Mobile Madness

iPhone insurance, s’mores, and why the numbers 1 and 2 are more important than anything else in your address book.

Call it the iPhone syndrome, call it life, but we’ve all grown increasingly dependent on our mobile devices. Heck, we even have a hard time calling them “phones” — it seems to belittle their pivotal role as irreplaceable lifestyle hubs. And if a fresh mobile service comes along to make keeping it all together even a little bit easier, well, we’re all over.

MOBYKO

If you’ve ever lost a cell phone, you know the connectedness nightmare that ensues — contacts lost, calls missed, photos gone. If only you had backed it all up. Enter Mobyko — a UK-based service that lets you back it all up on your computer and on the web, making all your precious mobile info not only safe but also accessible from anywhere.

The service is completely free, does everything wirelessly with no software to install, works with non-UK cellular providers as well, and even lets you send text messages from your computer. You can view, manage, and save all your texts, photos and videos — and if you get the premium version, you get an extra 250MB of storage.

Smart, simple, shit-happens-resistant.

JOTT FEEDS

Remember Jott?

We slapped our claim of approval on the nifty voice transcription service very early on, and they have more than lived up to it. After their BlackBerry platform a couple of months ago, which was received to great critical acclaim and has probably saved many a relationship by swapping normal sentences for curt one-liners, Jott has just released Jott Feeds: a simple way to stay on top of your web dwellings (Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds)…by listening to them.

Yep, Jott Feeds is part personal assistant, part private broadcast station, and wholly awesome. You simply add your favorite RSS feeds to your Jott account and you’re good to go: Jott converts the feeds into audio using text-to-voice technology and sends them to your phone.

And we think anything that lets us find out about the latest Campfire event while having s’mores around an actual campfire is a winner.

MIZPEE

Listen ye of small bladders: rescue cometh.

We’re serious: we’re huge proponents of hydration, but that goes hand in hand with…um…an exit strategy. Luckily, your trusty cell phone can now help you with two very important numbers not found in your address book: number one and number two.

MizPee is a mobile social network for the small-bladdered city dweller. It finds the coolest, cleanest public restrooms in any area you specify — you can look ’em up online, or hook up your cell phone for easy access when you need it the most: when you’re on the go and really gotta go.

Not only that, but these guys have also started hooking up with local establishments that offer special deals for MizPee members: like, say, a free truffle at Michael Mischer Chocolates in Oakland when you go in to drop your own…truffle…in their loo.

And if you were to calculate just how much time you spend in the loo over your lifetime, cross-tabulate it with the time you spend roaming the city, and divide that by… You know what? Let’s just say this rocks and leave it at that.

B-Sides and Breakaways

Dancing in the streets, digital Dickens, time retold, LEGO on Times Square, 34841003122 reasons we’re devolving, what Etruscan vases have to do with skin rashes, and how to out-BlackBerry the BlackBerry.

SING IT LIKE IT IS

Independent music is an art all its own, but when you add phenomenal cinematography to it, it becomes a cultural masterpiece. And that’s what French filmmaker Vincent Moon is doing in La Blogotheque: “take-away” impromptu live shows by some of the most iconic indie artists, shot beautifully in some of the world’s most breathtaking cities.

No crowds. No stages. No equipment. Just the musicians and their talent, in the raw.

The project’s About page has nothing but Greek copy — we suspect because the films speak so strongly for themselves, no explanation is necessary. And if you parlez français, you can indulge in even richer content by way of articles, exclusive interviews and other artist- centric digressions. Still, the films themselves are the real indulgence.

Some of our favorites: The Shins on a street corner in Paris, José González outside a torn-down house in Marfa, TX, and Dappled Cities on a San Francisco sidewalk.

But, really, they’re all absolutely brilliant — so do indulge.

UNMAPPED TERRITORY

Down with the old book smell. Penguin, in a brilliant bout of innovation, is fully embracing new media and social collaboration.

As part of the “We Tell Stories” mantra, Penguin is collaborating with 6 authors who tell 6 stories in 6 days, each inspired by a timeless classic.The first one, The 21 Steps (inspired by The 39 Steps), is told entirely on Google Maps, following the main character around the world.

