Simulacra @atoynton - Tumblr Blog

My jam

This is pretty rad.

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Cameron, a ten-year-old Scottish boy, was captured on camera by his father speaking a really unusual language: English. Except, backwards. Fluently.

In the video, Cameron talks backwards into an iPad, which then plays his chatter backwards, transforming it into regular, front-facing English.

http://www.fbomb.co

Software developer Martin Gringras has created a site called Fbomb, which tracks every time a Twitter user (Twit?) uses the F-word and puts a little icon on a map. Effectively, we can now measure who gives the most f***s. It’s not exactly a battle we’d be proud to win, but we’ll take what we can get.

Gringras came up with the idea for the site in a conversation with friends about how cursing can work against you when you’re trying to make a point. The map, on the other hand, is an excellent way to make his point, as you can watch the Fbombs pop up on the map live and click to see the often poorly composed tweets in which they appear.

Of course, seeing yourself in an F-bomb packed area may leave you feeling a little embarrassed, as some regions seem to hardly use the word at all. It’s not exactly fair, considering language differences, but it’s also interesting to see that the word does get thrown around in non-English speaking areas from time to time.

http://www.fbomb.co

laughingsquid

Steve Wozniak test-drives ancient Apple 1 computers

atoynton

I lov the Woz.

Happy Geek Pride Day, everyone. Go forth with the knowledge that being a geek means you probably have a job!

If you’re feeling slightly more proud than usual, dear geeks, it’s because today is Geek Pride Day! Get your geek on out in public. Let’s celebrate the best way geeks know how — with cold hard data. The folks at Modis conducted a survey on the state of geekdom in America. Let’s look at the numbers.

chartier

New purple dashboard option

All other dashboard color options are retired

By June 1, you will have to update your avatar to be one of those damn cartoon people things

All new post buttons (icon and background) are now purple

Every sentence you write will automatically get an exclamation…

marissamayr

I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!

We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.

Tumblr has built an amazing place to follow the world’s creators. From art to architecture, fashion to food, Tumblr hosts 105 million different blogs. With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of thefastest-growing media networks in the world. Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent onsite each month. On mobile, more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app, and those users do an average of 7 sessions per day. Tumblr’s tremendous popularity and engagement among creators, curators and audiences of all ages brings a significant new community of users to the Yahoo! network. The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! could grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50% to more than a billion monthly visitors, and could grow traffic by approximately 20%.

In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience.

As I’ve said before, companies are all about people. Getting to know the Tumblr team has been really amazing. I’ve long held the view that in all things art and design, you can feel the spirit and demeanor of those who create them. That’s why it was no surprise to me that David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met. He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with. His respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome, and I’m absolutely delighted to have him and his entire team join Yahoo!.

Both Tumblr and Yahoo! share a vision to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas by focusing on users, design — and building experiences that delight and inspire the world every day.

http://yahoo.tumblr.com/

atoynton

Well done and tasteful, but it might b time to look for another blog.

Every Arrested Development Running Gag in One Amazing Interactive Visualization

The time for goofing around on Recurring Developments, an interactive map of every running gag — every awkward shoulder rub, every huge mistake, every “Her?” – in the first three seasons of Arrested Development has just begun. If you can’t catch up on the episodes by brazenly just watching television at work, this is probably the next best thing, though it would probably serve to keep an important looking Word document open in another window.

Recurring Developments is simple, but deep, taking one of the shows many running gags — like one of my favorites “Well, that was a freebie” — and shows you which episodes the bit appears in. In some happy cases, it will even give you the chance to hover over the joke and get some context on where it appeared in the episode.

Of course, you can also reverse engineer the diagram, picking an episode — for example “Motherboy XXX” — to find out that it has a Carl Weathers gag, a J. Walter Weatherman bit, a “Hey, brother!” and many more of the series’ trademark lines. In short, it is pretty much the nerdiest of all possible things, and we’re really into it.

As the once mythical fourth season draws nearer, expect more stuff like this to start cropping up. And yes, expect to see it all here, because we could not be more psyched for the comeback of the century.

http://recurringdevelopments.com/

New Google Glass Video Shows What It’s Like Actually Using Glass...Kind Of.

This new introductory video demonstrates how to use Glass’s touch navigation, but also gives us a better idea of what using it is like.

It looks like the interface is pretty similar to Google Now in the way it breaks information and alerts into cards. The touch navigation looks like it could take some getting used to. Not because its gestures are complicated, but because if you’re using the device heavily it would require a lot of time tapping and swiping at the side of your head.

We’ve also seen voice features in earlier videos, so I’d imagine most users will use some combination of the two and navigate however they feel most comfortable — either by tapping their head or by talking to themselves. It’s probably going to take some getting used to either way.

Another pretty cool Microsoft innovation is in prototype.

It looks like tomorrow will mark the big coming out party for Microsoft’s new toy, the IllumiRoom, a projector system that could one day turn your whole living room into a television screen. That day is not today, as the immersive gaming gear is still in its prototype stage. Microsoft has released an updated video detailing the IllumiRoom’s potential, though, and it’s got our attention.

IllumiRoom is, at its heart, a projector that is in constant conversation with your Xbox. Using the Kinect, the IllumiRoom’s projector can get an accurate scan of the room around your television screen. Once it has that, it can project the information that doesn’t fit in your field of view on the screen to the area around it, transforming bookcases into exploding buildings and speakers into machine gun wielding robots — or zombies intent on destroying your garden, it that’s more your thing.

Alternately, the IllumiRoom can go a more abstract route, turning the room round the game into a snowstorm or a blue light grid that looks like how androids must see the world. While I don’t know if android vision will make anyone better at playing games, I certainly don’t see how it could hurt.

Chances are, we’ll have more details on the new tech tomorrow after it makes its official debut in Paris at this year’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. This doesn’t feel like a game-changer for the industry yet, but if it’s something Microsoft can bring to market alongside its coming next-gen offering…well, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sweeten the pot a bit.

laughingsquid

Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, and Others Discuss the Storytelling of Science

atoynton

I love science! We need to move science out of its siloed existence and into popular culture. This is such a great lesson for kids, teaching them how to deal with uncertainty and embrace basic discovery. #iwishipayedmoreattention

To say that Twitter Music is debuting today would be to discount the man hours Ryan Seacrest and other celebrities have spent assaulting their earholes with it.

What are you doing May 26? Shut up, doesn’t matter, cancel all your plans right now. You have new plans, and they’re awesome, because you, like any decent, right-thinking person, are going to be watching 15 new episodes of Arrested Development when they arrive on Netflix at 12:01 PDT May 26.

Netflix had the decency and wisdom to bring the show back on a Sunday, which means you won’t have to feel bad about marathoning right through five and a half straight hours of new Arrested Development, because seriously, what else are you going to do on a Sunday?

Google's 'Fools' Blue is hilarious...and a shot at Facebook? Maybe.

Mobile advertising has always had and attribution problem, making it difficult to discern it's effectiveness due to poor analytics. Jason Spero, Google's head of mobile strategy is trying to change that. Google has developed a new marketing/measurement tool designed to quantify the value of mobile advertising. Hopefully convincing marketers that its a worthwhile advertising channel.

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