Geek Chic

I just saw this on FAILBlog:

Wow, right?  303,000 people did a search on Google for ‘I am extremely terrified of chinese people.’ ??

What’s amazing about that is that it actually works.  Go to Google.com and type something into the query field and see what Google Suggest comes up with.  We tried ‘I am scared of’ and got this:

Some of that is predictable — 14 million people are scared of death or dying, 7.8 million are scared of the dark.

Some of it is disconcerting — 1.7 million are scared of Obama vs. only 472K are scared of Pailn.

And some of it is just a fun logic game:  if 26 million are scared of people and 16 million are scared of themselves, that must leave 10 million people who are scared of you.

Anyway… it’s a fun way to kill some time, and it’s actually a fascinating exercise to learn what people are searching for on Google these days.

I just came across a couple of pages for The Arcade Fire that really impressed me.  Both are music videos (Black Mirror and Neon Bible from their Neon Bible album), but are completely interactive. And pretty amazing.

For Black Mirror, you can turn on and off the various song tracks as the music is playing, so you can hear what the song sounds like with, say, just piano and vocals.  I’ve seen stuff like this before, but the implementation is really good.

The second one is what blew me away, especially having been coding in Flash a lot more lately.  For Neon Bible, you get to control the lead singer’s various movements as he sings the song.  Granted it’s a limited set of movements, but I played through it twice and found a completely different set of actions from one time to the next.  So for those of us who really like easter eggs, this site can keep you entertained for a good amount of time.

What’s great about both is that they are on a timeline.  You have certain windows of opportunity to do something, and once they pass you’ve missed them.  So it becomes like a game (unlike most easter-eggy experiences, where the environment is static and you have all the time you want to click away).  A really great idea.

Remix Black Mirror

Play with the Neon Bible

Thanks VSL

The Stanford Laptop Orchestra.  Featured today in shiny technicolor on the Apple homepage.

photo by Enrique Aguirre

Stanford University: Finding a Nerd to Art quotient of 1.

See a nice narrated slideshow on The Mercury News

Check out video of SLOrk in Beijing

And visit the SLOrk website for more

Or are baggy clothes coming back into fashion?

via FFFFound

This is totally amazing — a really clever marketing campaign from Nintendo on YouTube.

You have to check it out

via AjaxBlog

Google announced its first foray into the smartphone market yesterday with T-Mobile’s HTC Dream, which uses the Android Mobile OS.

I honestly have to say I’m not particularly impressed with what I’ve seen so far.  If the iPhone is the sexy MacBook Air of the mobile world, the Dream feels like the equivalent of the One Laptop Per Child laptops: interesting enough to play with for awhile, but not enticing enough to buy.

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