There is no computer-generated imagery behind this surreal-seeming scenography, but rather a skillful remixing of reality to sort actual automobiles by color.

Artist and filmmaker Cy Kuckenbaker explains that his “aim is to reveal the color palette and color preferences of contemporary San Diego drivers in addition to traffic patterns and volumes. There are no CG elements, these are all real cars that have been removed from one sample and reorganized.”

Sure enough, the dominant colors are actually revealed to be anything but colorful – vehicles are mainly white, gray or black, with some reds and blues then very few oranges or yellows. Both lanes below and the overpass ahead are integrated into the artificial choreography.

Shot in San Diego and reorganized in post-production, the seamless transitions in this film serve to make the piece simultaneously more realistic and implausible. Just imagine your reaction  if you saw something like this actually unfolding on the highway before you.

In a similar previous project, Kuckenbaker captured a series of landings at the San Deigo airport and then overlaid the results of hours of filming. The sky was effectively green-screened so that the planes could be overlapped in front of a seemingly-consistent background.

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Fake Banksy: 40 Forgeries Sold in 1 Hour on Streets of NYC

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Tonal Tricks and Treats: Sweets Neatly Arranged By Color

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The opposition All Progressives Congress swept every seat in peaceful local government elections in Nigeria’s northeast state of Yobe, officials said, defying Islamic extremists opposed to democracy and the ruling party’s insistence it was too insecure to campaign…

Yobe state, Nigeria

The [Peoples Democratic Party] boycotted Saturday’s elections for 178 councilors and 17 chairmen, saying it was not safe to campaign. They had not been expected to win seats in the traditional opposition stronghold.

The [PDP] disputed the Yobe electoral commission’s figures showing nearly 80 percent of 1.2 million registered voters cast ballots. Some reporters had noted a low turnout and the figure was surprising in a region where tens of thousands of people have been forced from their homes by a 4-year-old Islamic uprising…

Chairman Mohammed Jauro Abdu of the Yobe State Independent Electoral Commission said, ‘‘Our elections went on smoothly without any case of violence or breach of peace. This is a pointer and a signal for the government at the center that the state is safe to hold elections even in 2015, insha'Allah (God willing).’’ He spoke Sunday night when he announced the results.

Some politicians in Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north have suggested southern Christian politicians want to prolong the state of emergency to prevent 2015 voting in areas where they are unpopular…

Data is much easier for most of us to process when it’s presented in visual form, and these 15 infographics and visualizations give us a (literal) picture of New York City that would be hard to come by otherwise. Exploring things like income inequality, building age, how the city has evolved and what its most popular hot spots are, these maps and charts illuminate the city in new ways.

Inequality and New York’s Subway

New York City’s inequality problem is even clearer when viewed by subway line, as this interactive infographic from The New Yorker illustrates. Using data on median household income from the U.S. Census Bureau, it allows you to see the areas where earnings range from abject poverty to sky-high wealth.

Building Age, NYC

Where are the city’s oldest buildings? You could read a list of them, but seeing them laid out visually on a map makes them easier to spot. See the ages of one million New York buildings mapped in vivid colors, zooming in and exploring by neighborhood, at BDON.org.

10,000 NYC-Based Tweet Locations

Ten thousand New York City-based tweets are laid out on top of a map in this interesting data visualization. The creator, Eric Fischer, asks “Is this the structure of New York City?” Perhaps it’s really just bored people in subways and cabs taking a moment to tell the world what they ate for lunch.

Growth of Manhattan Island, 1650-1980

It’s easy to forget that  much of Manhattan Island (and the rest of New York City) used to be a marsh. The borders of the island were much further inland way back in 1650 when the first settlement was founded. By 1980, they had extended by a good 1,000 feet.

Manhattan Past, Present and Future

Here’s another visualization that shows the drastic changes in the island from the way it was when European settlers first arrived to how it looks today. The composite image shows the left side of the island as it was 400 years ago and the modern-day city on the right. How will it change in another 400 years?

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Virtual Reality 15 New York City Data Visualizations

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The remains of large concrete arrows can be found in patches of dirt and grass across the United States from New York to San Francisco. Many locals have wondered what they’re for, seemingly pointing nowhere at all and often located in fairly remote places. They were installed in the 1920s, each accompanied by a fifty-foot tower and a tiny hut, and became obsolete within a decade.

So what were they for? Getting mail delivered in the time period just after the birth of the airplane, but before the wide use of radar and radio communications. The arrows helped guide airmail pilots at night, when flights would otherwise be grounded due to inability to properly navigate. The ability to deliver mail by plane represented a huge step in the evolution of U.S. mail delivery, vastly speeding up a system that had previously relied on stagecoach lines.

