It's a very rare thing.

(photo by virtualwolf)

• Google Data centers (cool photos)
• The Jalopy Journal » Blog Archive » Nitro: When you think about the hot rods of the 1940s, you tend to think in terms of charm rather than violence. The sepia toned imagery of a roadster blasting down the salt in 1948 fails to purvey any kind of sense that something catastrophic looms. ... It's somehow easy to forget that the cars of yesteryear were actually driven closer to the threshold of death than those of today. I mean, these guys were running those charming little flatheads, right? What kind of shenanigans can one really get into with only 300 or so horsepower?
• Formula One's Favorite Driver Mumbles And Swears His Way To A Victory: Race Engineer Simon Rennie: "Okay Kimi, next guy behind you is Alonso. Alonso is five seconds behind you. I'll keep you updated on the gap. I'll keep you updated on the pace." Kimi: "Just leave me alone I know what I'm doing." Ahh it's why we love Kimi... but it gets better: he sent them commemorative t-shirts afterwards.
• Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters: In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they invent and are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood. Hipsterdom is the first "counterculture" to be born under the advertising industry's microscope. Not sure that's entirely true. Hipster is basically a flavour of mainstream; but even if you classify it as a counterculture it's hardly the first to be tapped by the advertising industry. Still, it's an amusing rant by someone who's over the hipsters.

• Daniel Boud | Sydney Photographer - definitely a portfolio worth checking out. Also worth reading Dan's blog post about the process of putting it together: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Portfolio | Boudist Photos.
• Alejandro Cartagena » New work/ Car Poolers 2011
• russos: (abandoned radar towers)
• Pennsylvania Station: 1910 | Shorpy Historical Photo Archive

Model Industries building, Alcatraz.

Labels: photo

Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction | DVICE:

We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.

...

If this all reminds you of a certain science fiction book by a certain well-known author, it's not a coincidence: Nell's Primer in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age was a direct inspiration for much of the OLPC teaching software, which itself is named Nell.