iPads in the Bathroom, Unfollow Friday and the World's Most Intelligent Street Sign

Procrastinate your day away with Rob Walker's Weekly Linkdown!

Via AdWeek, the World's Most Intelligent Street Sign.

by Rob Walker | @YahooTech

Is the government spying on you? Perhaps. Throw the Feds off your trail by wasting the rest of the afternoon with the following fun diversions.

Shutterbugging: In the smartphone era it’s (way too) easy to snap pictures of strangers on the street. But check out this video on Petapixel of “invasive street photography” pioneer Mark Cohn back in the day, as he pops camera flashes right in people’s faces, takes borderline creepshots of a woman’s calves, and somehow manages to avoid getting punched.

This Way: AdWeek brings you the world’s most intelligent street sign.

Dancing About Gizmos: Tuur Van Balen and Revital Cohen designed an object whose only function is to be manufactured, and (working with a choreographer) created this fascinating video that visualizes assembly-line movements as dance. Via Wired Design.

Beautiful Failures: Computer crashes as art.

Look What’s Missing: “Image Not Available” messages as art. Via Creators Project.

Fashionably Weird: Beautiful Decay shares some appealing fashion-subverting design work from Atelier Ted Noten, such as: “Ice picks and cocaine are sunk into acrylic and transformed into designer bags. Perfume sprays down the barrel of a gun, its silencer concealing nail polish.” Nuff said.

Unfashionably Weird: How many terrible T-shirts are for sale on Zazzle? Enough to support at least two Tumblrs dedicated to, uh, highlighting the unfortunate results of opening up this form of creativity to the masses. Via Metafilter.

iPad in the Kitchen: How to make a rustic-looking tablet stand from a cutting board. Via Bem Legaus.

iPad in the Bathroom: “Easily adjust iPad to any orientation, angle or position … . Stable heavyweight base with convenient toilet paper holder.” Truly horrible.

Stop Following: Untweep checks your Twitter followers so you can dump those who “don’t tweet often enough.” I don’t know. I’m vaguely attracted to the idea of only following people who never tweet at all.

And Finally: If you’ve ever wanted to climb a construction crane, walk out to the end, and dangle by one hand — you’re crazy. But this guy did it, with a Go Pro camera. Terrifying. Via Berg.