Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) is one of my favourite tunes on the The Suburbs and the new interactive website does it justice. In another collaboration with Vincent Morisset (having previously directed the interactive website for Neon Bible), Arcade fire present a dystopian suburban nightmare in which you control the characters with your own movement.

http://www.sprawl2.com/

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

Steve Jobs, 1955–2011

It is hardly possible to overrate the value… of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar.

John Stewart Mill 1806–73

In a similar vein to his geo-tagger’s map of tourism, Eric Fischer creates another visualisation that demarcates geographical areas. This time combining flickr and Twitter by representing tweets with a geo-tagged photo link with blue dots and a geo-tagged flickr photo with orange dots (both are represented with white dots). Beautiful.

via FlowingData

a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to appreciate their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.

Wikipedia

Featuring slots such as How did you die?, letters from people on earth and an interview with a woman who has an immensely strong feeling she could play every musical instrument better than anyone who has ever lived.

Genius

http://rsw.cc/radio-spiritworld-the-other-side/

mp3 download (NSFW — strong language)

This image, while not revealing a huge amount of insight, is rather beautiful — considering it visualises all the activity from the Champion’s League Final between Barcelona and Manchester United last month.

From the FT Weekend:

… activity (from both teams combined) during the second half of the Final. The large spikes are goals; the taller ridge represents touches; the shorter ridge represents passes.

via CR Blog

Rather beautifully rendered visualisation of the definitive Daft Punk discography.

See and hear it here

via @Shealan

Should I care what color the bikeshed is? The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change.

To expand, wikipedia has:

Parkinson dramatizes his Law of Triviality with a committee’s deliberations on a nuclear power plant, contrasting it to deliberation on a bicycle shed. A nuclear reactor is used because it is so vastly expensive and complicated that an average person cannot understand it, so they assume that those working on it understand it. Even those with strong opinions often withhold them for fear of being shown to be insufficiently informed. On the other hand, everyone understands a bicycle shed (or thinks he or she does), so building one can result in endless discussions because everyone involved wants to add his or her touch and show that they have contributed. While discussing the bikeshed, debate emerges over whether the best choice of roofing is aluminium, asbestos, or galvanized iron, rather than whether the shed is a good idea or not.

via Jon Rafman @9-eyes.com.