It's been too long

I started using Tumblr and it's pretty sweet because it meets the needs of my "blog" without all the work of posting and thinking of something clever to write. In other words, it's an easier platform for me to post goodies that I come across on the web. Given the ease of the Tumblr platform I'm going to be way more active with postings.

check it here
http://zach-ary.tumblr.com/

also on twitter:
http://twitter.com/Zach_ary

Dunny's Make Noise

Neat Stuff care of Rob "Blobbos" Braun.

Someone has taken the Vinyl Toy trend and added speakers to it...smart. The site is called Headphonies.

DnB Meet Jesus - Jesus Meet DnB

Amazing Set Of Videos by DJ Holy Ghost - Click HERE to be linked.

Pixadore

Pretty intense stuff - Pixadore In Sao Paulo

Revolution http://joshspear.com/?tag=education

WiiSpray

Sup Y'all - came across this on PSFK...their write up is below...the graf game will hate on this hard but it's a pretty cool invention - i guess one argument could be made that it could improve the state of graffiti by providing toys with the tools to work on their can control before hitting a public environment...

From PSFK

We’ve previously written about Daim’s 3-D graffiti, now a couple of Media Art and Design students are working on a Wii-Controller turned Spraycan. Wiispray is a prototype, currently under heavy development as part of a final-thesis design work by Martin Lihs at Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany.

Wiispray aims to give sprayers all the tools of a real-life spraycan with a digital extension. This neat gadget could open the concept of a digital spraycan to a wide audience. The virtual spraycan simulates real spraying characteristics and comes with a range of different caps and of course paints. Collaborative spraying on a virtual wall is planned as well.

Wiispray

Typo Graffiti

Armed with Sharpies, erasers and righteous indignation, two apostles of the apostrophe make it their crusade to rid the world of bad signs.

Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson have not wasted their lives.

They fight a losing battle, an unyielding tide of misplaced apostrophes and poor spelling. But still, they fight. Why, you ask. Because, they say. Because, they must.

For the last three months, they have circled the nation in search of awkward grammar construction. They have ferreted out bad subject-verb agreements, and they have faced stone-faced opposition everywhere. They have shone a light on typos in public places, and they have traveled by a GPS-guided '97 Nissan Sentra, sleeping on the couches of college friends and sticking around just long enough to do right by the English language. Then it's on the road again, off to a new town with new typos.

Picture a pair of Kerouacs armed with Sharpies and erasers and righteous indignation—holding back a flood of mixed metaphors and spelling mistakes and extraneous punctuation so commonplace we rarely notice it anymore. But they are 28 and idealistic. Graduates of Dartmouth College, they are old friends with a schoolmarm's irritation at conspicuous errors, and despite their mild and somewhat nerdy exteriors, they have serious nerve. Deck lives outside Boston; Herson lives outside Washington. And together, they are TEAL—the Typo Eradication Advancement League—and they are between jobs.

o they approach a cafe, a shoe store, a visitors center.

They identify a typo on a sign, a label, a poster.

They point out the typo. They await the reaction.

This next part varies. They are greeted warmly (sometimes). They are told to go away (sometimes). They are gently blown off (usually). "We have not yet encountered fisticuffs," Herson said. But it's always a possibility. Often they make the needed alterations themselves, with compliance from a manager or supervisor. And when ignored, they have resorted to guerrilla tactics—slipping in a stray letter here, removing an errant comma there. They have found about 400 cringe-inducing examples of bad copy mistakes—on church signs and at Rockefeller Center, on sandwich boards and at the Grand Canyon.

That is, 400 examples they have brought to the attention of the powers that be. They have gone as far as correcting graffiti. Their tour ended this week.

Their route was circular. Deck began March 5 in Boston, drove to Virginia and picked up Herson; from there they worked their way clockwise around the country, from Atlanta to Texas to Seattle to Madison, with many stops in between. (Their blog is at jeffdeck.com/teal and will be updated regularly, typo trip or no typo trip.) They swung into Chicago in late April—the town that gave birth to their guiding light, "The Chicago Manual of Style." They headed straight for Wicker Park. They tend to hunt for typos in "high-density text locations," in spots with more independent businesses than chains—indies being generally less attentive to flagrant sins against grammar than corporate conglomerates.

Deck, who decided to launch the tour after spotting typos in his shower curtain (it was covered in math terms and equations), arrived wearing an Indiana Jones hat. He had a watchful manner and rarely seemed to blink. His foil, Herson, a kind of Ratzo Rizzo of proper usage, was jumpier, squirrelly, eager to push Deck whenever an encounter with a store employee got awkward (which was every time).

We started down Milwaukee Avenue.

