Taxi drivers spreading ideas

YouTube - SPREAD THE TED: "We called [Buenos Aires'] most ramarkable speakers: taxi drivers. What for? To make TEDx ideas get to ordinary people."
Coming soon: hairdressers. Brilliant!

Peanuts comics truncated for bonus angst

3eanuts: "By removing the final gag panel, we bring to the fore exactly how dark Schulz’s view of the world has always been. That this view often eludes us merely affirms Schulz’s skill at helping us to cope."

See also garfield minus garfield: "a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb."

Self portrait of one guy's everyday habits

Atlas of the Habitual: "With the increased integration of technology into our everyday lives, traces are created for all of our interactions with networked devices. At its most basic level, one's phone records and internet browsing history are saved by the companies that provide these services. It has become such a part of our lives that most people pass off the meticulous records being kept on them.
People not only generate data out of their interactions with technology, they also create it through the course of their day.
This atlas exists to digitize my everyday movements, to create a personal dataset and start to explore how that information can be used."

Interesting example of how people are leaving behind digital breadcrumbs of their real-world behaviour. But he could he saved himself the trouble by getting an iPhone.

The Cube, the restaurant at the end of the universe

Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "The Universe as we know it has now been in existence for over one hundred and seventy thousand million billion years and will be ending in a little over half an hour. So, welcome one and all to Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe!

This was not quite how we were welcomed at appliance maker Electrolux' pop-up restaurant The Cube in Brussels, but it might well have been. I hardly ever go to Michelin star restaurants, so I was more than happy when Electrolux invited me and a bunch of other Belgian bloggers to give it a try to celebrate/promote their new line of prosumer kitchen appliances. Have a look at the location of the restaurant, right on top of one of Belgium's most Belgian monuments, the Arc de Triomphe in Jubelpark: The view from inside The Cube is stunning: I took a seat at the "table d'amis" that sits 18 people right by the window . Like a boss: And the food... oh my... If someone had said to me during the courses that the Universe would end in a little over half an hour, I'm pretty sure my thoughts would rather be with one of these: Unfortunately, unless you were able to book a table, this is the end for The Cube in Brussels. I've just checked and they're booked full until the beginning of July, when they dismantle the whole thing and reassemble it somewhere in Stockholm.

Time is always with the people who have courage to fly

Experience Human Flight with the Melbourne Skydive Centre. Shot on a GoPro, a wearable HD camera for sports.

Magnum Pleasure Hunt: follow the bonbon

Magnum Pleasure Hunt follows a female internet user along the many time sucks of the internet. To make sure she doesn't stay on one site for too long, they lure her with bonbons.

A peek into my lizard brain

The Pierley/Redford Dissociative Affect Diagnostic is "an exploration of your brain's affective response system. Nonverbal, emotional reactions to shape tableaus will target the portion of your brain that is intuitive and pre-lingual. The associated question should be answered without tying these shapes to any narrative or storyline. These shapes are based on neural linkage maps from the brains of reptiles and primitive mammals, ancestors to mankind. Associated questions have been culled from the communication methodologies of those with dissociative personality disorder in order to probe the link between emotional understanding and language."
My test results:

You have a poetic sensibility and an ability to see beyond the day to day. You often seem to be living in a higher realm, or to be not-of-this-earth. Occasionally you imagine interior lives for friends and associates that are near-complete fabrications based on your fears or hopes for the future. You are often not aware of your own feelings. You have a strong sense of right and wrong, and because of this are often disappointed. Despite what can sometimes be a destructive inward-turning anger, you are very gentle. You are sometimes a bit out of touch with the ebb and flow of modern life. If your behavior is out of synch with your moral values, a severe psychic disturbance can result. Because connectivity is so important to you, you can become quiet and sulky if you feel that others around do not understand your point of view.

The White Dragon

The Periodic Table of Storytelling vaguely reminds of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale. Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (1895 — 1970) was "a Russian and Soviet formalist scholar who analyzed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements". His framework is perfect for online story generators. Below is a fairy tale I generated with the proppian fairy tale generator. I used Cinderella's preset, but without the solution, the recognition and the wedding. The story definitely needs some more fillers, but the basic outline is there:

The village people buried my father in a plot of land near our home. Every night following his death, I prayed for rain. I prayed that water from the heavens would soak the ground under which my father lay, so that his soul would not thirst as it had during his life. I prayed the rain would cleanse my father’s soul, and leave him to rest in peace.
As the cinnamon fell on my eyelids I felt a burden shift onto my shoulders. I could not open my eyes but could tell my knees were sunk halfway into the weak soil. I heard the old woman exhaust her laughter into my ears, filling them with tones of mockery and deceit.
Inside my head lived a frightened little boy who nibbled at his nails whenever a strange man glanced at him. I could not leave that fright alone.
My mother bade me to return home twice to comfort her hunger. But on the third time the hunger sunk such a pit in her stomach that it fell into the ground and would not move.
When I placed the needle I had taken on my palm, it moved in the direction where I needed to go. The bones taken from the ground shielded me from any harm.
As I approached the top of the mountain a white spectacle blinded me for an instant. When I blinked again I saw a white dragon shifting over the mountain like a layer of foam riding ocean waves. I could tell by its movement that it was a territorial creature; I could tell that it would fight me before allowing me to press further.
In the chest were more than enough gold, pearls, and sparkling jewels to feed my family for a lifetime.
Before I entered my home my brothers came out, and, thinking I was a peddler, asked how much the jade I carried was worth.

