It was always a highlight of the show, no matter which flavour of Star Trek you were watching. The music would swell, the Enterprise (or perhaps some other ship) would dramatically bank past the camera, then the engine would spin up and the ship would suddenly spring forward, blurred and leaving tracers behind, to disappear into a flash of light.

Warp speed.

Whenever they had an episode that featured ships from the future, or advanced ships from a never-before-seen alien species, they always tweaked the warp effects a little bit, and you always wondered what they would do. It was kind of like the cousin of the transporter effect, which also differed throughout the years.

You know, if we ever do learn how to bend time and space around a spacecraft, I wonder what it would look like to an outside observer.

(via Gizmodo)

For example, in today’s Winnipeg Free Press, they’re highlighting a story of recovered two-century-old beer from the bottom of the Baltic. The story comes with a picture:

The tale is mouthwatering:

Divers who found what’s believed to be the world’s oldest drinkable champagne say they have also discovered two-centuries-old bottles of beer at a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea …. Researchers who tried drops of the dark, foamy liquid liked the taste of it.

But what really made me laugh was this comment, by “kiov”:

They must be quite valuable given the care that is going in to protecting them. I always place all of my rare, breakable artifacts on a stack of papers on the edge of a desk while I send emails a few feet away.

Ha! Touché!

Astronaut Don Pettit takes time-lapse videos of the Earth, as seen from his orbital viewpoint, and shares them with the Internet. That is awesome.

This one gets a little repetitive, since it appears he’s using the same shots multiple times, but I never get tired of seeing that aurora, especially when it pops up the first time, at about 0:15.

Gizmodo has a gallery of some of this other videos, but I found this one on the Daily What.

According to the story, he’s hauled over 6 million pounds of trash from rivers over the past 12 years — including an astonishing 775 refrigerators. I don’t know if he cleaned up the site of an abandoned fridge factory at one time, but that’s an average of more than 60 fridges a year — a fridge every week, and sometimes two! That’s too many fridges in the river.

Here’s his nomination video — click pause at the very last second to read the fine print. It’s worth it.

You can see more nominees at the contest website.

Interior design and architecture blog DigsDigs has a post up about a modern kitchen design called “Tribe.” There are about a dozen photos, from all different angles, and loads of info, and I think it looks sleek and well-designed and way too expensive for me.

But I can’t get past the picture above — doesn’t the shape and placement and colour of those two cupboard units just scream “Tetris!!” to you?

I love it, but do you think it was deliberate?

I am in love with these pencils, stamped as they are with the slogan made famous by Woody Guthrie’s guitar. It’s $22 for a box of 10 at You And Me The Royal We, which is temping, seeing as how it comes with that cool box, too.

Sadly, I so rarely use pencils that this would be a purchase for image purposes only.

Ret3, commenting at Boing Boing points out the irony: “it’s basically a bundle of sticks.” Tee hee.

Still, any excuse to post some Woody Guthrie!

You know, I’d heard of a Pottery Barn, but never before a pottery camera. But check out the line of ceramic ppinhole cameras crafted by Steve Irvine.

Because it’s so easy to make a pinhole camera, a lot of them look kind of slapped together. But Irvine’s are nice enough to put on a shelf.

And they take good pictures, too! When I heard of it, I wondered how he got the pinhole tiny enough for good shots, but it looks like he’s got a metal “lens” for his cameras. Good idea. Here’s an example shot from the above camera — it took 90 minutes to expose:

(Thanks Colin!)

Having grown up with hot water radiators in a Victorian-era house, I think they are far and away the most comforting of heating devices. Sure, they don’t heat up a house a quickly — or perhaps as evenly — as forced air, but there’s nothing better than leaning against a warm radiator when you’re cold. It’s like a gigantic metal hot-water bottle.

I like fireplaces, too, but if forced to choose, I think I would choose radiators.

And, I dig the vintage look that most radiators have. But I’m kind of in love with this modern reinterpretation — a radiator made to look like a white picket fence.

Tell me this wouldn’t be perfect if it were paired up with those cloud shelves?

Another pic and some brief details at Interior Design Ideas, which credits them to a Kayleigh Metcalf.

Going to admit it: I’m a bit of a Mad Men junkie. Amy and I are solid fans. I even bought a vintage suit and dressed up to have a party for the Season 4 premiere.

So I’m going to eat up the Rolling Stone story (even if they kind of botched the Photoshoppery on the cover). Best of all was flipping through the behind-the-scenes photos they have in their online slideshow. They’re printed in grainy black-and-white for a vintage feel, and they often just show “Oh, a Mad Men moment, but with cameras over their shoulders.”