Immediately, Herson spotted an offense—a second-floor awning outside a tarot shop that advertised "Energy Stone's." They climbed the stairs to the second floor and approached a middle-age woman with a quizzical expression. "We happened to notice the sign for energy stones," Deck said, "and there happens to be an extra apostrophe. 'Stone's' doesn't need the apostrophe."

"And?" she asked, her voice flat with annoyance.

"And we wanted to bring it to your attention," Deck said.

As they spoke, the woman's daughter stepped into the room and shouted: "Oh my God! I saw you guys on 'Good Morning America.' Tell me, tell me—what did we get wrong?" She sounded genuinely thrilled. (Actually, they were on "The Today Show.") Herson explained the typo on the awning. Deck said he understood that the mistake is out of the way and not easy to fix, but he asked them to promise that they would fix it—soon.

"Don't know if we can ..." the woman said.

Deck said they've heard that a lot.

Back on the street, Deck said poor use of the apostrophe was their most commonly encountered typo. "It's like a virus," he said. Herson agreed: "It really is contagious, I think. Especially the lack of them in possessives." (For instance, parking lot signs explaining that any unauthorized vehicles will be towed "at owners expense" have been particularly pervasive.)

They continued down Milwaukee.

A block later, they stopped. Outside a clothing store, Deck noticed the lack of an apostrophe in the window type—it read "Women's & Mens." They entered, and two clerks with white-blond hair perked up.

"Hi, we're driving around the country fixing typos," Deck explained, "and we noticed one side of your sign out front has an apostrophe and one doesn't for some reason. So we were wondering if you have a spare apostrophe we could stick in there. Or I could just do it."

"My, that's specific," the first clerk said.

"I'm not sure we keep spare apostrophes," the other said.

Very observant," the first clerk said.

"Amazing, actually," the other said.

Deck reached behind him for the clear plastic pencil case attached to his camera strap. He asked if he could add the apostrophe, and the clerks huddled, then shrugged. Inside his case were dry erasers for white boards and Sharpies and different colored markers and chalk and bottles of Wite-Out and a few pens and a handful of crayons, because you never know. Deck crouched down in the window and carefully painted a matching apostrophe on the glass with a Wite-Out brush; then he stepped back.

"Thank you for making our window a better place," one clerk said.

"Thank you for letting us."

They continued on.

Their mission, Deck said, is to raise typo awareness—after each stop Deck has blogged about the goofs found and the typos corrected. "I've always noticed typos," he said, "and one day I just decided to take action. I thought it would be great to go national and see if there were patterns." He said he detects a general erosion of good grammar, from coast to coast, region to region. "If we can inspire enough people to carry Sharpies and help out, then we will be satisfied and happy."

Until recently, Deck did administrative work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Herson worked at Borders. But they had saved a little money, and so they set out. Of course they want a book deal—they've had interest, they say. But they are also sincere in their goal. Maybe too sincere. There's an element of performance art here—an invisible line between genuine and absurd that they approach with each fresh encounter. They press their faces close to even the most innocuous handwritten neighborhood leaflet and scan carefully. They don't smirk. But you detect one anyway, studiously smothered.

They entered a men's clothing store near Ashland Avenue. The large faded metal sign out front read "Mens Clothing." They swung open the door. An older man was resting his elbows on a shirt rack. They approached. Deck spoke. "We noticed your sign."

The man said nothing. Deck explained it needed an apostrophe. The man is Robert Marks, the manager. He is 60 years old and said he had been coming to this store (founded in 1914) since he was a child. (He said the sign is at least as old as he is.) He listened to them explain why the grammar on the sign was wrong. And then he shrugged, never changing his expression.

Deck asked if he had a ladder, so he could climb up and ...

"Don't worry about it," Marks said.

"We could jus ... "

"Leave it alone."

Outside, back on Milwaukee, I asked Deck if there wasn't charm to certain mistakes—that didn't his drive to eradicate honest goofs from the awnings and sandwich boards of every neighborhood mom and pop remove a little charm from the landscape. Isn't he unintentionally helping to hide the human hand in cities that are quickly succumbing to a slick numbing sameness? Is all of this really worth it?

He stopped.

"Well," he said, considering the point. "We worry there are cases when someone is trying to say something and they won't be taken seriously because their sign is riddled with mistakes. We don't want to see more chains. But a grocery store that can't spell grocery [as he encountered in California] makes you question the food they sell. I think charm can manifest in different ways."

Chicago, Deck would say later, had been nice—as nice as New Orleans. But at the time of the hunt, they fretted that their percentage of typos corrected to typos spotted was being thrown. They had been at around 50 percent, but again and again they encountered clerks who said the boss was not around, so no changes could be made. Deck and Herson looked pained.

