DSD

While we’re on the sub­ject of Dar­win, here’s a good exam­ple of his the­ory in action.

Evo­lu­tion of the AT-AT

By the way, for the con­fused, that’s an AT-AT (All Ter­rain Armored Trans­port). It’s impor­tant to know these things.

In honor of Darwin’s 200th birth­day, there’s this inex­plic­a­bly awe­some poster.

It’s one of a col­lec­tion. (via boing­bo­ing)

These ARE the clothes I’m look­ing for! This thing actu­ally exists at shopecko.com.

The Real Trooper hoodie from Marc Ecko. Zip-front hoodie fea­tures “Storm Trooper” body and the hood looks like a mask. Zip welt pock­ets, rib knit sleeve cuffs and hem. 100% cot­ton. Machine wash. Imported.

Imported… from space! Also, here’s a review from a sat­is­fied customer:

Best Uses: Going Out, Wear To Work, Casual Wear [… A]s soon as i zipped up the hood i couldnt stop laugh­ing. i looked like an idiot. i love it.

It’s beau­ti­ful and omi­nous and crazy.
(Via Coudal Part­ners.) There’s also an extended ver­sion.

Not merely a curios­ity, this is almost cer­tainly the worst music video ever. Wow.

I know I just included this in a dif­fer­ent post, but it’s funny enough that I wanted to give it some atten­tion of its own. Here’s Mae the Sea Otter:

Microsoft Song­smith is a piece of soft­ware that attempts to auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ate back­ground instru­men­tals to go along with a vocal line. Via techcrunch:

the song-making soft­ware is inspir­ing a whole new genre on YouTube where peo­ple alter famous music videos and con­cert footage by strip­ping out the orig­i­nal instru­ments and replace them with tinny key­boards or folk ban­jos, and keep the vocals. The results are a twisted breed of clas­sic hits that are fas­ci­nat­ing in the same way that ter­ri­ble auto­mo­bile acci­dents are.

Here’s one of my favorites (there are many more at techcrunch):

I just have to add a few more:

• Soulja Boy — Crank That Swing
• Brit­ney Spears — Toxic

From telegraph.co.uk, here’s a bit of pos­si­bly the world’s best cus­tomer com­plaint let­ter, sent to indus­tri­al­ist Sir Richard Bran­son regard­ing a flight on Vir­gin Airlines:

Now I know what you’re think­ing. You’re think­ing it’s more of that Baaji cus­tard. I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mus­tard Richard. MUSTARD. More mus­tard than any man could con­sume in a month. On the left we have a piece of broc­coli and some pep­pers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef had pre­pared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obvi­ously bro­ken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the pota­toes through the diges­tive tract of a bird.

(Thanks to Nathan for the link.)

An inter­est­ing pro­peller pic­ture via Global Nerdy:

The cheap CMOS sen­sor of an iPhone does not expose the whole thing at once, it scans from left to right. If you take a pic­ture of some­thing that moves very fast (like an air­plane prop) you can get some crazy pic­tures out of it since each col­umn rep­re­sents a slightly dif­fer­ent time. 

Hear­ing this story recently on This Amer­i­can Life reminded me about the ter­rif­i­cally ridicu­lous World’s Most Unwanted Song. It was care­fully com­posed accord­ing to poll data on people’s least favorite musi­cal ele­ments, and is vir­tu­ally guar­an­teed to offend your sen­si­bil­i­ties. From the com­posers’ notes:

The most unwanted music is over 25 min­utes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sec­tions, between fast and slow tem­pos, and fea­tures tim­bres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy pre­sented in abrupt tran­si­tion. The most unwanted orches­tra was deter­mined to be large, and fea­tures the accor­dion and bag­pipe, […] banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, syn­the­sizer […]. An oper­atic soprano raps and sings atonal music, adver­tis­ing jin­gles, polit­i­cal slo­gans, and “ele­va­tor” music, and a children’s choir sings jin­gles and hol­i­day songs. […] 

Here’s some more back­ground. Also, please, have a listen:

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