In week 2, Slice (inspired by The Haunted Dolls’ House) was told via tweets. (That’s Twitter messages, for the media geezers.) Next we have the mad-libs-like custom Fairy Tales, a take on the classic genre where readers fill in parts of the story. This week, a married couple of authors live-blogs the story of a relationship: Your Place and Mine, inspired by Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin.

Weeks 5 and 6 are yet to happen, but we know the upcoming stories, authored by a DJ-ing media whiz and a Pakistan-born London-based Harvard Law grad, will be inspired by Dickens’ Hard Times and 1001 Nights.

So what’s it gonna be? A Facebook group? Flickr? A YouTube channel? Time shall tell.

NEXT TIME AROUND

Time-keepers. While their price tags can be exorbitant enough to push any budget, there’s an overwhelmingly underwhelming cross-industry sameness that hardly ever pushes the design envelope. Well, no more.

A finalist in the Signity Watch Design Competition 2008, the Orb bracelet watch is the work of young Serbian designer Djordje “Djo:Djo” Zivanovic. It displays time on the ends of three lines of different thickness representing time-size: hours, minutes and seconds.

Watch-averse? The Verbarius clock tells time like no other — literally. It tells it the way people do: with words. It comes pre-loaded with five languages (English, German, Spanish, French and Russian) and has a USB port, which you can use to upload additional languages from your computer.

Available June 15, but you can pre-order now for the ironically down-to-the-digits amount of $184.92.

HISTORICALLY ENLIGHTENED

What are the great classics for if not for great reinterpretations? British photographer Mike Stimson does just that: he takes on the classics…in LEGO.

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Behind the Gare Saint Lazare”? He’s got it. Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “V.J. Day Times Square”? Done. And he doesn’t stop at classic photography. Hollywood’s fair game, too — Indiana Jones, Dart Vader, Stormtrooper. Even Rembrandt portraits.

And while we dig the sheer novelty of this concept, we must also admit Stimson’s mastery of lighting is a whole separate art form.

UNTRIVIA

Plastic. What a love-hate relationship we have with it. And while the recent badmouthing of plastic bottles has done a bit to raise awareness, it hasn’t done nearly enough. How many bottles have been landfilled in the US so far this year?

34,841,003,122.

Only a fifth of those get recycled, down from a third in 1996. Progress? Not so much. Watching the real-time counter is even more chilling.

And while other materials are doing a bit better, recycling is still declining: 54% of aluminum cans get recycled, down from 59% in 1996. Glass is at 20%, down from 30% in ’96. Let’s hope the new (pseudo) green mass movement results in some face-saving numbers at the next data collection.

The point here? Get with it, son: go ahead and buy that Sigg already.

ITCHING FOR ART

Here’s to taking life’s lemons and making lemonade. Artist Ariana Page Russell has done that, and then some: she has a rare skin condition called dermatographia that causes red, raised lines to appear on skin whenever it’s lightly scratched. Basically, hyper-hypersensitivity with bells and whistles.

So Page Russell is using this unusual condition as a tool in her body-as-canvas art: she draws on her body and takes pictures of the patterns once her skin’s hypersensitivity embosses the artwork. Thirty minutes later, it’s all gone — the body has “[become] an index of passing time.” Her patterns are inspired by anything from Greek and Etruscan vases, to Medieval wall coverings, to Renaissance pottery, to contemporary clothing and wallpaper.

And although the rest of the artist’s body of work is also quite stunning, we can’t deny the sheer category-creating brilliance of her skin art.

SPEAK TO THE HAND

You’re curt. Brusque. Terse. Hell, you’re even rude. At least if you have a BlackBerry. At least that’s how people perceive your one- liner emails. And now there’s a fix.

Remember Jott? The nifty speech transcriber service now has a BlackBerry platform that lets you reply to emails with your voice. The download is seamlessly integrated with the email app you use on your BB. Best of all, it ups the ultimate BlackBerry ante: using your voice is 3-5 times more time-saving than thumbing your way through that Re:. And it’s still free.

