A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything: a flipbook animation that covers the history of the universe… as related to our planet (and Western cultures in particular).

Cute Things Exploding takes popular, cute videos and makes the subjects of the video explode.

Example:

Here’s a perfectly innocent & cute video of a kitten making a ‘surprised’ gesture:

Here’s that same kitten with the “Cute Things Exploding” treatment:

Julia Child cooks up some primordial soup in this video for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum exhibit ‘Life in The Universe’:

The Swimming Cities are one of the most incredible art installations I’ve heard of in quite awhile: both in terms of the resulting works & the experiences of building, sailing & living on the floating constructions. Here’s a story about their production.

Here’s a short video about the project (and about Swoon, whose work is central to the project):

Selleck Waterfall Sandwich: a site that lives up to its name.

In case you need to see more of post-earthquake Haiti to prompt you into action, this 360° video takes you down the rubble-ridden streets and allows you to control the view of the camera. CNN has several more interactive videos available. Have a watch, then lend a hand: American Red Cross, UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders. {Thanks, Gymbeaux, for finding these videos.}

These are not computer effects… well they are, but they are actually projections on real buildings.

Nicholas Cage might just be the most overused and over-appreciated actor of our times. He might have been OK at one point, but now the choice to cast him spells doom for any film (in my completely solid & irrefutable opinion). As if to bring one of my worst nightmares to life, a website is now dedicated to replacing everyone with Nic Cage. It’s called Nic Cage as Everyone and it might be the most sickening site ever created. For example:

Just for Gymbeaux: what the maker’s have called “The Most Useless Machine Ever.” I find it endlessly entertaining, so not completely useless, then.

Watch the video, then follow the instructions to build your own.

One day paper receipts will be a thing of the past. Here’s one possible view of that future, where Kevin Rose (who you might know from Digg and/or Diggnation) introduces the Square mobile credit card payment processor. Many will marvel at the system (which uses an iPhone & tiny cube credit card reader to receive, authorize & process credit card payments “anywhere”), but for me the best part is a move towards storing receipts online. We all need to keep records of the various transactions we make and, like online bill pay, it’s time that receipts are moved from the crumpled mass at the bottom of my pocket* to a centralized form of online storage.

*No, I don’t really crumple my receipts. As a man of class & sophistication, I keep them neatly folded in my wallet… until I get home, where they form the top layer of an ever-growing pile of paper-things-that-I-imagine-I’ll-need-someday-for-something.