cinnamon thoughts.

Sir Patrick Stewart talking euphoric about the internet, Twitter, iPhone and games. This man is awesome.

Alex Roman created this wonderful, completely animated film named The Third & The Seventh. This is truly a piece of art.
After watching this I wonder when an average computer will be able to render pictures and animations as realistic as these in real time.
Watch the film in HD or take a look at some stills [...]

Recently I came across Reeder which is a great news reader for the iPhone. It uses Google Reader as a backend so it is easy to sync your feeds across multiple devices and clients (e.g. NetNewsWire on the Mac).
Reeder 1.2—which might get submitted to the app store as early as today—will be quite an update. [...]

A collection of stunning pictures of Mars’ surface taken by HiRISE onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment website has high resolution versions of most images and also beautiful wallpapers.
(NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

A bird apparently dropped a pice of baguette on a part of the Large Hadron Collider which shut down the whole operation. It had to be a bird from the future preventing the total apocalypse if you believe this article from the New York Times:
[T]he hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with [...]

While in the US two weeks ago I had the chance to buy a print issue of Wired with the article Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine. Whether you believe everything or not doesn’t make this a less interesting read:
The point of the system […] was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American [...]

Fantastic photos of Saturn and its rings and moons at equinox, when the Sun shines directly on the edge of the ten meter thin rings.
Photo: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

NASA has released information on water molecules found on our moon and in unexpected places on Mars. Exciting news! I’m looking forward to see whether LCROSS — the Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite — finds larger quantities of water ice on the Moon. Its impact is on Oct. 9, 2009.

Forever’s Not so Long is a fantastic short movie about a hopeless situation starring Garrett Murray. I can’t tell more without a spoiler, so just watch this 13 minute masterpiece.

If you have an iPhone and a Twitter account or a website be sure to check out Ego, also by Garrett Murray.

Photos of the 2008 eruption of the Chaiten volcano in Chile—its first eruption in about 9000 years. Be sure to scroll at least down to the sixth picture!
Cases of electrical storms breaking out directly above erupting volcanoes are well documented, although scientists differ on what causes them. Picture taken May 2, 2008.
Full article at boston.com

The best pictures have been selected!

My gorgeous wife and I after the ceremony on August 22nd.

Until recently I didn’t know of the Viking 1 and Venera 13 missions that took the first pictures on the surface of Mars and Venus.
In 1976 NASA’s Viking 1 took the first photos as a lander on Mars. At the moment Spirit and Opportunity are still working and snapping pictures on Mars.

In 1982 the Soviet [...]

This reading lamp by the four French designers Jun Yasumoto, Alban Le Henry, Olivier Pigasse and Vincent Vandenbrouck is pure genius: it goes dark as soon as you put you book on it after reading.

(via Core77)

There were a lot of things we couldn’t do in an SR-71 Blackbird [...], but we were the fastest guys on the block and loved reminding our fellow aviators of this fact.
When you’re remotely interested in planes, etc. you should read this story by a pilot of the great reconnaissance aircraft SR-71.
More about the Mach-3-fast [...]

What a great place to work at!

via Boing Boing Gadgets

A beautiful animated, interactive music video. Pintando una Canción.

Here are some great HDR photos from Japan.
High Dynamic Range imaging is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas of a scene than normal digital imaging techniques.
I find this technique quite amazing as good HDR photos almost look like a painting.

Interesting article by @dom on how Twitter was developed.

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture.
Anybody who’s interested in design and fonts should definitely watch this documentary. Really interesting and great for understanding the roots of many designs we now see in our daily lives. helveticafilm.com