Tomorrowland

Here Comes The Hypertablet

Dubbed "The Looking Glass" by tech blogger Yanko Design, Mac Funamizu's slick little hypertablet would tell you anything you need to know about, well, anything you see. For now it's a prototype, but man, wouldn't this be amazing?

oSkope Visual Search

There's more than one way to find stuff online. oSkope is a visual search tool that lets you search content from sites like Amazon, eBay and Flickr, but in a refreshingly new way. Search results show thumbnails of the items which can be tossed around, stacked in a pile, "biggified," arranged on a cool x-y axis and dragged into a folder for later comparison. Definitely one of the slickest web applications I've used in a while.

An Exertion of Authority

Florida Department of Transportation, District 4

Closed-circuit programming. Ultragranular surveillance. Infinite feedback loops cataloged and analyzed by an audience of civil servants and prime-time editors. While the MySpace generation willfully exposes its collective self on the Internet, the rest of us star in our own reality show hosted by the state, blind to the cameras that watch our every move.

More photographs of control rooms at landscape architecture blog Pruned.

Initiate Hyperlink Sequence Gamma

Rosemarie Fiore, "Firework Drawing," 2005 (lit fireworks on paper)

Too many late nights in front of MS Word, not enough time in front of Firefox. It's a recipe for blogging gridlock. As promised, here's a fresh hyperlink sequence for the faithful and the culturally unstable.

Jonathan Lethem plunges headfirst into plagiarism and culture in The Ecstasy of Influence, his latest for Harper's. Turns out most of it is lifted, which lends an uncanny, infolding structure to the whole affair. Like a Twilight Zone episode, where nothing is what it seems. Or a plunderphonic remix, where samples—quotes, really—are torn indiscriminately from a variety of sources and recombined to dizzying effect. John Oswald laid it all out in his manifesto. Go read it in the original Canadian: "Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative."

Capitalism never seemed to me like the hoary beast of all-consuming darkness that many make it out to be. Go buy stuff. Terrorism finger puppets from Moss. Classic early-80s Italian electro club tracks, compiled on "I-Robots." Tasteful work, minimal and hooky. Maybe only just a tiny bit icy Eurotrash?

Pedro Almodovar's transfixing end titles to Volver. Pretty colors on the motion graphics tip. The other side would be an mp4 of Holy Ghost People, which I've been hunting for over 10 years. It's Peter Adair's 1967 documentary on a West Virginian pentecostal community. Snake handling. Casseroles. That ole time relijun. Mass hypnosis. How better to explain the phenomenon of Benny Hinn? Dateline's 2002 expose blows the roof off his entire show. Self-fulfilling prophecies are the only kind of futures Hinn trades in.

Yet people flock to the guy, frozen in a state of "cognitive dissonance." Originally used in When Prophecy Fails, the classic study of the effect of disconfirmed prophecies on a UFO cult, the phrase indicates the tension between faith and reality. If the old rationale doesn't hold water, just invent a new one. From WMD to the supposed "last throes" of the insurgency, parallels to the current administration's prophetic tactics abound.

Onward: Cats enjoy music. Watch the evidence. Equally amusing are the works at Chris Parks video gallery, designer of the freaky-deaky interstellar graphics from Aronofsky's The Fountain.  Perry Bible Fellowship offers hilarious cartoons that use the Far Side as a point of departure to a darker, weirder realm. Speaking of: dare to watch the queen of early-90s Tampa Bay public access TV, Sondra Prill, with her incendiary take on Nasty Boys. A populist spectacle, begging to be cleaned with a lint-free cloth.

Proceed with caution.

Award for Best Fascist Dictator: Adolph Hitler!*

Tomorrowland.org systems engineer Buford T. Sanchez would like to thank you all.

Indefatigable Jacksonville developer/burrito dealer Tony Allegretti has published his latest round of Distinguished Blog Awards. Amazingly, Tomorrowland.org (yes! the very thing you're stepping in!) was bestowed the honor of "Best Specialty Blog."

From his site, The Urban Core:

"I'm not sure what the specialty is, perhaps debunking religions, incredible art introductions, disturbing 80s videos, news of the wired/weird? Its a damn good site and its cool as hell its from JAX or dooval or whatever the kids are calling it. Tomorrowland makes me happy on my daily read and I think it might have the same effect on you. Strap on your jet pack, lace up your kangaroos, doublecheck the drawstring on your parachute pants and lift off into a World of Tomorrowland."

Tony, your kindness is exceeded only by your charm. A firm handshake and a delicious mixed beverage for you, sir.

[*Alert Tomorrowlanders will recognize the post title as a line from Woody Allen's Academy Award-winning film Annie Hall. No actual endorsement of fascism, dictatorship, or Adolph Hitler is implied.]

Good one, CNN. Had Tomorrowland been up and running back in April 06, I would have posted this the moment I grabbed the screen shot.

Surely I'm not the only one who reads the caption as a description of the nice man in the graphic. A not-so-subtle swipe at the integrity of New York's former mayor? You be the judge. 

