Plastic fantastic

You've got to love the sheer ingenuity of these street sculptures by artist Joshua Allen Harris. They're made from plastic bags and tied to subway grilles so that when the train whooshes past underneath, the bags come to life...



Someone will doubtless find a use for these to advertise something. Frankly, they'd be daft not to. But part of their appeal is how splendidly pointless they are: pure delight and nothing more.

(Via Boing Boing and the Wooster Collective.)

A treasure trove of inspiration

This month I came across one of the best websites I've ever found. Possibly the best. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd urge a visit.

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, was originally a conference for leading figures in those industries. It's now become a gathering of the world's most influential "thinkers and doers".

The TED website is an archive of talks by these luminaries, and I haven't found a dull one yet. Each is inspiring, lucid, thrilling. There are many star names, like Bono, Richard Dawkins, Bill Clinton and so forth. But equally compelling are the lesser-known speakers (at least to me), who are busily having the most extraordinary ideas and creating amazing new worlds.

Go and have a look. If you don't come away buzzing with excitement and new interests, you're either much too clever already or dead from the neck up. The only danger is that you'll spend all day gasping at TED, rather than doing whatever it is you get paid to do.