So go ahead and be a better person.

All Things Hacked

Junkyard chic, 4.8oz of gawk, outsmugging Mac guy, Victorian computers, pre-electricity Internet, a museum of the future, how to get strangers to instantly trust you, what The Blue Man group and diaper changing tables have in common, why a missing comic book hero is the modern Nietzsche, and whose entire life you can buy on eBay.

JUNK HACKER

Alas, we may have just discovered something that outawesomes the super-awesome repurposed materials fare from a couple of weeks ago. Because reestore may recycle objects, but their furniture designs are 100% original. They say they “take everyday waste objects and cheekily turn them into charming yet functional pieces of furniture and accessories.” And they mean business.

Most of the pieces are pure design delight, all hip no hippie. And it seems like they’re all crafted with a lot of love: each product carries a “human” name and its description addresses it as a respective “he” or “she.”

reestore reminds us of childhood when imagination made common household objects into superhero attire and snow sleds and medieval castles. Except reestore makes stuff that helps adults be hip adults. Some of our favorites: Heather the waste tube lamp (right), Max the roll top bath loveseat (above right), Olivia the hanger folding chair (above left), Agnes the rear bumper sofa, and their most popular: Silvana, the washing machine drum lamp.

Pick your own faves — or, hey, make some of your own. All it takes is a design eye and a prolific dumpster.

BLING HACKER

And if doing unexpected things with useless old crap is exciting, it’s all that much more exciting when you do it with really, really expensive new crap. Which is why we dig the Conice 6×18 Zoom Attachment for iPhone.

Sure, it may weight almost as much as the iPhone itself (4.69 oz, vs. 4.8 oz), but it sure pimps the iPhone’s measly 2-megapixel fixed-lens camera with its 6x optical zoom. Only glitch we foresee: the iPhone has no image stabilization whatsoever, so those long-distance zooms would require bomb-squad-steady hands.

Still, at $14.77 with free shipping, it’s worth it even just for goofing around and making people gawk. Just like Steve Jobs here.

SCREEN HACKER

Okay, so maybe you’re not as fortunate as us to have OS X Leopard with its nifty screen share feature. (Which actually begs the question of why you’re depriving yourself of that ultimate license for smugness.) But smug as we may be, we’re also charitable: so we’ll turn you onto another way to share your computer screen with others, letting them see what you’re looking at and seeing what they are.

Enter YuuGuu, which does just that. Once you download and complete the super-simple registration, you can build your private network or invite your friends to also join so you can do remote screen-sharing.

Best part: soon you’ll even be able to share screens with people who don’t have YuuGuu, thanks to a new feature called Web Share. And even Leopard can’t claim that — your network is still confined to others who also have Leopard, not to mention it’s only within your system network (a.k.a. office, etc.) rather than all around the web.

Downloadable free for Mac or Windows.

RETRO HACKER

One of our favorite trends from the past decade — retro-futurism — has made a quiet but powerful return lately. Gadgets are being de-timed at rapid rates, producing sculptures of historical modernity.

You may recall our passing mention of the Modbook — a slate-style tablet Mac reminiscent of the now-ancient Newton, but sporting the latest and greatest of software and hardware: Leopard, Firewire, BlueTooth, AirPort, USB and more, topped with a 2.1GHz processor. And if you’re not a believer already, watching it in action will certainly make you one.

But that’s minor league retro-futurism. Because all the big boys are busy translating the Steampunk genre (you know, that speculative science fiction thing of the 80’s and 90’s) to today’s tech arena. And there are a handful of undisputed King Pins in that scene.

There’s Jake von Slatt (an alias, of course) whose Steampunk Workshop brings an Industrial Revolution life to modern objects. He decks out everything from Altoid Tins to keyboards to guitars in brassy, etched, Victorian goodness to really capture the notion that Steampunk is the intersection of science and romance.

