Stats of the Union tells health stories in America.

Sound Cells – Universal iOS App Creates Generative Music.

Aphonium – App Creates Generative Audio and Visuals.

SunVox – Multiplatform Modular Music Creation Studio.

Surprise Surveillance Theater: An Experimental Drama with Unwitting Stars.

Japanese artist Eiji Watanabe cuts butterflies out of printed field guides and sets them free, covering the walls and ceilings of installation spaces.

15 Shopping Rules of Thumb.

Every individual needs emotional and intellectual support from her creative tribe to sustain a positive, thriving and aspiring practice.

Hidden is an app that lets you spy on the person who may have stolen you laptop.

Urban Quiver camera bag from Blackstone Bags.

Everything is a Remix Part 2 (video).

DataMarket launches with international time series data.

25 Years of Digital Vandalism by William Gibson.

Unsolving the City: An Interview with China Miéville.

European robins may maintain quantum entanglement in their eyes a full 20 microseconds longer than the best laboratory systems and Particles can be quantum entangled through time as well as space.

Sustainism Is the New Black.

Dingsaller is a workspace for creating algorithmic compositions on the iPad.

Americans Have No Idea How Much Welfare They’re Getting

Binaural Beats = Synchronize Brainwaves & Alter Consciousness.

Phil Durrant on Reaktor and the Laptop as Improvisational Instrument.

Are Writers Powerless to Make a Living in the Digital Age?

Useful Resources and Tips for Managing Your Virtual Staff.

Check out the Asian Film Archive and European Film Archives.

Visual analysis of ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.

Interacting with Inner and Outer Sonic Complexity: from Microsound to Soundscape Composition (video).

Meditation Correlated With Structural Changes In The Brain.

Using Bamboo to Fight Climate Change.

Digital Video Fragments, Flowing as if Liquid: A Chat with Robert Seidel.

Soda carbonation solutions for home.

Mapping human development in America.

Immersive videogames make players feel like their best selves. Why not give them real problems to solve?

Study: To Cut Emissions, Cut Parking Spots.

Music Control Meets Web Code Goodness: App for iOS, Soon OSC+MIDI Everywhere?

Arc: New Music Controller in Video, Detailed Q+A with monome Creator Brian Crabtree.

Alexandra Lange: What Should Food Look Like?.

TUAW’s Daily App: Strange Rain.

Urban Archaeology: North Brother Island – Riverside Hospital.

The Ambiguity of “Open” and VP8 vs. H.264.

Stuxnet Worm Used Against Iran Was Tested in Israel.

Four Loko Recycled Into Eco-Friendly Fuel.

SAVED is a new initiative from Green Thing where unwanted and unloved T-shirts are Saved from waste by adding a design and story that makes them wanted and loved again.

Jonas Bendiksen’s ”Satellites” contains some amazing photos from spacecraft crash zones.

Ben Fry, the other co-founder of Processing, on  “Computational Information Design” (video)

Emily Pilloton’s TED Talk,  Teaching design for change (video)

“Silent Evolution” builds a beautiful coral reef from statues.

Terms you need to understand for a record contract.

I haven’t posted a Processing sketch in more than a year. So, here’s the recent sketch_2010_09_27_shard02.

OpenIDEO

Where did the money to rebuild Iraq go? (infographic)

Penguin 75: Designers, Authors, Commentary.

Amon Tobin records The Foley Room (video).

Why the next big pop-culture wave after cupcakes might be libraries.

An archive of MTV’s ’120 Minutes’.

Handwriting and flourish art.

Ford films found in Kiwi vault.

Researchers create the world’s first synthetic cell.

Synth Britannia and Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany are two great BBC Four documentaries, but you’ll need to find torrents to watch them, as they’re not streamable online (even to rent) due to music licensing restrictions.

On gospel, Abba and the death of the record: an audience with Brian Eno

Old cast-iron radiators, transformed for electric heat.

Far from being in a state of decay, the Y chromosome is the fastest-changing part of the human genome and is constantly renewing itself.

Tending the Garden of Technology, an interview with Kevin Kelly

A new year brings a bounty of hope—for new attitudes, new projects, new directions. In the past year, my intentions were to play more live shows and focus on finishing select tracks to my satisfaction. Mission accomplished.

Rather than make predictions or resolutions, here are some of the things on my plate and/or on the horizon for the year ahead (not all related to this site, FWIW): taking delivery of a blinky, new monome grayscale 64; composing generative pieces using Nodal, Ableton Suite 8 and Max for Live; finishing up a new EP for commercial release; posting more free podcast mixes; turning my generative sketches into fully interactive works; selling original prints and artwork; reading J.G. Ballard‘s complete works and making a dent in my reading list; devoting more time to my Geometry Studio, Sympathy for the Robots and The Silent Stars projects; developing some ideas into a viable, sustainable business; brewing some homemade beer; eating fresh, local cuisine; staying more plugged in and chilled out. Opa!

