Besides the extraordinary talents of Jamie Hewlett, one thing I really love about this video is the cameo by Gruff Rhys of the Super Furry Animals. The song he sings, "Superfast Jellyfish", on the new Gorlliaz album Plastic Beach is apparently slated to be the next single, later this year. Given that "Superfast Jellyfish" also features De La Soul—who also appear in cameo in the "Melancholy Hill" video (along with Snoop, et al.)—it figures to be a great video. For my part, I can't say "Melancholy Hill" is the song I would have chosen as a second single after "Stylo". My favorite tune off the album so far is "Rhinestone Eyes", slated to be the fourth single—I may even have led with that track, as good as it is.

Order them before they’re gone. Futura never looked so good.

This is, to me at least, quite bizarre. If you want to view a rare manuscript or book in the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, you now can, instead of going there yourself, have a librarian put the book in front of a webcam and beam the image of the manuscript right to your screen anywhere in the world. If you need to go forward or back a page, then just ask the lucky librarian to turn it for you. One presumes both of you will need bathroom breaks from time to time. Of course, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want to go to Wolfenbüttel yourself, but perhaps this will work in a pinch if you can’t find the time or funding to make the trip. Still, more bizarre than useful in my book.

(Via Roger Pearse.)

The new Lo-Fi digital camera of choice, designed by Saikat Biswas. Features include 1) no LCD viewfinder, 2) a cheap (if handsome) plasticky enclosure, 3) an e-ink HUD, 4) frequent vignetting, blur, and other problems, and 5) no way of telling what the heck your pictures will look like till you download them. Nevertheless, it looks awesome — no word, it seems, on when these will be available for purchase.

(Via Wired’s Gadget Lab.)

Strangely, if you click on the link to the work, you automatically download a .zip archive full of .png and .html files. But if you click on “(read in your browser)” it takes you to the normal Google Books page for the book, from where you can download a .pdf file, or search the work via the web interface, depending on your needs. On one hand this is quite helpful since 1) the .png files are, presumably, being provided to help OCR algorithm writers develop their code and 2) it’s not always easy finding older editions of ancient texts if you don’t know the specific (often unwieldy) title of the specific edition. On the other hand, how difficult would it be to make the default download link the .pdf file, or at least the normal Google Books page? This is what most people use on their own machines — surely non-techie users are going to be baffled by a .zip file full of images and .html files?

Many congratulations to a former teacher and mentor of mine at Oxford, Professor Fergus Millar, who has been awarded a Knighthood. There’s hardly a scholar I can think of in Classics who deserves this honor more than Sir Fergus.

(Via RogueClassicism.)

An interesting article on whether the new iPhone4 "Retina Display" is false marketing, by one of the designers of the Hubble Space Telescope and author of the blog Bad Astronomy.

(Via Daring Fireball.)