Then we have the arguably even more hardcore Datamancer — there you’ll find stuff so elaborate it’ll make your head hotter than a steam locomotive’s boiler. As if the Steampunked Laptop isn’t wild enough, he’s cooking up something that’s a whole nother ball game: a Pixello-Dynamotronic Computational Engine. (If you’re having trouble saying it, try making it.)

And to put a twist on the already twisty, there’s Greg Brotherton of Brotron — he takes the design elements of Steampunk, putting the technology aside, and superimposes them on elements of pop culture and mythology, often to a stunning yet diabolical result. His aim, in his own words, is to “create heroic icons from our ever-evolving cultural saga.”

All in all, it’s a whole fascinating subculture that creates its own mythology through storytelling unlike anything else out there, a cultural time machine if there ever was one. Dig in some more with the guys at Wired.

INTERWEBS HACKER

Here’s a dose of Steampunk for our web generation: the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine. It’s a catalog of 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to today. (Yep, you read right: billion.) So you can check out what your favorite websites looked like way back before running water and electricity.

Mostly, we dig it because it’s fascinating how easily we adapt to and endorse new technology, taking it for granted before the developers’ motherboards have cooled from building it. Email? Puh-leez. RSS? Ha. Streaming video? Meh.

So feel free to dig back, point and laugh, but then when you snap back out, remember you’re doing it all on a blog…that you reached through your email or your RSS feed…that talks about iPhones and widgets…with embedded video…and a bit of Ajax…without ever hearing the brain-drilling sound of a dial-up modem.

And, suddenly, 1996 seems nothing like 2008.

HACKER HACKER

Here’s an antidote to the horrible flashbacks of pre-Gmail times past. Remember the London Design Museum’s Design Library from a couple of weeks ago? Now imagine the same thing, only instead of fashion, architecture and real-world technology, it’s about websites and apps and all those exciting online lovelies. Now stop imagining and just visit the Museum of Modern Betas, or MoMB.

MoMB may be in early Alpha itself, but this isn’t stopping it from cataloging a world’s worth of apps in Beta. You can browse them all by language, most anticipated, all-time top 100, latest hot 100, and more.

Skimming them is a nifty test of how up to speed with the two-point-oh Interwebs you are. But it’s also an exciting discovery tool — we stumbled upon some great stuff, way beyond our usual Beta main squeezes like Gmail, Flickr, Twitter and the like. Go — explore.

IMPRESSION HACKER

You may recall the guys you can hire to remedy your reputation by burying those what-was-I-thinking moments. Well, now you’ve got a Plan B — say “hey mamma” to the Liquid Trust Spray from Vero Labs.

The product is based on oxytocin — a human hormone and neurotransmitter secreted in acts of social recognition and bonding, including hugging and touching. Your brain gushes it at the sight, smell, touch or even thought of people you love.

Now, we’d be the first to vouch for the legitimacy of the hormone itself, thanks to our countless hours in cognitive science lecture halls, but the premise of the product is a whole different story. It promises that the oxytocin in it will make people develop a strong, inexplicable, immediate feeling of trust when they meet you, without ever realizing you’re neuro-scamming them. (Okay, that last part is our words.)

Read their spiel and decide whether you wanna shell out $50 for this social snake oil or just, you know, be a trustworthy person with an extra $50 in their pocket.

HOME HACKER

Few brands can claim as loyal a following as IKEA’s, and even fewer can sprout so much creative interpretation. We’re talking about IKEA Hacker, a blog that agglomerates the funkiest, most creative transformations of IKEA furniture into something cooler, more functional or entirely different.

Some are utilitarian, like the space-saving moddi murphybed hack that turns it into a hideaway bed. Most are design-inspired, like the leitbox-backlit mini-collages or the light mods stand for Mac Mini. And some are just wild, like the convergence of a sniglar baby changing table and PVC pipe into a 22-note Blue-Man-Groupesque instrument that plays anything from the Flintstones theme to AC/DC.

IKEA Hacker started back in 2006 with a quick Google search that yielded an astounding amount of creative hacks, which just begged to be compiled in one place for all Swedish meatball lovers to savor. Or attempt — the blog sprouted the Instructables hacks group, where you can get step-by-step instructions on various hack projects. There’s even a Facebook app that lets you share your latest hacks and designs with your friends.

