Advanced Beauty is an ongoing exploration of digital artworks born and influenced by sound, an ever-growing collaboration between programmers, artists, musicians, animators and architects.

The first collection is a series of audio-reactive ‘video sound sculptures’.  Inspired by synasthesia, the rare, sensory experience of seeing sound or tasting colours, these videos are physical manifestations of sound, sculpted by volume, pitch or structure of the soundtrack.

Check it out.

“Corrections to Last Month’s Letters to Penthouse Forum,” by David Copper:

In the letter “Three-Way Freeway,” it was implied that “Diana” begged for the opportunity to participate in sexual relations with her roommate and her roommate’s boyfriend after accidentally walking in on their “sweaty, all-night lovemaking session.”  In actual fact, “Diana” was not aware of her participation in the “love sandwich” until she regained consciousness later that evening.

Courtesy of McSweeney’s, of course.

Surely in our era of space exploration – where satellites take photos of our blue and clearly globular planet from space, and robots send back info about soil and water from Mars – no one can seriously still believe that the Earth is flat?

Wrong.

Really?

Great high-res pics of the LHC at The Big Picture.

If you’re a FireFox user and you haven’t installed the PicLens plugin, you should give it a whirl.  Not worth trying to describe it, you have to see it in action—and you can, right here.  Download from that link too.  In my experience, it works impressively well with older Macs (system requirements aside):  It ran pretty smoothly on my old titanium PowerBook.

More from the now year-old “Gothamitis” piece in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik:

By a city we don’t mean, or just mean, a place where many people live; we mean a place where many kinds of people live, all more or less on top of each other.  Though Mrs. Astor knew nothing of the Lower East Side, and the Lower East Side could only dream of Mrs. Astor, they were still nodes on one grid.  In the course of any even semiconscious wandering through the city—much less the kind of conscious wondering that marks the city’s poetry and literature from Walt Whitman to Alfred Kazin and beyond—each group bumped visually and tangibly into the other.  Only twenty-five years ago, a walk from Tribeca to SoHo and the Lower East Side would show as many kinds and classes—rich, aspiring, immigrant—as it had a century before; now that walk is likely to show only the same six stores and the same two banks and the same one shopper.

Read the full article here.