The system used fifty-foot beacon towers with rotating lights placed on top of concrete foundations shaped like arrows, usually between 50-70 feet in length. A small hut offered a place to stay for the people who maintained the generators and lights. The beacons were only visible from a distance of about 10 miles.

By the end of the first year of the program, the airmail service had 18 terminal airfields and more than 500 beacon lights in operation along the main mail delivery route, and continued to expand throughout the 1920s. But by 1933, new technology and the high cost of operation during the depression shut the program down. The towers were disassembled for their steel during World War II. A few have been preserved, like the one pictured above at the Western New Mexico Aviation Heritage Museum.

While many of the arrows have since been lost to development, those further afield still offer a (sometimes mystifying) glimpse of the past. The blog Sometimes Interesting has compiled a list with map links to arrows that still remain in New Mexico, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada and other states.

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7 Island Wonders of the World: Most Remote & Mysterious

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As any experienced urbanist can tell you, city life is rarely dull and this year has proven no exception – from traffic-topping articles to staff-picked stories, here are WebUrbanist’s must-read highlights of 2013. Skim below and skip ahead as desired, but be sure to click the blue links inline along the way for full article access. Share your favorites with family and friends … and thank you, as always, for reading!

Starting with the world of architectural anomalies of the West, a London skyscraper became a global sensation when its curved glass surface began starting fires in neighboring structures. Many readers were also amazed to discover faux facades hiding everything from train tunnels to power stations in plain sight in cities including New York, Toronto and Paris. Speaking of NYC and secrets, don’t forget this temporary abandoned water tower-turned-speakeasy on a Brooklyn rooftop.

Meanwhile, in the East, we witnessed a Tokyo company add a top-down twist to building demolition in Japan. Nearby China, in turn, presented designs for an incredible car-free city whilst simultaneously making the news for an array of deserted urban endeavors, including a surreal smaller-scale replica of Paris.

In the realm of futurism and fantasy, this year included a Russian space hotel design and artists making floor plans from famous American television shows. But fact can be stranger than fiction, as many commented on how much this dark tower in South Africa resembled the setting of a dystopian film. And in a bid to push urbanism beyond the borders of continents and countries altogether, one entrepreneur floated the idea of an entire high-tech offshore city. In turn, IKEA is also stretching the boundaries of architectural interventions with its portable $1000 flat-pack refugee shelter.

Our ongoing 7 Wonders Series is a long-standing fan favorite and well worth browsing for travelers and urban explorers. Many of these collections showcased abandoned places around the world, including top-secret buildings and underwater wonders; some were classed by broad type, including military, residential, commercial and industrial architecture, while others were organized by region, like Antarctica and New Zealand. Still others were even more specific, including sets of abandoned ski resorts, swimming pools, bookmobiles and unfinished nuclear power plants.

Shifting back to contemporary creations and cutting-edge design, we have seen some great innovations when it comes to modular rooms and convertible furniture, including an apartment where everything its occupant needs is hidden in floors, walls and ceilings. For those with a bit more space (and money) and an eye for luxury, there are also secret in-floor swimming pools that hide right under your feet – perhaps a reasonable place to deploy your fold-up suitcase kayak, too. Almost everyone, it would seem, loves a helpful space-saving design or a mysterious secret room, hidden passage or trap door.

In the arts, we saw everything from invisible-ink graffiti and hyper-realistic artworks to the world’s most-vandalized landmarks and ancient Greek statues turned into modern-day hipsters. In technology, we looked back at idiotic inventions from times past and forward to futuristic materials that actually exist today. And at the increasingly interesting intersection of art and technology, we found graffiti artists tagging low-tech cellophane as well as the most powerful man-made tornado in a museum.

WebUrbanist has managed a few milestones itself this year, with over 10 million visitors in 2013 alone (60 million+ total to date) and over 20,000,000 article views, also breaking a single-day record with nearly 500,000 pages viewed in one 24-hour period this fall. The site has topped 10,000 followers on Twitter and is nearing 50,000 fans on Facebook; those with a preference for  Google+ can now add WebUrbanist to your circles there as well. We are (as always) working on some new directions and innovations of our own, with more surprises to come in the new year. Meanwhile, it may sound cliche but it bears repeating: you readers, fans and friends of the site who share our articles and support our team … you make all of this possible, and you have our sincerest thanks and best wishes for 2014.

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• I hate it when the weather is really hot (or really cold).
• I hate shredded coconut.
• I hate waking up early.
• I hate my ISP.
• I hate Internet flash mob videos where orchestras perform classical music in public places as if "by accident".

• I hate that the commercials are louder than the programs.
• I hate it when the news makes me feel that there is no hope.
• I hate that the average American watches 5 hours of television per day.
• I hate any television show or movie which features zombies.
• I hate discussions, movies, scientific theories and religions on the subject of how the world will end.

