Blip Festival needs to raise money this year due to severe budget cuts in grants that havee previously supported artist travel and performance fees. Now entering its fourth year, The Blip Festival NYC is poised to take over the Bell House, December 17th-19th, to celebrate the best of chipmusic and its related disciplines with live music, workshops, film screenings and more. In the past, Blip Festival organizers The Tank and 8bitpeoples have brought you an amazing breadth of performers and artists from around the world, thanks to the help of our devoted fans and a generous array of sponsors and grants.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1108352555/the-peoples-fund-to-support-blip-festival-2009-0

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A concept-map exploring the Left vs Right political spectrum. A collaboration between David McCandless and information artist Stefanie Posavec, taken from my book The Visual Miscellaneum (out Nov 10th).

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/left-vs-right/

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These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking. To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=11

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How many servers does Facebook have? For some time now, the stock answer has been “more than 10,000 servers,” a number the company began using in April 2008. Facebook has continued to use that number, even as it has soared past 300 million users and dramatically expanded its data center space.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/10/13/facebook-now-has-30000-servers/

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The essay is titled 'Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal' – although we would have called it 'Run for it Marty: Doc Brown was right' – and put forward the theory that bad luck will dog the launch of the LHC, with future influences stopping the Collider from doing its job.

http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/future-tech/large-hadron-collider-sabotaged-by-time-travel--642543?src=rss

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When you plan your Halloween party, the food must be front and center. Since we published Gruesome Halloween Party Food two years ago, many more creepy and delicious treats have surfaced. Try serving these, and your guests will be talking about your party for years. Warning: some images may be disturbing.

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/36634

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Almost 2 full years in the making, the 8-Bit Operators’ “Wanna Hld Yr Handheld, Vol. 1” Beatles tribute focuses on the glorious avant-garde and electronic side of the Fab 4 with over 20 of the biggest international names in 8-bit chip music, all utilizing re-tooled, classic Game Boys, Ataris, Commodore 64s, Apple II, Nintendo Entertainment Systems and circuit-bent toys.

http://8bitoperators.com/beatles/

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Bastard offspring of now-famous ambient loop player the Buddha Machine, GRISTLEISM is part Industrial sound machine, part noise instrument. Featuring thirteen original and uncompromising loops, GRISTLEISM delivers a mix of signature TG experimental noise, industrial drone, and classic melodies and rhythms.

http://gristleism.com/

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Only on the TED Blog: In The TED Lens, each Sunday a TED speaker offers a new look at the week's big news stories. This week, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks about how the moral roots of the political right and left are shaping the debate over healthcare in the United States.

http://blog.ted.com/2009/09/the_healthcare.php

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Paper art can be traced back to Japan, where it originated over a thousand years ago. From complex paper cutting to book carving, this is an ever expanding area of design that is hardly talked about. These intricate paper designs grace museums and exhibitions throughout the world and is becoming yet another exciting medium of expression for many designers. Some of the artists featured here use simple materials, such as A4 printing paper, while others resort to unexpected materials, such as actual books, as their prime materials. In this article, we’ll take a look at 13 remarkable artists and showcase their truly amazing pieces of paper art.

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/05/100-extraordinary-examples-of-paper-art/

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Inspired by the world’s most popular game, comes the world’s most popular tiles. No longer do you have to suffer looking at bathroom walls with no character. No longer do you have to hear the words Terracotta or Slate. No longer do you have to accept just one colour.Tetris Tiles puts the fun back into tiling. Ideal for use in Kitchens, Bathrooms, Bedrooms - any place that is worthy of colour and fun.

http://www.tetris-tiles.com/

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Based in Kansas City, but working nationally and internationally, T2 is a design driven motion graphic and FX company that blends the work of nationally recognized, award-winning animators, VFX artists and motion designers to produce creative content that stretches across multiple platforms.

http://www.t2.tv/t2/

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In recognition of the 20-year anniversary of the Macintosh Portable, let's look back at some of the superstars of Apple's laptop lineup—as well as a couple of duds that should never have made it out of Cupertino.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/09/from-portable-to-pro-best-mac-laptops-of-the-past-20-years.ars?utm_source=rss

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All fairy tales have good endings, don’t they? At least that’s what everybody wanted us to believe till now. Well, it’s time to reveal the aching truth: reality always is stronger than fiction and Yatzer, after having spent loads of money on private detectives, finally found where all those Disney princesses have ended up.

http://yatzer.com/1909_the_fallen_princesses_of_dina_goldstein

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Air is a new generative audio-visual work that’s “like Music for Airports made endless,” according to ambient pioneer Brian Eno, “Which is how I always wanted it to be.” The iPhone music app was created by musician / software designer Peter Chilvers and Irish vocalist Sandra O’Neill. Based on concepts developed by Brian Eno, with whom Chilvers created Bloom, Air assembles vocal and piano samples into an ever changing composition, which will be familiar, but never the same.

http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2009/09/16/brian-enos-new-iphone-app-like-music-for-airports-made-endless/

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http://lookslikegooddesign.com/illustrations-fernando-vicente/

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The original Circle ® kitchen is an innovative high-tech compact kitchen concept for commercial and residential use. This 180° revolving kitchen design features all the characteristics of a traditional kitchen with an incredibly low demand on overall space, less than 1.8 sqm. This concealable “room within a room” concept is realized with the ability of blending the circular kitchen location independently; particularly where space is at a premium. Through rotating the complete work area may be reached from a sitting or standing position.

http://designyoutrust.com/2009/09/14/original-circle-kitchen/

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Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

http://blog.monochrome.co.uk/2009/02/if-architects-had-to-work-like-software-developers/

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Everyone knows what a urban park looks like, right? It tends to be a parcel of green space in a sea of asphalt and concrete and glass. But, of course, there are innumerable variations on that principle. We thought it would be fun to take ten of the world’s largest, most famous, and most beautiful city parks–some combination of those virtues, anyway–and view them from above, all at the same scale, to get a sense of how they’re situated in the fabric of their respective cities and how they work as a whole. How do the world’s great parks compare? Employing the wonders of searchable satellite imagery, we’ve brought together this collection of bird’s eye views.

http://www.infrastructurist.com/2009/09/10/the-worlds-10-greatest-city-parks-viewed-from-above/

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How the hell did The Muppet Show ever get on the air? Imagine it from a TV executive's point of view: a weekly variety show, in an old vaudeville theater, featuring puppets, and a mix of A, B and C-list celebrities that catered to both kids and adults. That's not a pitch... it's a just list of random words that don't go together. Unfortunately, it's that weirdness that's been lost to the ages, as these days the Muppets are remembered more as a kids' show instead of the more adult, primetime comedy it was. Most kids today have only seen the Muppets shill pizza with Jessica Simpson, and haven't seen such flipping weird sights as surreal entertainments as Lew Zealand and his boomerang fish or Gonzo the Great tap-dancing on oatmeal. Where else on TV could you see not only a pig in love with frog, but then that frog having to deal with a gypsy curse and Jonathan Winters? Nowhere, that's where. And that doesn't even compare to the stuff we've got on this list of The Muppet Show's 10 weirdest moments.

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2009/09/the_muppet_shows_10_weirdest_moments.php

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