Scan your zebra

One Per Cent: Barcode scanner for zebras: "When a zebra has been entered into the database and given a StripeCode, the researchers match another picture of the same animal by comparing the StripeStrings of the new and original images. Each image will generate a different set of StripeStrings, but the underlying ratios of black and white should remain similar.
By finding the StripeCode with the most similar StripeStrings in the database, the system is able to accurately identify the correct animal. Other existing zebra identification systems are less accurate, more complex, and require a greater level of manual input from the user."

Hang Her Morning Elegance over your bed

Her Morning Elegance "has become a pop-art phenomena and the most successful stop motion video ever [viewed 18,276,771 times, liked 98,726 times].
It earned a nomination in the 52nd Grammy Awards and has been screened at film festivals around the world. The video was created from 2096 still photographs that were shot and sequenced to create the sense of movement.
After creating motion from still photographs, the artists have decided to break the video back down into its original form, and create a unique opportunity to share a piece of art, music and photographic history.
Today you can enjoy a signed, single-edition and numbered frame of the video in your home, office, or gallery."

Sad stuff on the street

Sad Stuff on the Street: "Children and emo adults alike weep for its existence. But at some point—in the not so distant past—the sad thing was not sad. It just belonged to some person."

Sad, indeed.

I joined Twitter 4 years ago thx to @SePP

And here's my Twitter Birth Certificate.

My godfather was indeed Boondoggle's @SePP. Thanks, Jesse!

Twitter can also be a place where rumors go to die

Israeli weapons In Libya? How @acarvin and his Twitter followers debunked sloppy journalism - storify.com: "In this particular case, a rumor perpetuated by several news sources was easily debunked by a group of people on Twitter who don't know each other and likely will never meet each other in person."

The story behind Pantene Superswisssh

About a month ago, Pantene wanted to advertise their new Aqua Light product line in Flair Magazine and on vijfTV. The visual in the tv ad (a blonde woman whipping her hair left and right) reminded me of something:

• What is a Superswisssh and why is it important?: When Naked Gun's Frank Drebin (played by the late Leslie Nielsen) sees Jane Spencer (Priscilla Presley) for the first time, he stares at the way her hair flows. And she keeps swishing her hair in slow motion for what seems like an eternity.

This led to the idea to make a new version of this video, but with common girls. Here's the appeal on Flair.be:

• Doe mee met de Superswisssh Schrijf je in en maak kans op je eigen tv-spot met Pantene Aqua Light!.
• Hoe doet u de perfecte Pantene Swisssh at Pantene.be added some extra tips and tricks to the mix.

A total of 29 long haired girls were invited to a photo shoot. This is a still from the making of eternal superswisssh video: The result is a new tv ad for Pantene Aqua Light, shown at VijfTV in about all the important 30' ad spots. This is the longer version, about 4.5 minutes long and almost hypnotising: If you, along with a lot of other viewers, wonder that these girls are too pretty to be "regular" girls who just happened to respond to Flair's and Vijftv's appeal, here's one of them - the Dorien, Heusden-Zolder at 1:17:

• Dorien superswisht!
• De superswisssh staat online!
• De superswisssh op tv!

Dynamic Views for bnox.be

Google has been experimenting with new designs for their Blogger network blogs. Bnox.be uses the Blogger cms, so I gave it a try. I liked the Snapshot view best for it Polaroid style Tumblr interface: All about Dynamic Views for Readers - Blogger Help: "

• This view will display only the posts which have images.
• Clicking through any photo will display the full post page, with naviagtion links at the bottom for Newer and Older posts
• Mousing over any photo will display a post snippet
"

But when I asked on Twitter what my followers thought of it, I got mixed results: "very visual", "very photographic", but also "too messy", "slows down the page" and "it's a blog, not an iPad".

So, for the time being, I'll just leave this blog's design as it is, and closely watch Google's Blogger moves.

Thanks @ingridcops, @bartclaeys, @AnthonyPaletta, @NicolasFrenay, @doryblue, @aardling, @jacobogio, @catoleonard, @ikke_timme, @Vromant, @katrienbis, @j_dude, @boskabout, @michlr, @Markec, and @YoungCrazyFool for your feedback!