Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I’ve never been able to start or finish anything.  Granted, granted I’m a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are.  But what’s to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble—that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground

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.

Click.

You have got to be fucking kidding me:

According to a recent survey, 100 percent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 percent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven percent claimed to have been raped.

Pretty disturbing.  Read more at Foreign Policy: Passport.

Direct Note Access is a technology that makes the impossible possible: for the first time in audio recording history you can identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material.  The unique access that Melodyne affords to pitch, timing, note lengths and other parameters of melodic notes will now also be afforded to individual notes within chords.

Gotta see it to believe it.  Watch the demonstration video here.

(Thanks, Claire.)

Okay, we all know the benefits of buying generic.  Generic ibuprofen is the same thing as Advil, but significantly cheaper.  So, we save money—sometimes quite a bit.

However, Snarkmarket points out the truly unbelievable savings that can be had by buying generic online.

For comparison’s sake, you get 32 pills in each bottle of Unisom (over-the-counter sleep-aid) and pay roughly $11.  Buy generic, however, and you’ll get 1,000 pills for $20.  I shit you not.

Speaking of t-shirts, I recently noticed the label on one of mine reads, “Not for use as pants.”  Is that a serious warning—or just a joke?

Totally sweet t-shirt.  Totally stupid t-shirt.

Both discovered via tcritic.com.

Teaser trailer for the upcoming W. is out.  I, for one, am interested in seeing how Oliver Stone handles a topic as broad as George W. Bush.  The current trailer’s emphasis is on his immature, party-loving nature.  I guess we’ll see where it goes from there.  Also worth checking out is this great mock-up poster for the same film, complete with all our favorite quotations.  It appears in IMDb’s image gallery, but I’m not sure if it’s official or not.

PS:  Watch the trailer while you still can; it’s already been pulled from YouTube by Lionsgate.