheap tourist village somewhere in the Mediterranean. Kitsch. And embarrassing. It’s easy to express an uninformed opinion, 140 characters is more than enough. I’ll try to explain why I was mistaken, why I should never have tweeted that tweet.
Jonathan Keats, an American experimental philosopher and artist, is the creator of Cinema Botanica. This art installation was made to show stimulating images to ordinary American house plants. Your Sansevieria, which would otherwise only see the plaster ceiling of your appartment, can experience the blue Italian sky for once. But Keats took it a step further and also included plant porn; bees pollinating plants. He does not know what exactly happens to the plants, but his work definitely raises questions. “So if your children are supposedly vegetating in front of the television when they watch it for hours, what happens when you show television to vegetables?”
With their street view option Google added an incredible feature to their maps application. When you’re heading into unknown territory you don’t have to be prepared for the unexpected, you can explore the terrain from the safety of your hammock, looking for obstacles like traffic lights and speed cameras. It also helps finding a place to park. But not everybody seems to be happy with it. It can be considered to be a little invasive in ones privacy.
Most URL shortening services merely make your URLs boring. For example, http://www.facebook.com/ becomes http://tinyurl.com/4t993 and http://twitter.com/lovenonsense turns into http://bit.ly/bg6JpN. But now there is a lovely new URL shortener, called ShadyURL.
All kitchen necessities tucked to one wall and everything fits exactly. This is the ultimate efficiency, the ultimate minimalism in kitchen design. Why use a room when a wall is enough? And look at all the free space where you can, uhm, stand and look at your beautiful pots, pans and cupboards. I guess I’ll just leave that sink where it is and drink something else than water.
This post does not quite belong on a site about nonsense, because it adequately explains a phenomenon we use most every day; the Internet. What most people do not seem to realise, is that the Internet is made entirely out of cats. To make this field of Science more accessable to the public, Joel Veitch of rathergood.com has made a song with a video clip.
A clear trend on the interwebs is the rise of one issue sites. You have the simple single page sites that try to answer a question, like is it friday yet? or is it 2010 yet?. A site like this is built and published within ten minutes, you can’t really call that a waste of time. And they aren’t exactly nonsensical either. I wrote about a more complex one issue site, the incredible Defiant Dog a while ago and yesterday I found this very good reason to keep a computer with flash installed at hand: Giant Bat Farts. These two sites are not exactly built within a few minutes, somebody took their time to look at some trivial details (like the source code of the bat farts). But nevertheless, these sites are built and then they’re done. If we visit them next year chances are they haven’t changed.
I’ve always been a fan of On Kawara, the artist who meticulously registered every part of his life that can be registered. Every morning he sent a postcard to a friend with the time he got up, he filled up big books with a daily report of who he met that day, every day he painted a painting of the date, all very autistic. And he noted where he’d been by drawing lines on a map.
The main co-author of this weblog might reason that the use of any Microsoft product is always absurd. What’s even more nonsensical, is that someone has emulated Windows 3.1 using Javascript.
Many designers and engineers suffer from it: solving a non-existent problem by adding an extra problem. I found a nice example.
The iPhone responds to movement so game developers build games where by moving your phone you steer a car. A very simple and intuitive interface, no wonder this phone, and the games on it are so popular.
But you can’t control a car with your phone, you need a steering wheel to do that! So in order to make the gaming experience more realistic this clever dude built just the thing we need: a steering wheel for your iPhone.