If you like the portability of the Phillips LED Candle light, but want something a bit “sweeter,” check out Nick Foley’s Pear Light. Custom made from hand-forged steel, this tree of light comes bearing fruit with rechargeable LEDs that allows you to take the lights with you down dark hallways. Once “picked” from the tree, each pear stays illuminated for about an hour. To bring it back to life, just place it back on the tree, where it will recharge for your night-viewing pleasure.

Nick Foley’s Portable LED Pears

CommandShift3 is like Hot or Not.
Except, instead of clicking on hot babes, you click on hot websites.

CommandShift3 - It's like Hot or Not for web design

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year is …. “W00t”.

I’m not a great language purist (I’m a Webster’s New World fan, and don’t much care for the overly prescriptivist American Heritage), but I don’t know that I would call this interjection from leetspeak a ‘word’ exactly.

I’d have gone with ‘waterboarding’ myself.

W00t the Heck?

confess. if you read this blog, you are addicted to data. this means you do not like Christmas presents. in fact, you hate those information-less presents your friends buy you each year. even after patiently telling them "any present should self-update at least each 30 seconds", last year's Christmas was still a disaster, despite that wireless weather station from your wife that is now measuring the temperature & humidity of those boxes on your attic.

starting from $15, here are infosthetics' 20 most wanted Christmas gifts for the info-addicted.

shopping guide for the data-addicted

Now playing in Nashville ... (and numerous other US locations)

As the front man of the Clash from 1977 onwards, Joe Strummer changed people's lives forever. Four years after his death, his influence reaches out around the world, more strongly now than ever before. In "The Future Is Unwritten", from British film director Julien Temple, Joe Strummer is revealed not just as a legend or musician, but as a true communicator of our times. Drawing on both a shared punk history and the close personal friendship which developed over the last years of Joe's life, Julien Temple's film is a celebration of Joe Strummer - before, during and after the Clash.

People seem to like it.

Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten

Marshall McLuhan's advice on how to choose books:

Turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like that page, buy the book.

The Page 69 Test

BEFORE the internet, book recommendations traveled at the rate of sound. You had to talk to someone to pass on word about what to read. Or read it in a review. Or write a letter. Now you can go to the website of a newspaper, a magazine, or a literary blog to find out what's new and what's good.

But with all this connectivity, it felt like a moment had yet to be seized about finding out what a lot of people said was good.

Apparently the National Book Critics Circle has yet to receive their MemeStreams invitation.

And what better people to ask than award winning novelists, historians, poets, critics and biographers?

These are the pie-in-the-sky notions that prompted the National Book Critics Circle to create a monthly Best Recommended List. Polling our nearly 800 members, as well as all the former finalists and winners of our book prize, we asked, What 2007 books have you read that you have truly loved?

CRITICAL MASS: Introducing the NBCC's Best Recommended

This year's Favorite Books issue has a retrospective feel. Inside, you'll find pieces on the pioneering comics artist Winsor McCay and children's author Beverly Cleary, as well as a reflection on rereading and a look at the lingering influence of the chapbook.

The joy of reading: Favorite Books of 2007

Above all, White Sun of the Desert celebrates Russian men. Perhaps that is the secret of the film's enduring success and why it is still one of the top five bestselling DVDs in Russia. Ravaged by alcoholism and cursed with plunging life expectancy, Russian men today need reasons to feel good about themselves. Blue-eyed Comrade Sukhov fits the bill. He is the embodiment of Russian macho cool, the sort of guy who serenely lights his cigarette with a smouldering bunch of dynamite. Even in the dramatic final shoot-out on the beach, he remains laconic and unruffled.

This sangfroid appealed to Soviet cosmonauts. Bizarrely, White Sun has become a lucky talisman, ritually watched to this day before each and every launch. Even the recent space tourist Charles Simonyi had to sit through it. "Not bad for a Soviet movie," concluded the Hungarian-born Microsoft billionaire when I called him on his yacht in the Mediterranean. Georgiy Grechko, who made three Soyuz flights and trained with Yuri Gagarin, compares the film to a "tuning fork".

Wild, wild east

Suppose that the film you're watching is a very minimal and abstract show. It doesn't fill the whole of the screen's rectangle with colourful business. What you see is only a single thin line of bright white, with darkness all around. The light beam that projects this line will not have the form of a pyramid. It will be a mere plane, triangular in shape, with its apex at the projector, its base on the screen.

Introduce some smoke, and you'll see it – a thin, flat, sharp-edged dart of light, hovering in space, cutting through the dark. And if the bright line on screen should move or bend or grow, the projected sheet of light will evolve accordingly. Cinema can generate a form of immaterial, kinetic sculpture. These are the basics of the art of Anthony McCall.

British artist Anthony McCall (born 1946) has a cross-disciplinary practice in which film, sculpture, installation, drawing and performance overlap. McCall was a key figure in the avant-garde London Film-makers Co-operative in the 1970s and his earliest films are documents of outdoor performances that were notable for their minimal use of the elements, most notably fire.

After moving to New York in 1973, McCall continued his fire performances and developed his ‘solid light’ film series, conceiving the now-legendary Line Describing a Cone, in 1973. These works are simple projections that strikingly emphasise the sculptural qualities of a beam of light. In darkened, haze-filled rooms, the projections create an illusion of three-dimensional shapes, ellipses, waves and flat planes that gradually expand, contract or sweep through space. In these works, the artist sought to deconstruct cinema by reducing film to its principle components of time and light and removing the screen entirely as the prescribed surface for projection. The works also shift the relationship of the audience to film, as viewers become participants, their bodies intersecting and modifying the transitory forms.

Read a review in The Independent. (Excerpt above)

Serpentine Gallery: Anthony McCall