You knew this was coming. I’d call spoiler alert for those who haven’t seen Inception yet, but honestly, this flowchart from graphic designer Sean Mort will just confuse you anyways. If, however, you’ve been fortunate enough to see the mind roller coaster of a film already, Mort’s chart makes perfect sense and might clarify any confusion. Levels and dreamers are labeled accordingly. I think the line for Cobb to Limbo should start at Level 4 though.
[via datavis]

Long Form * Instapaper: “

Longer than a newspaper item but shorter than a book, a magazine article is the ideal length for my attention span. I’d rather spend an hour with a great magazine article rather than read a book any day. Ditto for hopscotching through shallow blogs and newspaper bits. But there are fewer print publications running long form journalism. Ironically, a new website, called Long Form, points to the best long form articles appearing anywhere in print, and also collects the great magazine articles from the past. Long Form fits perfectly into a small ecosystem whereby you can read these great pieces of writing on a Kindle, iPad, or phone. I’ve found the easy-reading portable screens of these tablet devices fit a 1 to 2-hour window perfectly.

Here is how this system works. The Long Form website lists great magazine articles just published as well as past hits from the archives. You mark the articles you want to read, which are then downloaded to your tablet via Instapaper, another website, which has an iPad app and Kindle connection. You can then read the articles, without ads, at your leisure on your gadget. The whole migration is seamless and unconscious.

Give Me Something To Read, like Long Form, makes reader selections of the best magazine articles. On both sites you hit a button ‘Read Later’ to move it to your reading device. In fact you can mark any web page to be ‘read later’ from an Instapaper button on your menu bar and it will move it to your tablet, phone, or even RSS feed. And you can send to Instapaper (and therefore to your reading device) any item from your Twitter stream or social apps like Delicious or Digg, Reddit, etc. to be read later on your Kindle or iPad (or computer screen).

However, I prefer to read long form factuals, and so I keep returning to Long Form to find the gems. I particularly enjoy classic great magazine pieces that I missed over the years. In fact, I realized that I’ve never seen a list of the best magazine articles ever, but see no reason not to make one now. If you have a nomination for one of the top 100 magazine articles of all time, please send it to me (with a link if possible). I’ll share what I accumulate on this page here.

— KK

Long Form

Instapaper

Give Me Something To Read

iPhone version:

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Controlling Soot Might Quickly Reverse a Century of Global Warming: “A massive simulation of soot’s climate effects finds that basic pollution controls could put a brake on global warming, erasing in a decade most of the last century’s temperature change.“

Ants on a scanner: 5-year video timelapse: “

By François Vautier

(via Submitterator, thanks gevertully).

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Consider What Your “Top Idea” is Making You Do [Thinking]: “

Essayist and programmer Paul Graham realized that the idea one thinks about when allowed to think freely—in the shower, for example—is more than just a quiet obsessions. It’s a “Top idea,” and it influences every other thought, too. More »

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Colin Christian’s “silicone lady art”: “

Above, two works by artist Colin Christian. Matthew Bone has a neat post up about this guy at Nerdist.

A hopeful idealist, the women of Colin’s armada are the amalgams of the many beautiful icons that he grew up worshiping, sanded and painted to a shiny perfection to match the streamlined clothing and provocative space gear that adorn his ladies. Though one could dismiss the work as being too sexy or kitschy, these sculptures embody what it’s like to be a child, to see the world as a beautiful shiny egg to crack, one where sexuality, cooperation, and advancement are not hindered by closed mindedness or cynicism; basking in the embryonic glow of cinema and television has allowed Colin to create a 3-dimensional manifestation of how he sees, or hopes to see where technology, art, and science can take us. ‘As a species we must embrace technology in the right way, and leave this planet… When we leave our genitals will come with us, eventually spacesuits will get sexier.’

(via @matthewebone)

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Ant drinking from a rain drop: “

(Via Nothing to Do With Arbroath)

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Mila’s Daydreams: mom photographs what her baby might be dreaming: “

Adele Enersen in Helsinki says, ‘This is my maternity leave hobby. While my baby is taking her nap, I try to imagine her dream and capture it.’

Mila’s Daydreams

(via Laughing Squid/Matt Haughey)

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HOWTO make spider-silk thread: “

Love the spiders in your garden? Put the little critters to work for you by turning their abandoned silk webbing into thread: ‘
I have also encountered many abandoned webs, which gave me the idea of harvesting these out-of-use webs for their silk. Having walked into so many webs, I know how unbelievably strong and stretchy their threads are. Spider silk, in fact, is the strongest fiber ever discovered. Spider silk is stronger than steel, for its diameter; that is, a thread of steel would be weaker than a thread of spider silk of the same size.’

How to make Spider Silk Thread

(via Craft)

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And then something remarkable happened. The crowd — just about evenly divided between men and women — instantly segregated itself: the men were propelled as if by a centrifuge toward the room’s perimeters, and the dance floor, a platform raised just a step off the ground, was taken over entirely by women surrounding Freedia. The women did not dance with, or for, one another — they danced for Freedia, and they did so in the most sexualized way imaginable, usually with their backs to her, bent over sharply at the waist, and bouncing their hips up and down as fast as humanly possible, if not slightly faster. Others assumed more of a push-up position, with their hands on the floor, in a signature dance whose name is sometimes helpfully shortened to “p-popping.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25bounce-t.html