Hilarious:

(Nod: The Daily Dish)

A splendid motion-graphics-based Pepsi commercial for the new year and coinciding with their newly launched branding.   Slick, colorful, and simple.   “It’s time for joy” indeed.

A phenomenal video by Stefan Nadelman outlining the history of world-wide warfare from World War II to the present represented entirely by food.

A guide to the various food items.

(Nod: The Daily Dish)

The Bible according to Legos:

The 2008 Beijing Olympics Games recreated with Legos, complete with the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube:

Here is some other Lego coolness I posted a while back:

• Super Lego Mario
• USB Lego drive
• Lego Thriller

Tilt-shift photography is a technique where the photographer manipulates the camera lens to make life-size objects appear miniature.   Here are a couple examples via Smashing Magazine:

If you don’t have the camera equipment or the know-how to create actual tilt-shift photographs, you can use the lens blur filter in Photoshop to create a faked-yet-realistic alternative.   TUAW walks you through the easy-to-do tutorial.   Warning: if you decided to try this out, prepare to be lost experimenting for hours!

I tried this on, umm, a LOT of my photos. :-)   The trick is to select the right photo.   Some work and some don’t.   I found that aerial shots worked the best, but many landscape photos work well also.   And to really see the effect, make sure you use a large photo.

Before tilt-shift fakery:

After (larger version):

And here are a bunch more.   Stonington, CT (larger version):

Place de Trocadéro, Paris (larger version):

Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Paris (larger version):

Catalina Island, CA (larger version):

Chase Field, Phoenix, AZ (larger version):

NYC (larger version):

Petrified Forest, AZ (larger version):

Paris (larger version):

In most of these, if I really wanted to fake the effect, I should have tweaked some elements in each. For instance, in the NYC one, the light posts and a couple of the taller people shouldn’t have their tops blurred since they’re on the same depth plane, but for this exercise that’s okay.

Seriously, though, try this out. Turning your photos into miniatures is fun!

Not even Apple is immune from under-image reflection Photoshop disasters:

Side note: if you haven’t checked out the Photoshop Disasters blog, take a look.   That this sometimes subtle but sometimes egregiously awful Photoshop work actually gets published is astounding!

If you’re searching for the perfect gift for the Mac lover in your life (or yourself), how about the Mac dock throw pillows?

Or how about the iPhone icon coasters?

(Nod: TUAW and Fumin)

Typealyzer analyzes the words and sentences of a blog and guesses the personality type of the author.   I’m a thinker:

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

Fitting? You tell me.   I love how the laptop their cartoon has is an Apple. :-)

(Nod: The Daily Dish)

Care for an Apple apple?

Might those be Macintosh apples?   Check out the whole process.

(Nod: The Unofficial Apple Weblog)

Strange Maps posts this very interesting two-part map.   The red and blue are the county-level results from the 2008 presidential election.   The overlayed black dots represent where 2,000 bales of cotton were produced in 1860 (larger image):

Scary Ideas posts this awesome real-life recreation of Photoshop (larger image):

Mark Newman at the University of Michigan Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems has a very interesting set of maps from the 2008 and 2004 election.   Here is the county map from 2008:

And from 2004:

Awesome commercial for Hovis Bakery runs through a history of the UK in the 20th century.

With “Wario Land: Shake It” here.

(Nod: Fumin)

A cool look at 50 movie posters from the original films and their remakes.

(Nod: Smashing Magazine)

(Nod: The Daily Dish)

In celebration of The Google’s 10th Anniversary, they re-released their first internet archive, so you can search the January 2001 Internets.

(Nod: The Daily Dish)

After seeing the cool word clouds of speeches from the Democratic and Republican conventions, I played around with the free online tool used to create the clouds: Wordle.   Uber-fun!

The United States Constitution (larger image):

The Declaration of Independence (larger image):

The Gettysburg Address (larger image):

My thesis paper (larger image):

The script from some 80s movie (larger image):

10000Words.net posts word clouds of the main speakers at both the Democratic and Republican conventions:

Obama:

McCain:

Wow.

The song is “Wizards in Winter” by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

Internet Explorer has a shoddy record with following web standards, and that includes the proper displaying of PNG images. BUT, rest assured, there is a hack work-around to enable PNG to work properly in IE6: AlphaImageLoader. I haven’t tried this yet, but it looks pretty interesting.

Do you like to make crafts? Do you like pop-up cards? If so, then check out this tutorial on how to make a Christmas tree pop-up card. I tried it out, and the card is super easy to make and the instructions very easy to follow.

If you’re a fan of logos or logo design, or even a fan of design before-and-after, you should check out the blog Brand New. The blog features company and organization logos that have been recently redesigned. In addition to a before-the-redesign logo and the after-the-redesign logo, the blog gives excellent commentary on the old, the new, and the process. Check it out!

The Chicago Olympic bid logo:

This is easily the coolest rendition I’ve seen of the popular spot-the-differences game, which tasks you to locate the differences between two seemingly identical pictures.

…and they apparently store all your important files. A 2-gig USB drive, in a Lego brick:

How cool is that?! Order one here!