The other extreme: low-alcohol beers.

Deep below New York City’s bustling streets lies a dangerous world inhabited by “sandhogs.”

The Rise and Fall of Design Within Reach.

How Robber Barons hijacked the “Victorian Internet”

Robert Henke talks with Rashad Becker about audio mastering.

Apple’s Mistake: An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work.

Processing T-shirts 2009/2010.

ABC Oddity iPhone app for toddlers.

What design researchers can learn from hostage negotiators.

Christian Swinehart’s visualizations of Choose Your Own Adventure stories.

Reinventing the MBA: 4 reasons to mix business with design thinking.

Report: 237 millionaires in Congress.

Nutrition-style labels reveal companies’ social responsibility.

Miles Davis: The Complete Columbia Album Collection.

The Botany of Desire: based on the book by Michael Pollan.

Cercle et suite d’éclats, a large scale outdoor art installation.

“Natural Instincts” art print series by Tes One.

Create Democracy, an interactive exhibition.

Brian Eno three-fer: Eno, Peter Schmidt, and Cybernetics, Harmonia & Eno ‘76 Remix Album, A conversation with Brian Eno.

Roger Penrose says physics is wrong, from string theory to quantum mechanics.

IdeaPaint turns virtually anything you can paint into a dry-erase surface.

Canadian credit union gives people ten-dollar bills to give away.

The polaroid is coming back.

Huge dust storm feeds fish and eats carbon dioxide.

5 Reasons your marketing plan will fail.

New editions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series let you create your own cover art.

An investigation by The Smoking Gun unmasks the leader of Pranknet and the miscreants behind a year-long wave of phone call criminality.

Nathan Shredoff has released a series of free syllabi and teaching materials to help instructors teach students key topics for the future.

Learn logo design from top brands.

Taking Steps toward zero waste.

Olympus announces LS-11, a compact digital audio recorder.

We love (and wish we could afford) Aether’s jackets.

Design Ignites Change promotes and encourages talented high school and college students across the country to use design thinking and innovation to create messages for, and solutions to, pressing social problems.

Complete Yale courses now on iTunes U.

Eros, a short video by Tom Geraedts sports some awesome motion graphics.

The role of side projects in entrepreneurial success has a rich history in the United States.

A roundup of software art for the iPhone.

Travel in style with Patagonia’s MLC® (Maximum Legal Carry-On) Burrito suit bag.

Worn Free resurrects the coolest T-Shirts of all time.

The Big Picture remembers Apollo 11.

Was Moore’s Law Inevitable? by Kevin Kelly

• 50% of all work is sub-par or unremarkable, i.e. upholding the status quo.
• 45% of the remainder tends to exist for shallow issues only, i.e. as decoration, current fashion or surface styling only.
• 5% is great and to be appreciated and recommended.

YMMV.

Images of Brian Eno’s recent 77 Million Paintings installation at the Sydney Opera House.

New Math, by Craig Damrauer.

WANT: Neuton CE 6 Rechargeable Lawn Mower.

David Lynch’s new Interview Project.

WANT: Bali 12-Bottle Wine Rack.

Neil Voss’s music generating iPhone puzzler, xgon.

100 Abandoned Houses.

Hulu Desktop beta for Mac OS X.

Use the Mac OS X app Self Control when you need to limit your online temptations.

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party (video).

Why do we often care more about imaginary characters than real people? A new book suggests that fiction is crucial to our survival as a species.

Everything Tracy Jordan Said in Season 3 of 30 Rock.

Danger Mouse to release blank CD after record label EMI reportedly cancelled his new album.

The coming wave of cellphone novels, Twitter fiction, sudden fiction, and flash fiction.

How using gestures can make you smarter.

The duplicability of recordings has had another unexpected effect. The pressure is on to develop content that isn’t easily copyable—so now everything other than the recorded music is becoming the valuable part of what artists sell.

Yudo announces 8Bitone Retro 8-bit Synthesizer + Sequencer for iPhone/iPod Touch.

Peruse pics from the First 100 Days in the Official White House Flickr Photostream.

25 years of logos from Duffy & Partners, one of our favorite agencies.

Rickshaw Bagworks’ Large Zero Messenger is cut and sewn from only four rectangles of fabric for zero manufacturing material waste.

Song of the Vine, an illustrated history of wine.

Skip Hulu Commercials with this nifty Greasemonkey script.

Five Ways To Market Yourself During A Recession.

jQuery Style is a resource for all things jQuery.