We’re off to watching that baby changing table play My Sharona. And we imagine if PacMan was in a band, that’s he instrument he’d be playing.

HUMOR HACKER

And now for some comic relief — literally. What happens when a comic strip is relieved of its main hero? You can find out a Garfield Minus Garfield, a brilliantly entertaining exercise in neo- minimalism that captures the tragicomic elements of modern self-conception as Jon Arbuckle embarks upon solitary adventures into the questionable corners of mental health.

And if you’re like us and often feel like your life’s been robbed of its Garfield (ever worry your neighbors hear your heated debates with yourself?), then you’ll relate all the more.

LIFE HACKER

And now for the grand finale: the ultimate hack. One guy in Australia, Ian, is walking the fine line between genius and idiocy by putting up his whole life for sale. It has nothing to do with suicide, the dude’s just had enough and wants to start from scratch, with nothing but a passport and a ton of cash.

Basically, what he’s doing is to identity theft what shopping is to shoplifting.

Why? He had a life-wrecking breakup with his wife of 12 years, whom he still can’t get over. So he figured the only way out is the all-out out. How? One huge eBay auction, slated to kick off on June 22. And, most importantly, what?

Everything. His house, car, and bike. His furniture and clothes. His hobbies — skydiving gear and jet skis. His friends. Even his job.

No, this is not a joke. The dude is for real and all business — we strongly recommend you check out his site, complete with his reasons, the full list of stuff and their valuation, before this life brokerage thing becomes the latest neo-nomad trend.

Geography, Topography, and Everythingography

Google vs. Hitler, underwear peninsulas, Hansel and Gretel, global black holes, 18th century German lovescapes, how Holland’s streets are finally becoming rivers, why Philly is reinventing the wheel, and what Joan Miró has to do with NASA. We’re exorcising our maps obsession.

MOUNTAIN VIEW TIMES

Alright, folks. It’s happening: Google has officially begun its world conquest. Starting with New York City.  Or so venture capitalist John Ellis of Real Clear Markets thinks as he speculates that it’s only a matter of time until Google buys The New York Times. And it makes a lot of sense — it’s no secret that NYT has been on a steady decline of value (down 70% over the past 5 years, actually) and, if the New England properties got sold off, it would only be worth under $3 billion. Which is lunch money for the big G. It’s also no secret that Google is going hard after the mobile market, readying to launch Google Mobile. The only trouble: Washington. And owning a major media outlet is bound to score them major points in the lobbying game.

We’ll leave it to the pros to elaborate on the details, but we’ll just say that if the Nazis were able to re-imagine New York in their own world domination schemes…

…why shouldn’t Google? At least this time there’s a do-no-evil take on it.

WORLDWIDE RUNWAY

Fashion: it’s a global thing. Dutch artist Coriette Schoenaerts seems to be feeling our little maps theme here with her fashion cartography: high-end clothing laid out to represent the geographic and political maps of various regions. Check out South America, The Netherlands, and Europe.

The work was commissioned by Rails Magazine and aims to boycott the human body ideal traditionally used to sell fashion.

Meanwhile, global fashion is taking it to the streets: literally. Street Clash is an innovative contest that recruits bloggers and photographers to stage a virtual face-off between the street styles of cities from Paris to Perth.

Last year, 118 fashion “fights” ensued brackets- elimination-style, finally yielding the best-dressed city of 2007: Tel Aviv.

A retrospective of the catwalk catfight is taking place as we speak at Berlin Fashion Week.

NEW YORK CITY FAIRY TALE

It started without a name. Kind of: some poking around the East Village and the blogasphere would reveal it had a codename: “Birdbath.” Which sounds more creepy than crepe — not a surprising approach given the operation is the doing of legendary New York chef and prankster Maury Rubin. What is it?