Accidents Will Happen

In light of Steve Jobs' (admittedly great) presentation of the iPhone at the Macworld conference yesterday, I thought we could take a look at some past keynote presentations that perhaps didn't go over so well. Crashing operating systems, broken hardware, and cringing CEOs, all before an audience of thousands. Thankfully, the folks at Presentation Zen have done the hard work and compiled a delightful collection of demo disasters.

Well worth the visit, especially if you're the kind of person who might enjoy watching Bill Gates squirm in his chair as his flagship software crashes on national TV. The most bizarre one has got to be Larry Osterman's demo of Vista's speech recognition software. I don't wish that kind of humiliation on anyone. Egad.

[image via Wikipedia's entry for the Apollo 13 mission]

Initiate Hyperlink Sequence Beta

Currently enjoying the Institute for Interactive Research's clickless site, Don't Click It. Ethereal navigation for the intuitive crowd, the site will either drive you batshit or make your day, depending on your tolerance for clever Flash design. The Leo Burnett site mines similar territory with its shape-shifting interface and slick video reveal.

Learn how to design cool stuff at Before & After. All Colourlovers unite with weird palettes and international color trends. Speaking of colors: Greenpeace criticizes Apple's use of planet-unfriendly parts and lack of a product take-back program. C'mon, Apple: lowest grade of all computer manufacturers on the 2006 environmental scorecard? Is the fruit rotting?

Outlaw bikers, Sharon Tate, and more mondo bizarro covers at BadMags (nsfw). World's largest Saved by the Bell collection (alas, bidding has ended). Corey Feldman sings and Mr. T plays the cello on the Strange Findings trailer. Corey Haim films a love letter to his fans. Doritos wash ashore in North Carolina. Mr. Show, we miss you: David Cross on the Pre-Taped Call-In Show.

Deeply amused by obscure word resource the Phrontistery. Chances are slim you'll find any of those words at the FBI's online reading room, where one can peruse thousands of files from the Freedom of Information Act. Escape the celebrity dossiers with some heartland zen at Peter Baker photography. Or check the forest-inspired gear and sexy design at Little Odd Forest. ("A forrr-est...") The hands down, final, end-all/be-all Joanna Newsom article (by Erik Davis for Arthur Mag). The Jim O'Rourke quote is tops: “It’s someone’s vision seen all the way through–-sweat lost, brain racked, soul searched, and fingers calloused. I doubt we’ll hear anything as brilliant in a long, long time.”

And from Fimoculous, Girl Talk live at the Empty Bottle, New Year's Eve, "the party you weren't at." But with YouTube, who needs throngs of sweaty Chicagoans to celebrate the end of '06? The party's online, baby.

[image via Flickr]

New York Times Year in Ideas

Essential reading for futurethinkers worldwide: the New York Times Magazine's 6th Annual Year in Ideas.

Steven Johnson and others chime in on topics ranging from taxation of virtual economies, boomerang spycams (they're invisible! and fit in your backpack!), indie sitcoms and the wheelchair car.

Each of the dozens of entries conveniently spans no more than 5 or 6 paragraphs. They're tasty, bite-size info chunks perfect for those of you too busy living your life in 2006 to pay any attention to all the blathering crap on the blogs. Enjoy.

Foreign Affairs

One of the random pleasures of running a blog is checking out the referring webpages. At my Stats page I can see how many visitors are coming to Tomorrowland, from where, and when, and I get a link to the referring pages, too. For some reason, I get lots of visitors from Google Belgium. And my page views went waaaaaay up after I included the term "Euroteens" in a post about the Found Photos site. It's enough to make me consider lacing all posts with "search magnet" terms. (You know, the kind of words that most of us delete with spam filters.)

Last week, a visitor arrived from Google Japan, which isn't unusual considering how much the Japanese love King Walt's magical wonderworlds. For kicks, I clicked the referring page link and discovered some subtle differences in formatting and labeling between Japan's version of Google and every other version of Google. Check it out:

Interesting how the search results are displayed in Times New Roman, a more formal type than the standard Arial used in all other versions of Google I've encountered. Also, the content is a blend of English, katakana, kanji, hirakana. I don't speak or read Japanese, so maybe this isn't unusual at all. Clue me in, people.

For comparison's sake, here's the US equivalent of the pic above:

Hmmmm. Weird how Google provides English-speaking users with a direct video link, but not for tech-forward Japan. Yet the biggest difference between the two versions is the label on the Search link: in the US, it reads "Search", but in Japan, it reads "Google" + two kanji characters. Here's a close-up:

I have no clue as to what those kanji characters signify. However, in light of the company's recent efforts to end the generic use of the word "Google," it seems extremely odd for them to use it in what APPEARS to be verb form on the Google Japan search button. If I'm correct, then this button label, this call-to-action that drives the very system they're trying to protect, is antithetical to their whole program to avoid brand genericide (a la Kleenex, Jell-O, Escalator, Xerox, etc.).

Anybody out there read kanji? Help me crack the code on this one.