The history and cover art of science fiction published by Penguin Books from 1935 to 1977.

Here’s another recent sketch in Processing. This one has decidedly more visual complexity, with additional shapes and some white hatch lines for erosion. FWIW, I think it looks better at 1280×960 resolution. View sketch_april28_comp_Screen1.

Field is an open source framework that combines code and visual views for creating dynamic media arts.

NYT food writer Mark Bitman maintains a vegan diet during the day, but says anything goes after 6 p.m.

One of our favorite sketch comedy shows, The State, is finally coming to DVD.

This Belkin surge protector is a great idea for turning off your electronics when they’re inactive.

Check out this Flickr set of vintage beer cans.

Amazing concept artwork from Andree Wallin (despite the huge, annoying site header).

The Teenage Engineering OP-1 is so cool we want one even though we don’t know what it does.

Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek have spent the last 15 years studying the dress codes of social groups and published a book and website featuring their photographs and findings, called Exactitudes.

’241543903′ is the tag for photos of people putting their head in a freezer.

MTV Cherry Girl is an impulsive character, who finds that her actions, which are seemingly self-indulgent, can have a positive effect on the people and environment around her.

Broadcast at Pratt Manhattan Gallery presents a selection of works, dating from the 1960s to the present, that interrupt broadcasting systems in order to examine or challenge the structure, influence, and power of mainstream television and radio.

Cut-up and pasted-together photos of locations in New York depict unseen herds.

J.G. Ballard proves you should live a bit before writing.

The different kinds of people that there are. Funny.

If the newspapers think they’re such hot shit, they should make their own Hulu and stop whining.

A long, rambly exploration of the state of computing with no real conclusion…, by Steven Frank of Panic software.

U2′s Linear is a short-film to accompany their latest release. Yay, Anton Corbijn.

A court rules your MySpace page isn’t private. So, don’t post anything you wouldn’t want published in your home town newspaper without your consent.

Ten graphic design paradoxes.

Paul Frank’s partnership with Bugaboo = two great tastes that go great together.

Denon’s new DP-200USB turntable rips vinyl straight to MP3; no computer required to record and encode, just to edit.

The secrets of making a vinyl record (video).

The secret, social lives of bacteria; they talk to one-another.

Top 10 Myths About Freelancers.

Free Nodal Generative Sequencer, now multi-platform.

Herman Miller Replaces the Sample Catalogue With a Smart Web Site; someday we’ll be able to afford such brilliance.

He Charted the Moon Before Galileo, But You’ve Probably Never Heard of Him.

Jenny Holzer’s Protect Protect Show.

The Unreleased Recordings by Hank Williams.

Wrong Tomorrow is a database of provable predictions.

Novation announces SL Mk II; sweetness.

Fantastic design work followed by fantastic increases in newspaper circulation, by Polish newspaper designer Jacek Utko. His advice: “Give power to designers.” Right on!

Get Satisfaction as a Protection Racket.

A 10-month investigation by a team of researchers at the University of Toronto uncovered a broad Chinese espionage scheme that reached into foreign embassies, news services and even the office of the Dalai Lama.

The Top 5 Greenest Laptops.

I have been creating some new sketches in Processing. This sketch combines basic lines, bezier curves and triangles in a number of different ways. It’s still procedural code (running in a linear loop, as oppossed to object oriented, which I haven’t had time to explore), so I slowed down the frameRate() to be more viewable. Not every frame is a winner, but some are keepers, at least in my book. You can download the source code and uncomment the saveFrames() function to render the images to your computer. View sketch_march23_comp_Screen. More stills are in my Processing set on Flickr.

CR Blog has an enlightening Q&A with Adrian Tomine, one of our favorite graphic novelists. Buy Adrian Tomine’s work on Amazon. Visit his home page, Adrian-Tomine.com.

• Pretty Monsters: Stories – terrific contemporary fantasy and modern fairy tales, by Kelly Link
• The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet – collected shorts from the underground contemporary fantasy zine, edited by Kelly Link
• Ice Haven – each character is fixated on someone else, by Daniel Clowes
• Dream Country (The Sandman, Vol. 3), Season of Mists (The Sandman, Vol. 4) – more about the King of Dreams, by Neil Gaiman
• Shortcomings – longing and confusion, by Adrian Tomine
• Queen & Country: The Definitive Edition, Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3 – great action and espionage series, by Greg Rucka
• I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets! – vintage cosmic weirdness, by Fletcher Hanks
• The Best American Comics 2007 – another great collection, this one edited by Chris Ware
• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth – the seminal work, by Chris Ware

I’ve always enjoyed these patterns, so I decided to generate them. Someday I’ll be savvy enough to make it interactive. For your consideration: sketch_2007_12_11a