Today, the revolutionary neighborhood “green” bakery has fully embraced its codename and, after Rubin’s City Bakery success, Birdbath is taking the love of sugar and dough to new levels. It features Rubin’s famed gigantic cookies. But this one is as green as it gets, using top-notch organic ingredients in both the food itself and the shop’s marvelous architecture, making for a bakery Hansel and Gretel would love. We’re pretty sure you can even eat the whole place, including — and we mean this in the least cannibalistic way possible — the staff: Birdbath‘s walls are made of wheat and sunflower seeds, covered with milk-based beets-pigmented paint, the floor comes from a cork by-product, the counter from bamboo, and the baristas’ vests from linen and hemp. Yum.

Rubin’s idea is to inspire people to make the connection between organic foods (which, by the way, more than half of Americans buy regularly these days, spending over $14 billion annually) and a broader appreciation of organic, sustainable materials.

No green bakery in your ‘hood? No problem. Now you can get delish, do-good foods wherever you are. (Plus, we’re big proponents of locally grown over organic.) And the fine folks at LocalHarvest, the online community for farmers and foodies alike, are making it super easy with their nifty map-based search feature.

Go ahead, trade a Whole Foods trip or two for a farmers market one — it’s an experience of its very own.

UNDERDOG AND FRIENDS

You may remember the heads-up from a while ago to keep an eye out for Nokia because the progressive underdog is creeping up on everyone from Apple to Google to MySpace. Well, turns out we were on to something.

The guys at Paid Content report Nokia is now foraging big-time into the world of social networking via a hush-hush pact with Facebook. Seems like the idea is to make Facebook the default social net of Nokia headsets (much like YouTube is for iPhone video) in exchange for a Nokia stake in the Zuckerberg empire. Not a bad idea for a mobile company in the business of “Connecting People.”

If you’re getting the so-what shrugs, consider the deal in light of Nokia’s aforementioned recent acquisitions — especially the Universal-catalog- backed music store, the Ticket Rush concert ticketing partnership with Live Nation and the Enpocket mobile advertising platform. (Plus the steady 58% stock increase over the past year.) And while social networking as a way to relate to friends is great and all, these powerful tools have the potential to make it much bigger — it can be a way, a monetizable way, for people not just to list their interests and connect with friends, but to act on those interests and relate to products they’re passionate about.

This underdog is barking loud and clear.

Meanwhile, and because this is the maps issue, we feel compelled to point out where the Nokia/Facebook partnership just won’t happen: in the international “black holes” of the Internet.

That’s right, these 15 countries are all Big-Brother-on-steroids about their citizens’ access to and use of the Internet. Doesn’t it just make you rejoice in democracy and the ability to Facebook away any time of day?

DATING JUNGLE

It’s a crazy world out there on the singles scene. You’ve got blind dates, pity dates, online dating, speed dating…it all makes us wanna say “Oy!” (But we won’t. Because we’re not 60 or Canadian.) Well, you can now multitask your way around that jungle with a new hybrid: online speed dating.

WooMe, the online speed introduction platform cooked up by the folks behind PayPal, has finally launched in alpha.

It takes 30 seconds to register, then you’re on your way to all the 5-minute video chat sessions your heart desires. After each, you’re asked (thankfully, not by the datee) whether or not the person wooed you.

If the answer is yes, you chip in $1 to get each other’s real contact info. Which seems to us like a much better deal than the traditional dinner-movie-drinks scenarios that often have thanks-but-no-thanks endings. (Plus, it makes it so much easier to “go to the restroom” if things start going awry.)

And if things do go right, perhaps you’ll get to move your personal pin on this 1777 German map of the Empire of Love.