Then they looked stricken. There, high above Milwaukee Avenue, was a sign for Milwaukee Furniture. And Milwaukee was spelled "Milwuakee." "Wow," Deck said sarcastically. "Wow. I mean, Milwaukee is far away and everything. I mean, isn't this Milwaukee Avenue too? Oh, I think they need to be told about this." Herson checked the opposite side of the sign—misspelled there too. They entered a store full of furniture but devoid of customers. Behind a metal desk covered in stapled receipts sat a large guy in a black T-shirt. He squinted as they approached.

"We couldn't help notice your sign," Deck said. "The one that juts over the sidewalk?"

OK," the guy replied.

"The name of the store is misspelled."

"OK."

"It's correct on the awning, but the letters are inversed on the sign," Deck said.

"And?"

"And we were wondering if there was any way you could get it fixed," Deck replied.

"The manager is not here. Tomorrow."

"It's huge," Deck said. "Believe me, if we could fix that thing we would. If it were within our power."

"Could you let your boss know?" Herson asked.

The man smiled and looked toward the street. "I never noticed."

" 'Dining room' is spelled wrong too," Deck said. The store sign was a big enough goof that the mistakes he had spotted on the awning seemed small. But he couldn't help himself. "['Dining'] has too many letters," he told the man.

"I'll tell him."

"He'll change it?"

"I'll tell him."

"You guys should get a refund from your sign guys."

"I'll tell him."

They left. Herson started down the block—headed for a "matress" in need of a "t."

But Deck spun on his heels and turned back to the furniture shop and stared at the looming "Milwuakee." He'd learned a lot during this trip—walk away from a human powder keg, never bring up a typo on a menu until after you've finished eating your meal, our understanding of proper punctuation is shaky at best. And generally, people don't care.

He groaned and walked to the window. He pressed his forehead to the glass, then gently banged it against the pane. He stepped back and stared. "It's bigger than my head," he said, incredulous. "And you know it's not going to get fixed either."

Source - Chicago Tribune

Lego Version of MC Escher's Drawing

wowsers












































Source - Laughing Squid

Check Out

http://www.zune-arts.com/

Build An X-Wing Out Of A Bus Ticket

For all those origami enthusiasts out there - try your hand at building an X-Wing out of a bus ticket

Step by step instructions HERE.

For Trylon

Would love to see this in Toronto or any other city for that matter...from Trendwatching....

There are several vertical farms proposed from major cities around the world. We’ve already told you about the one being built in Las Vegas, now here’s one that’s been proposed for Toronto.

SKYFarm, is being developed by architect Gordon Graff. It will be a 58 floor skyscraper that will blend into the theatre/entertainment district and will offer 8 million square feet of growing space which will be used to feed an estimated 35,000 people each year. Year round it will be protected from disease, run off and other pollution, particularly harsh smog in the summer, and will be shielded from the biting cold Ontario winters. In addition, it will eliminate the need for bringing in produce from other countries as each area will be able to replicate the conditions of different climates.

As cool as it sounds that we might one day get all our nutrition from meal pills, growing crops will be a necessity for a long time still, possibly forever. Another cold reality is that we’re running out of agricultural space, specifically in metropolitan areas.

The beauty of these vertical farms is that they can supply thousands, if not millions, of people with fresh crops vital to our bodies, regardless of time of year or weather conditions. Inside the giant skyscrapers, the climate is designed to offer ideal conditions to grow and harvest fruits and vegetables. There is no pollution, and no concern that weather, like hail or floods, could ruin a harvest.

Some places are already way ahead of the curve.
Pasona 02, an underground farm in Japan, has been around since 2005.

This is the future of farming.

I guess it should be adding stuff to this thing...

Animal Farm Cover by Shepard Fairey













Relatively New Banksy Piece



















Neato

Ipod Ghetto Blaster

This is kinda cool despite being sold at Urban Outfitters. Whatever you do don't bring it to a beach in Nicaragua...you're guaranteed to get robbed. With a little luck you will be in the water so you won't lose your stuff by machete.

Colour Combos

I've found that the hardest part about painting a place is figuring out which colours to use. Among a multitude of issues, you want to make sure that the colours work together. I'm currently in the midst of determining how I want to paint my new place and I found the following site very helpful. "Wear Palettes" is a sub section of the fashion blog "The Sartorialist". This section of the blog provides colour palettes based on fashion ensembles. This site can be a useful for any project involving colour - I've just got paint on the brain.

Fak Pt.2

Frankly, I found this site awesome. Someone out there is making money off toy compatible weapons. I came across the page of Lego weapon accessories such as the M24 Stielhandgranate. The best part of this site is the number of pictures they had. Check it all out here.

Fak

So I recently heard of this company in Israel that essentially acts a prayer messenger for those not able to make it to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. For $25, a prayer sent to the company's website is given to a rabbi who prays on your behalf at the Wailing Wall. Your prayer is also written on a note and left in the wall.

