It was a late August Saturday night in Seattle, we decided not only to hit the dance floor, but boogie on down in a
whole new way. All the cats in town are wearing big belt buckles now, so we thought, hey, here’s our chance to show the world our latest hack, the Search Engine Belt Buckle.

What is the Search Engine Belt Buckle?
The Search Engine Belt Buckle is a PDA which shows 24 hours of all the bizarre and banal things people are looking for on the web. Art project or pointless hack? That’s for you to decide, but all we know is that people are searching for
some pretty freaky stuff out there, so why not put in a belt buckle and get on the scene like a sex machine?

So, these are all search terms that people were looking for that are now appearing on our belt buckle.

”olympic nude athletes”
“leaving the scene of an accident”
“night diaper bondage”
“food”
“used juicer”
“catfighting lesbians”
“disorder cutting self injury”

Engadget

Outsource Your Own Job! -- "Says a programmer on Slashdot.org who outsourced his job: "About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 out of the $67,000 I get. He's happy to have the work. I'm happy that I have to work only 90 minutes a day just supervising the code. My employer thinks I'm telecommuting. Now I'm considering getting a second job and doing the same thing." " via BBspot. MetaFilter

A Balinese project uses low-wattage electrical current to stimulate the regrowth of a badly damaged coral reef. It's the world's largest coral nursery ever built using this technology, in an area where most of the world's coral species live. Wired News

Boing Boing
Xeni Jardin: Browsing through this beautiful gallery of children's book illos from the '20s, I keep thinking about the fact that these were all created during a period just before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's kind of fascinating to look at the art from this period of Japanese history, and consider the fact that the people who remember these books as part of their own child years were around my own age group -- twenty or thirtysomething -- when the bomb dropped and changed everything. Maybe a hundred years from now, some young person will stumble on an "Electric Company" episode and think, "Wow, that's what the 9/11 generation was watching in their diapers." There's some interesting analysis on a subsection of this website. Snip: "The children in Kodomo no kuni seem to be enjoying the pleasures of modern city life. There are Western-style houses, trains and cars running along busy streets, airplanes flying in the sky, and subways passing beneath a townscape bristling with skyscrapers.

What is different from now is the energy and cheerfulness with which people seemed to be looking forward to the happy future that materialistic prosperity would surely bring."

Maybe those people 100 years ahead will look back on our enthusiasm for technology the same way. Someone in 2104 will take a break from watching Olympic nanorobotic doping scandal coverage on their ocular implants. They'll blink "pause," and browse the BoingBoing archives, and think, "How quaint, how naive. If only those poor fin-de-siecle suckers had stopped at Perl."

Link to Kodomo no kuni (via MeFi)

Trendwatching

Trendwatching. "Vast groups of immigrants now travel back and forth between their old and new homelands", "the fast growing class of products and services that cater to consumers' need for simplicity", "no-frills chic", "light versions of countries or societies, stripped of annoying 'features' like crime, bad weather and excessive taxes", "the obsession of ordinary citizens wanting to leave ‘something’ behind in print, audio or imagery", online access everywhere, the C Generation (where C means 'Content' - and that's not a reference to how they feel). Link

Chill, Toronto

Cool! Toronto's Deep Lake Water Cooling System was launched today. The system cuts electricity consumption in commercial buildings by 75 per cent by drawing near-freezing water through pipes extending five kilometres out into Lake Ontario. According to the city, the system will save enough power to service more than 100 Toronto office towers or 4,200 homes per year, and it will eliminate 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Link

The spirit of competition

Athletics from an alternate POV. Check out the trailer. (NSFW) Link

PSFK

PSFK is a "collaborative trend-spotting" web site operated by Piers Fawkes and Simon King (shuffle and deal, and you have PSFK). The site has 20 editors and it sounds like they work with suggestions from readers, though we couldn't see how to suggest a site. [Link]
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