• I hate companies that use automatic dialing devices to spam my telephone.
• I hate mega-corporations, Walmart in particular.
• I hate it when someone says that corporations are people.
• I hate that businesses have become so big that they harm individual Americans.
• I hate that copyrights have become corporate assets.

• I hate that politics has become mostly lying.
• I hate noticing similarities between the actions of the US and those of the Empire in Star Wars.
• I hate that the election of the first black US president has caused a resurgence of overt racism.
• I hate neo-liberals.  Also neo-conservatives.
• I hate the way Republicans in Congress behave.  Other Republicans too.

• I hate that some rich people have become too rich and too powerful.
• I hate that separation between church and state is decreasing.
• I hate that so many people can't find a balance between god and science.
• I hate the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
• I hate the notion that a gun makes you safe.  Also that more guns make you safer.

• I hate it when the value of things is confused with their cost in money.
• I hate when people make belonging to (or rooting for) particular teams part of their identities.
• I hate it when someone acts like they know everything about anything.  (Double for radio announcers on classical music stations)
• I hate all the loopholes.
• I hate hate.

Happy New Year’s, everybody! To ring in 2014, I present to you some new stuff. Or to be more precise, stuff in a new place. “John of the Rhine” is now available on Smashwords.

Happy New Year, Diss denizens. Games for the new Year. But don’t mention December 30th and 31st. They’re just going to have to be written-off as lost days in the larger canon of Games of the Week.

Wednesday: New Orleans Pelicans at Minnesota Timberwolves (5:00 PM PST on League Pass)

Sorry Wolves and Pelicans fans, but it looks like I’m going to be rooting pretty hard against your teams for the rest of the season. With the first third of the season in the books, and the top eight starting to create some separation between themselves and the rest of the conference, I am warily eyeing the Wolves (9th) and the Pelicans (10th) as teams who could benefit from a softer schedule down the road. They’re not playing poorly, per se, but they’re having a rougher go at it than their peers in the conference due to injury and a road-heavy schedule. When things get a bit easier for these teams in the coming months, it’ll be nice to have as many wins as possible to make a play for a low playoff seed. That’s why coin-tosses like Tyreke Evans’ game winner in Portland, or the non-foul at the end of the Wolves-Mavs game, mean so much in a dogfight. I just hope the Warriors are 10 games up in the standings by then, and don’t have to worry about anything that the Wolves, Pelicans, or any sort of animal are doing. And speaking of the Warriors…

Thursday: Golden State Warriors at Miami Heat (4:30 PM PST on League Pass)

The Homer Game of the Week features my beloved Golden State Warriors taking on the defending NBA champions, the Miami Heat. Most Warriors fans have had this game circled on the calendar for a few months because of some crazy symmetry. In case you forgot, the 2012-13 Warriors weren’t thought of as a quality team until they hit the road for an early-season seven game road trip, and ended up winning six of them. The most memorable win of that trip, of course, was the Miami game, when Jarrett Jack found Draymond Green for the game winner with just under a second remaining on the clock. Fast forward to 2013-14: the Warriors are currently marching through another seven game trip, and right now are sitting 3-0 (and have won six straight overall to bring their record to 20-13). And just like last time, the Heat await as a mid-trip test. Can’t wait for this game.

Friday: Toronto Raptors at Washington Wizards (4:00 PM PST on League Pass)

A soft Friday schedule leaves us searching for appealing options, so Wizards versus Raptors it is. I’m starting to get used to the “new normal” that comes along with Eastern conference games, and honestly learning to embrace it. No, the basketball never seems as crisp and clean as its Western conference counterparts, and the players don’t really seem to even try as hard. But there’s typically some pride involved in these playoff matchups. Of course, if the playoffs started today, the Wiz and Raptors would be playing each other in the 4-5 matchup, so learn to embrace the solid B-minus basketball that is the Eastern Conference this season. It’s like leftovers for dinner.

Saturday: LA Clippers at San Antonio Spurs (5:00 PM PST on League Pass)

With Lob City now entering its third year, I’m only watching the Clippers when I absolutely must. I mean, aren’t you? Are you getting anything out of the Clippers these days? The team under Doc Rivers doesn’t look markedly different than it did when Vinny of the Black was coaching; still a lot of high pick-and-rolls with Blake and DeAndre as the primary screeners, and Chris Paul hero-ball when he doesn’t feel like running a play. Yes, Blake is much improved (despite what people say); he has a wider array of post moves, and can create scoring opportunities passing out of double teams. But the only new face in the rotation is Jared Dudley, and I’m not going out of my way to watch Jared Dudley. Hard to tell what’s going to happen in this game given Pop’s proclivity towards treating the regular season like the appendix in a J.R.R. Tolkien novel, but even if the Clippers win this showdown between division leaders, this won’t really be a statement about anything or anyone.