As it turns out, "prayer" isn't the only service this business model caters to. A company called "Send.a.message" will take your personal message and spray paint it on the wall that separate Israel and Palestine. For 30Euros they will tag the wall on your behalf and send you a picture. Check out their site here.

MediaStorm

I came across this really interesting site of "photo-documentaries". Topics range from some pretty heavy stuff (Rape of a Nation) to some lighter material (Love In The First Person). I had the opportunity to watch "Marlboro Marines". The footage was beautiful and shocking. Click here to be routed to the site.

Fixies

Let the spring in! Counting down the days until it gets warm...not to say there's a set date but sweet Jesus I'm looking forward to it. Over the winter months, I've been working on building a fixie with this old Canadian Tire SuperCycle that I found in a bike graveyard. It's been a lot of fun (and work) and I can now say I'm pretty much done painting it after lots of sanding and priming. I really can't wait to get out there and rip it through the city. Pics to follow in coming day. In the meantime I've been satiating my appetite via the internet. Here are two blogs I've
come across that are a pretty good look into this developing subculture.

Trackosaurus Rex - here

Skitch Clothing - here

Cognitive Mind Control

Don't Flush Your Ad Down The Super Bowl
From: Advertising Age

If you're not Bud, don't bother.

It's so tempting: the biggest stage in the advertising world, a collection of all your biggest customers and their friends. Why not throw that $2.7 mil at it and watch the bottles fly off the shelves?

Well, because it probably won't work.

You might make a cool ad, a memorable ad, an ad beloved by all who behold it, but unless you've incorporated some very fundamental cognitive elements, your ad most likely will be attributed to Bud.

In a study released at this year's Cognitive Science Conference, that is exactly what researchers found. Ads with poor "cognitive scores" were misattributed by consumers, and beer ads were attributed to the huge Super Bowl presence that is Budweiser.

Beer wasn't the only category with problems. Many of the more popular ads suffered from the same breakdowns in cognitive principles. Remember those funny Ameriquest ads a couple of years ago-the turbulence on the plane, the crash paddles in the hospital? They made the Ad Meter top 10, but not a single person in the study could recall which brand they advertised.

It doesn't have to be that way. Understanding how people think, learn and remember-the basics of cognitive science-can produce reliable brand recall. The same study proved that researchers, using a model from cognitive science, could predict with stunning accuracy which ads would fare well and which would fall prey to misattribution. Those principles can just as easily be applied during development.

Take, for example, the concept of "working memory." Information has to go through working memory to get into long-term memory, where brand awareness and loyalty reside. One of the principles of cognitive science is that a person can hold and process only about seven items in working memory at any given moment. This actually varies from about five to nine in the general population. If your ad has so much information that it exceeds working-memory capacity, you'll lose control over what consumers are able to remember. Cog-sci lesson: Respect working memory.

At this point, some of you think I want to "kill the creative spark." You are mistaken. Science is here to augment good ideas, not replace them. Surely we can all agree that likability alone is not enough to make an ad effective. There is no ad sexy enough to overcome misattribution.

So here's another tip: There's a difference between a "punch-line" ad and a "piggyback" ad. Using a brand as the punch line to a story or joke is very effective. But a piggyback ad is entertaining for only 25 seconds and then has another five-second ad at the end. The hope is that the piggyback ad will enjoy some reflected glory from the ad it clutches on to, but that's not how the brain works.

Take the Nationwide commercial where Fabio rows a boat and then turns into a cryptkeeper, because "life comes at you fast." We already know Fabio, but now we're supposed to think "life comes at you fast" when we see him, and thus recall Nationwide. It's too much. Only about 4% of consumers remembered the brand.

It's not that a brand has to be mentioned early to be remembered. The FedEx caveman ad had a nice, funny story, and FedEx itself was the punch line. A year later, cavemen were synonymous with Geico, but 22% of consumers still named FedEx as the brand for this ad. Cog-sci lesson: Punch lines work; piggybacks don't.

Of course, an ad can make the "Cognitive Science Top 10" without any formal input from science. But the same could be said for making the Ad Meter top 10, and no one leaves that to chance. So you'd better hope you make both if you don't want to make another ad for Bud.

Lisa Haverty is a cognitive scientist at Brain on Brand, Brookline, Mass.

New Meaning To Watching 6

Source: 12ozProphet

Sweet Camera

"Sung Woo Park's Eazzzy digicam concept is simply a quick, convenient, and well, easy way to snap and download photos. The data transfer process is relieved of wires and multiple device connections and the viewfinder is in the eye of the beholder."

Sweet idea...probably take crappy pictures...BUT it come sooo many colours. DERP!

Source: Core77