lack of inspiration?

the 2008 Plagiarius awards have been announced.
what can we as designer do to stop manufactures from unlawfully appropriating our work?
how can we make ethics a major parameter in a capitalistic global society?

via: plagiarius

British artist Alison Jackson talks about her provocative explorations of celebrity culture. Funny and sometimes shocking, Jackson's work contains some graphic images.

via: ted

super virus/super computer

The Storm Worm Botnet currently infects between one and ten million computers worldwide, which means that it has access to a huge amount of processing power and somewhere between 1 and 10 petabytes of RAM. This apparently makes it one of the most powerful computers in the world, with more computing power than the ten fastest supercomputers in the world combined.

These interesting but admittedly vague and flaky estimates come from computer scientist Peter Gutman. Although you can pick at the numbers quite easily, the guy makes a very interesting point. While projects like Seti@Home can harness a lot of computing power, a virus or worm that doesn't need to ask permission from a user could conceivably be vastly more powerful. Imagine the potential if virus writers found more interesting things to do with those cycles than send spam.

Will the first person to find extraterrestrial signals be an amateur hacker, rather than Seti? Could complex protein folding solutions be found by bored crackers? And would the benevolent act of finding a cure for a genetic illness outweigh the malevolent act of creating the worm that rounded up the processing cycles needed to do it?

via: uber review

kai cars

i love these small japanese cars. when in japan last november i was so impressed by their design and ergonomics. tall westerners fitted easily and the cars zipped through trafic. parking space was no problem either. i really can not understand why they are not imported in europe where our only choice is the over expensive smart.
via: design-engine

the ones we love

"the Ones We Love is a project highlighting young and talented photographers from around the world. each artist contributed six photographs of the person(s) who is most important to them, taken outdoors in a natural setting. the goal of the website is to portray the people who are loved, cherished, and inspirational to these artists, and also showcase the differences and similarities in the photographs each of them took within the same guidelines." the ones we love

out of site, out of mind?

It's not exactly a Leif-Ericson-class discovery in terms of positivity, but it's important nonetheless. Oceanographer Charles Moore was on the high seas between Hawaii and the US mainland when he drifted into the "'North Pacific gyre'--a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it. What he found was revolting:

He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after day, thousands of miles from land. "Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by," he said in an interview. "How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?"

This "garbage continent" is apparently twice the size of the US landmass, and was formed from garbage both shipborne and dumped from land. Even worse, it's more malevolent than just a bunch of floating rubbish--it's decomposing into a kind of toxic soup, and it's due to double in size over the next decade. Read the unbelievable tale here.