Create your own planet, calculate your age in dog years and more!
It's your Weekly Linkdown with Rob Walker!
With the week winding down, you better get busy. Or maybe you could just look busy. Here’s some help with that:
World-Changer: Just because you’re wasting time doesn’t mean you can’t be productive. Create your own planet at planetmaker.wthr.us, an interactive site with tools for fiddling with the surface texture, atmospheric density and cloud cover, on the world of your choice. While adding rings to Mars, you can also pretend that you are learning something. Via Prosthetic Knowledge.
Add It Up: Turns out “dog years” are more complicated than the old “multiply by seven” rule, so the BBC has offered up a Dog Age Calculator. (Not enough choices on the breed menu, though.)
Best of the Worst: In other calculation news, consider The Wrongulator: “The Calculator that Always Gives You The Wrong Answer!” For more bad products, keep an eye on The Worst Things For Sale, which catalogs “the Internet’s most horrible items.” Via Coudal.
Product of the Week: TV test card coasters. Via bookofjoe.
Art or Lulz? The Tumblr In Duplo examines the “mysterious and liminal space that exists between how people present themselves and how the law presents them.” More specifically, it juxtaposes mug shots and Facebook profile pictures. I know that sounds more like a Web stunt than an art project, but it does say “liminal,” so. . . . More at Hyperallergic.
Lulz or Art? Meanwile, the Tumblr Local People With Their Arms Crossed is just that. Nothing liminal about it — or is there? Via Mashable.
Being Watched: Many people are paranoid about a world in which drones follow us around. But this Popular Science video introduces us to a company that hopes to serve those who want a drone to follow them around.
Underrated: I was randomly reminded this week of John Wesley Harding’s sublime 2011 song “There’s A Starbucks (Where The Starbucks Used To Be.)” Why wasn’t this a smash?
Listening To Cartography: For two hours and 47 minutes of pleasing instrumental music, enjoy the results of a collaboration between music site Disquiet and BLDG BLOG’s Geoff Manaugh, which challenged musicians to interpret segments of a map as musical notations.
One Last Thing: Here is a link to a post about a tweet of a Vine of an Instagram of a Tumblr post of a Facebook post of a tweet.
