Breakfast Links: Lego-Porn, Randomness v. Terrorists & Radiohead
It’s a little bit o’ monday art fo’ ya.
Lego-porn. And I’m not talking about lego-porn the way the internets like to talk about cool pictures of things, no, I’m talking about pr0n. This site is about showing pictures of those li’l lego guys (and gals) doing bad things. True to its roots it’s replete with broken images and tons of signup links - although, thankfully, it doesn’t hit you with tons of popups. Not that I’d know about that or anything, you know.. Anyhow. Thanks(?) to Poyla for this one.
If that wasn’t random enough for you, perhaps you need to hire yourself some computer scientists? That’s what the good folks at LAX did, after viewing that site they felt an insatiable need for true randomness and hired some U of Southern California guys to build them ARMOR which randomizes the positioning of security at the airport (via /.). Designed to foil the surveillance phase of the bad guys, this system takes in all sort of top secret info about the airport and daily (or whenever the button is pushed) allocates security randomly so no patterns can be discerned. No more,”Ok, so at 4pm the guards at this spot walk around and we have a 5 minute window to get through.” I hear the action tv and movie lobby is working hard to sink this initiative. We’ll see how that goes…
If that’s too random for you, you should go check out the pre-sales site for Radiohead’s new album In Rainbows. The hook is that if you want to buy the download (no physical media) you name the price. That’s right you tell them how much you want to pay and that’s how much you pay. Believe it! Don’t believe it? Click the ? on the checkout page. Twice. They mean business. And just to show you how much they get this whole music thing, the disc box that you can buy for a whopping £40 (and that’s $81 in american) gets you not just a cd with the same tracks, but a cd, 2 2″ vinyl records, an additional enhanced cd with more songs and all sorts of photographs and artwork and books. This thing is a little slice of wonderful madness. Seriously, Radiohead totally gets it. What with their refusal to sell individual digital tracks and the understanding that people will buy physical media if there’s some advantage to it. The only question mark that remains is exactly what form the digital download is - I presume it’s DRM-free MP3 but that’s just me guessing.