Sunday: Memphis Grizzlies at Detroit Pistons (10:00 AM PST on League Pass)

Most of my energy will be directed towards the Niners-Packers playoff game, but I’m vaguely interested in this Hangover Game between semi-struggling outfits who have quickly fallen off my own personal watchability radar. I’m used to getting Knicks or Raptors games on Sunday mornings, not Pistons games. Perhaps this game will be the smelling-salt that gets me re-interested in the team that many projected to be the most-watchable in the NBA. I doubt it. Mark my words: Greg Monroe is a massive contract away from being the Rudy Gay of big men. Deep down you know this to be true.

A Russian ghost town on a Norwegian island in the Arctic, decaying modernist houses in Sweden and woodland homes taken over by wildlife in Finland are among the abandoned treasures of Scandinavia. Left behind but not forgotten, these structures stand as reminders of a past now lost, whether due to the changing public view of prison-like mental institutions, the end of the Cold War or the invention of new technology that made old ways obsolete.

Pyramiden, Norway’s Abandoned Russian Settlement

A Russian ghost town at the end of the world, Pyramiden is a coal mining community on the remote Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Norway. It was founded in 1910 by the Swedish and sold to the Soviets in 1927, and was once home to 1,000 people. The town consists of just a handful of buildings and some mining equipment, and has been entirely abandoned since 1998, though in 2007 construction began on a hotel that enables guests traveling to the island to stay overnight. The last ton of coal extracted from the mine sits behind a spire-shaped monument bearing the settlement’s name.  The buildings remain as they were when left behind, and because of the low rate of decay in the freezing Arctic climate, they’re expected to remain visible 500 years from now.

Modernist Houses, Sweden

This glass-walled home was the epitome of Swedish modernity in the 1960s, designed by architect Bruno Mathsson and once full of the sleek midcentury modern furniture for which he remains most famous. Mathsson designed this home and two others like it as ideal showcases for the fitness-obsessed, nature-centered nudist lifestyle, but the homes were abandoned at some point and have been empty for decades. Photographer Mikael Olsson has spent the last decade visiting and documenting two of the houses, revealing their descent into disrepair.

Abandoned Houses Taken Over by Animals, Finland

This group of homes in the Finnish woods may have been abandoned by people, but they provide a safe haven for a wide array of wildlife. Photographer Kai Fagerström discovered the houses near his family’s summer home in Salo, left behind after their inhabitants passed away or relocated. Inside, he has documented raccoons, squirrels, skunks, foxes, owls and many other creatures making themselves comfortable.

Murmansk Ghost Ship, Norway

Rusting in the waters just off the coast of the Norwegian village of Sørvaer after running aground, a Russian cruiser waited nearly twenty years to be rescued. The Murmansk was commissioned in 1955 and remained in service until 1994, when it was sold to India for scrap, but it never made it to its intended destination, partially sinking into the sea. The process of retrieving it was complicated by the possible presence of radioactive substances aboard the ship, the rough seas and the extreme climate of the area. In 2009, funds were raised to build a dry dock to start the process of dismantling it. The wreckage actually looks much smaller than it really is – those waters are hiding the vast majority of the ship.

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Cold Comfort 7 Abandoned Wonders Of Scandinavia

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Chances are, you recognize these images, even though they’re simply arrangements of a few dozen colored LEGO bricks. Squint your eyes, and three of the world’s most famous masterpieces come into hazy pixelated focus, your memory filling in the details that can’t be rendered in this form.

Italian designer Marco Soldano interpreted two works by Leonardo da Vinci and one by Johannes Vermeer using official LEGO blocks. “All the children are authentic artists with LEGO,” he says.

The works, of course, are (from top to bottom) the Mona Lisa, The Girl with a Pearl Earring and Lady with an Ermine. Subtle variations in tone suggest the highlights and shadows, the folds of fabric, the mountain landscape, even the subtle twist of the third subject’s posture.

LEGO bricks continue to be a favorite medium for designers, who have used them to recreate everything from a 500,000-piece working water-powered hot rod to the entire borough of Brooklyn. See 20 more works of LEGO art (including another LEGO Mona Lisa.)

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• Margaret Coel's web page
• Stephen Campbell's inverview with Margaret Coel about Killing Custer (57 minutes)
• Publishers Weekly review of Killing Custer
• More SPOILER ALERT: Dana Stabenow's web site
• Publishers Weekly review of Bad Blood
• Maggie Harding's review of Bad Blood in Book Reporter