But there are a couple of really fun anachronisms — like Ken Cosgrove and Harry Crane checking out a Mac laptop, above. I love the awed expression on actor Rich Sommer’s face. That’s precisely what Harry Crane would look like if a 2010 laptop suddenly appeared in his office.

Here’s another one, of Don Draper and his iPhone:

See the whole Rolling Stone slideshow here.

Unless you’re really not paying attention, you’ll notice a few changes to the look and feel of the blog. There’s a big new logo at the top, for example, where before there was only plain text.

I’m not married to the logo — just whipped it up in a couple of hours based on the placeholder I’d been using on Facebook and Twitter — but I don’t hate it either. Ditto with the yellow-green colour that was a random “hey, that ain’t too bad” accident. I hope to tweak everything further over the next little while.

So I’m interested in hearing your comments about the new look — like it, hate it, don’t care — but I’m just starting a little bit of an experiment, so if there’s anything you’d like me to try, I’ll try it.

The biggest change, from a personal satisfaction standpoint, is that the main column is substantially wider. I think this will give prominence to pictures and to videos that we post — and it will enable me to post video clips that are a standard 640 pixels wide, rather than manually sizing them down all the time. Grrrr.

But if it’s so wide that it’s screwing up your screen — or if I’ve broken anything else for you — please let me know.

The impetus for these changes, by the way, is because Absurd Intellectual just had its biggest month ever. After starting the year with a bang in January and March, we tailed off quite a bit through the spring. But I’ve tried to up the posting a little bit, lately, and it seems to be working. For example, we had more hits just last week than we had in all of August last year.

It’s not enough to get us ranked on Alexa, of course (oh wait, we are — we’re ranked 1,091,993rd in the world!) but it’s more than enough to make me happy — and it’s far more than I anticipated ever attracting.

It’s flattering, it’s humbling — and if you’re reading this, thanks!

Just figured with so many of you around, it was time to neaten the place up.

Now, will someone please come and do a similar show at my house?

The weather is getter cooler.  The days are getting shorter.  Soon, classes will be back in session — and that, my friends — is the surest sign that summer has come to an end.

With that return to school, students will mourn the passing of another season, as is well known and often commented upon.  But what, I ask you, of the various teachers, professor and instructors?  What of them?

Yes, they too will gaze wistfully into the rearview mirror of time and see the glorious summer fading into the distance.  For me, not least of all, because I will once again need to shave on a regular basis.

Oh, summer!  How I love your long, hot days as the sun’s rays beat down upon my rough, be-stubbled face.  How the gentle rain’s moisture clings to my chin long after the skies have cleared….

This weekend, readers, my face will be shorn of its summer growth.  And I will, once again, mourn its passing.

For comfort, however, I will turn to The Beardly and ruminate about beards until summer rises again on the far side of winter.

I haven’t spent a lot of time poking around yet, but it seems like a nice, fairly easy-going, non-pretentious place for designer-minded types to post some of their work, get inspired by what others have posted, and to share and to critique.

Of course, like a lot of these communities, there are far more people asking for feedback than giving it. But it’s a nice-looking site, it seems friendly and collaborative, and it has a series of helpful articles.

There’s also some really nice designs up there!

Photo: That’s a completely different kind of newspaper “web”. Source: Winnipeg Tribune archives, 1957.

I’m intrigued by the idea of an open-source, peer-to-peer “university” as a way to both learn and to perhaps share my own knowledge, and now there’s a course that’s tailor-made for me — “Open Journalism and the Open Web.”

Says the syllabus:

a solid six-week online curriculum that will benefit both “hacks” and hackers (that’s journalists & programmers, in plain English). Each week the course will focus on a different topic, and each week the participants will be joined by a different subject-matter expert (or two) from the field of news innovation. The course readings, online participation, and a seminar are expected to require roughly 4-6 hours per week.

The six subjects include the basics of both journalism and coding, project management, collaboration, datasets, maps and open sources.

Very interesting!

There are only 40 seats, and to weed out people who aren’t serious, they’ve set a “sign-up task.” I’m seriously considering it.

(via Boing Boing)

I had never heard of Dr. Dog until they covered Architecture in Helsinki (a band I had heard of) and their song “Heart it Races.”

It was practically love at first listen. They took what I consider to be a pretty mediocre (and kind of odd and unpleasant) song and turned it into pop gold.

Dr. Dog – Heart it Races

Isn’t that the perfect pop song? Maybe it’s so perfect because their music is so heavily influenced by pop music of the 60s, full of harmonies and pretty lo-fi sounds. Check out more of their music on myspace.