CrowdDB, answering queries with crowdsourcing — academic paper proposes SQL queries backed by a Mechanical Turk engine (via) #

Rorschmap — don't miss James Bridle's thinking behind it #

Kevin Slavin's TED talk on how algorithms shape our world — Roombas, recommenders, and financial algorithms terraforming the Earth (via) #

MTV News on The Internet in 1995 — when Moby had hair #

Kevin Huizenga's Time Travelling — from the always-excellent What Things Do #

Topiary from LulzSec arrested — his last tweet: "you cannot arrest an idea" #

The Crowdfunding Cargo Cult — companies are trying to clone Kickstarter and the iPhone without understanding why they work #

Danny Choo on 3D printed vanity dolls in Japan — deep in the uncanny valley, dolls that looks exactly like you #

0-DAY ART — related: Street Show, a dead drop for art in NYC (via) #

Stereogum's tribute to the Strokes' Is This It — love the Owen Pallett, Frankie Rose, and Real Estate covers #

Selected — Mike Guppy replaces classic art with marching ants selections #

This American Life's brilliant episode on Intellectual Ventures and patent trolling — meant to be listened to, not read #

NYT on how the deficit got this big — the chart that should accompany every article on this topic (via) #

Adventure Time with Fionna & Cake preview — gender-swapped episode featuring Neil Patrick Harris as Prince Gumball #

12×8 pixel display built in Minecraft — don't miss the ridiculous reveal of the redstone circuits at the 2:10 mark (via) #

Infinite Mario in HTML5 — porting Notch's original to Javascript; source on Github (via) #

Mini-doc tells the story behind the Eli Porter rap battle viral video — even if you've never seen the original, watch this now; I want this treatment for every meme (via) #

Rob Ager's detailed analysis of set design flaws in The Shining — obsessively-compiled, he concludes it was deliberate; that Duke Nukem map is neat, but I prefer the N64 version #

The Internet Tidal Wave — Letters of Note reposts Bill Gates' 1995 memo about the future of networking (via) #

Clay Johnson tests engagement on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ — unscientific, but interesting; like Clay, my Google+ followers are rapidly catching up with Twitter #

NYT Magazine feature on Dwarf Fortress — awesome to see roguelikes get some mainstream attention #

Etsy promotes Chad Dickerson to CEO — woo, congrats Chad! #

Papers from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society — torrent of 18k pre-1923 scientific papers released by an Aaron Swartz supporter (via) #

Fake Apple Store knockoffs in China — even the employees think they're working for Apple (via) #

Ze Frank revisits the "Brain Crack" episode — possibly my favorite episode from The Show #

Madeon's "Pop Culture" — or watch him perform it live with a Novation Launchpad controlling Ableton Live #

Kickstarter hits $15M pledged, 10,000 successful projects — another interesting data dump; love the video of every project #

Benjamin Shaykin's Lo-Res Books — famous book covers abstracted to the edge of recognition #

A real person, a lot like you — Derek Sivers' call for Internet civility; short version: don't be a jerk, we're all humans here (via) #

Graphic Nothing's minimalist art and album cover remixes — hmm, this reminds me of something... #

Aaron Swartz indicted by feds for scraping academic journal database — unlike his PACER work, JSTOR is all from academic journals; here's the indictment, which includes details of the physical break-in #

A slight discrepancy — finding the math behind the otherwise mundane (via) #

Plain Text Offenders — shaming sites that store passwords in plaintext (via) #

Untris — impossible game tasks you with reverse-engineering a Tetris playthrough (via) #

Ironic Sans digs up the Comic-Con 1988 schedule — the expansion into films and gaming started over 20 years ago #

Where I Go At Night — clever mechanic, two-player game pits a character against itself (via) #

A Videogame Tour of NYC — related: 15 Days in Liberty City (via) #

The Final Image — guess the final scene from classic films #

Wired on how Stuxnet was deciphered — long, gripping read (via) #

A Geek's Journal, 1976 — "This blog is based on my actual journal kept in 1976." (via) #

Craig Hockenberry on the rise and fall of the indie developer — only companies can survive attacks from rampant patent and copyright trolls (via) #

MetaFilter Memories — Matt bought the first site ever linked on Mefi and collected touching tributes from members #

A Day in the Life of John Lasseter — 25-minute film following a man who loves hugging almost as much as Hawaiian shirts #

Wired releases entire Manning-Lamo chat logs — Alexis Madrigal pieced together a new profile of Manning (via) #

NYT on tomorrow's launch of Spotify in the U.S. — reports say 8am EST, open to all preregistered users #

Willamette Week's cover profile of Matt Haughey — with a nice Waxy.org shout-out; love the deep recursion in the comments #

TIME's Lev Grossman on fan fiction culture — includes discussion on the legality of fanfic (via) #

Paul Ford's The Age of Mechanical Reproduction — we love you, Paul #

Anil Dash on the triumph of the animated GIF — the Internet's native art form #

Clay Shirky on the new news environment — another must-read missive on the current state of journalism #