If you don’t sprechen Sie Deutch, here’s the gist:

• GEBIET DER JUGEND = Land of Youth (Forest of Love, Kiss Field, Flirting Game, Charm Castle, Stream of Wishes, Worry-Free, Joy’s Home, Beautiful House, Source of Joy, Sweet Look, Wisecrack Place, Rich River, Warning Castle)

• GEBIET DER RUHE = Land of Rest (Nightcap, Grandfather City, Equanimity, Manly Place)

• GEBIET DER TRAURENDEN LIEBE = Land of Mourning Love (Anger’s Home, Flood of Tears, Whim Mountain,  Complaint Place, Hopeless Mountains, Loathing, Strict Place, Swamp of Profanity,  Desert of Melancholy)

• GEBIET DER LUSTE = Land of Lust (Illness Valley, Weak Home, Intoxication Field, Lechery, Hospital)

• GEBIET DER GLUCKLICHEN LIEBE = Land of Happy Love (Lust Wood, Answered Prayers, Pleasant View, Enjoyment, Tenderness, Good Times, Affection Farm, Satisfaction, Compliance Mountain, Fountain of Joy, Marriage Harbor, Reward City, Peace of Mind, Bliss Town)

• GEBIET DER HAGESTOLZE = Bachelor Country (Stupidity Town, Rejection Place, Irritation, Indifference, Place of Contempt, Reprehensibility, Old Age Mountains, Separation, Hat, Obstinacy, Wrangler Hall, Exasperation Heath, Hamlet of Death, Sea of Doubt)

• GEBIET DER FIXEN IDEEN = Land of Obsessions (Place of Sighs, Desire Town, Unrest, City of Dreams, Bridge of Hope, Disloyalty, Sweet River of Tears, Little Town of Instincts)

STREET BLUES

And while we’re dealing with all sorts of cartographic representations of stuff, let us pay tribute to a brave effort to change the stuff in order to change the reprsentation. Dutch artist Henk Hoftstra‘s latest outdoor art project takes Google Earth head-on with 4000 liters of blue paint poured onto the streets of Drachten, Holland. The goal: an “urban river” visible from Google Earth, with the words “WATER IS LIFE” stretched across it.

Although the installation hasn’t shown up on Google Earth yet, the current Drachten view seems to have been snapped earlier in 2007, so it’s a matter of waiting for the satellites to come ’round — because we know Google stuff always does.

REINVENTING THE WHEEL

And while checking out other people’s streets is cool, why don’t we selfishly turn focus inwards and talk about the streets of Philadelphia for a second. Namely, about the amazingly bikeable streets of Philadelphia. Which is why an ambitious new collective, the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, is trying to break Philly’s car habit and take urban sustainability to new heights.

Enter Philly Bike Share — a public use bicycle program that aims to do for Philly what similar efforts have already done for many European cities: provide low-cost alternative transportation, reduce traffic congestion and increase the overall livability of the city. Which jives rather nicely with a few of our big urban gripes: people who live 15 minutes from work but choose to drive, foot-wide cobblestone Old City alleys clogged with SUV’s, and $20 cab rides. Hey, it may even help with our standing on the 25 Fattest Cities in America ranking.

But, in all seriousness, it’s a great idea — not only do we have the largest connected park trail system in the country, but we also have a highly sophisticated urban biking system (download the map here) with over 150 miles of bike lanes, a ton more off-road routes, 1,800 street-side parking racks and even buses equipped with bike racks.

Turns out, if we only replaced 5% of Philly’s short-distance car trips (under 5 miles) with bikes, we’d be reducing our carbon footprint by 98 tons of emissions per year. Clearly, we could say that’s a ton — but it would be an obvious understatement. So even if you’re not quite ready to commit for some reason (or if you already have a two-wheeler of your very own), you can help simply by dropping Mayor Nutter this quick email asking him to authorize and fund the program.

Besides, there’s the Dasani Blue Bike program in Pittsburgh — and if Pittsburgh can do something, what exactly are we waiting for?

BRIGHT SIDE OF THE MOON

We’ll sign off with one of our absolute favorite maps — which looks more like Joan Miró on psychedelic drugs than a real map. (Nice find, Wired.) Except it is an honest-to-NASA map of the dark side of the moon, with the different colors corresponding to geological materials and phenomena.

It’s part of a series done under the Astrological Research Program, a 1971-1998 partnership between NASA and the United States Geological Survey. And we think it’s geeky-artsy-cool — our kinda stuff.

Way to go downhill, NASA.

(Finally, special thanks to our new favorite blog, Strange Maps, for further inspiring and fueling our pre-existing map obsession.)

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