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Toogle

Check out Toogle, a wickedly cool web site that takes any Google query, pumps it into Google Images, finds a picture of it — then renders the picture as a piece of ASCII art composed of the search query itself. That picture above? It’s an iPod, composed of the word “iPod” over and over again (a full-screen version is here).

The top 10 searches are, of course, almost entirely for sex-related topics, which is oddly appropriate — since the art of producing photorealistic ASCII images was pioneered by the attempts of geeks in the 1970s to transform Playboy centerfolds into a format renderable on jurassic dot-matrix printers.

(Thanks to Incoming Signals for this one!)


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Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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Recent Entries

A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”

Gay squid sex

“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912

Hacking the Model T

“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex

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May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM

From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.

July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S

July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM

My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.

June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM

On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.

June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM

I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives. 

According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable! 

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Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson