The site’s Slush Pile Hell, and it includes pages of deliciously botched, mangled, and riotously presumptuous query letters from aspiring authors, and the agent’s wry responses.

Here are some of my favorites. Visit the site for many more:

“I recently quit my job to become an author. As a result, I am happy to say that I now have a manuscript for your review.

Congratulations on an incredibly wise move! I always advise my new clients to immediately quit their day jobs and to go ahead and put down payments on Italian sports cars and villas in the South of France. Anything else is a negative, defeatist attitude that, quite frankly, makes me want to vomit.”

“….While this is a literary novel, I believe it could appeal to low-class readers.

And all the “low-class readers” will rejoice at your largess, bequeathing such a literary gift to them. I hereby nominate you as Humanitarian of the Year.”

“Dear xxxx, let’s not waste words. I’ve attached my manuscript. Get it published.

Dear author: yes, let’s not. Bite me.”

Funny stuff, and sadly all too true. Read more at bigthink.com.

Patrick Acton is known as the world’s best matchstick artist for a reason. His extensive collection features scale wooden models of iconic film locations like Lord of the Rings’ Minas Tirith and Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School of Wizardry, made from hundreds of thousands of matchsticks.

Acton was one of the first artist I wrote about, when I started Oddity Central, almost five years ago. He was working on one of his masterpieces, a detailed model of the famous fortress city Minas Tirith, as seen in the Lord of the Rings 3: The Return of the King, from 420,000 matchsticks. Since then, he’s built lots of other astonishing matchstick sculptures and he doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. The 59-year-old American artist, who works as a career counselor in Gladbrook, Iowa, started his career as a matchstick modeler back in 1977, when he pieced together a small-scale replica of a local church from 500 matches. He did it all with only Ohio Blue Tip matches purchased at the grocery store, a bottle of school glue, a utility knife, and a piece of sandpaper. He had always enjoyed working with wood and tinkering with things around his parent’s home, and after graduating from college, matchstick modelling became an enjoyable hobby. Although he has achieved worldwide notoriety for his mind-blowing creations, Patrick Acton continued to work as a counselor and dedicated only a few hours a night working on his fragile models. He recently accepted Ripley’s offer to build models for their Odditoriums, full time.

These are just mind-blowing in their detail.

When I was younger and single I wanted to live in a loft. I guess that’s one of those dreams that’s going to have to remain unfulfilled. Maybe a vacation home someday. I still really love them.

See more pictures at home-designing.com.

In a new report on self-publishing, Bowker — the company that handles ISBNs (book identifier codes) and other bibliographic info for books published in the U.S. — says that the number of print and ebooks self-published annually is up by 287 percent since 2006 and now totals over 235,000 titles.

Bowker finds that 148,424 print books were self-published in 2011 — that means that 43 percent of all print books published in the U.S. in 2011 were self-published. 87,201 ebooks were self-published. Publishers Lunch notes a few important caveats: Bowker only counts titles with ISBNs, so “KDP exclusives and other sources that still don’t use ISBN numbers” aren’t included. That means the number of self-published ebooks is likely much higher than 87,201. In addition, the print and digital editions of a single title may be counted twice.

Bowker finds that four large companies dominate the self-publishing space. In 2011, Amazon’s CreateSpace was behind the creation of 58,412 titles, or 39 percent of all self-published print books.

Is anyone surprised by this?

Read the rest at paidcontent.com.

Hundreds of the world’s brightest minds — engineers from Google and IBM, hedge funds quants, and Defense Department contractors building artificial intelligence — were gathered in rapt attention inside the auditorium of the San Francisco Masonic Temple atop Nob Hill. It was the first day of the seventh annual Singularity Summit, and Julia Galef, the President of the Center for Applied Rationality, was speaking onstage. On the screen behind her, Galef projected a giant image from the film Blade Runner: the replicant Roy, naked, his face stained with blood, cradling a white dove in his arms.

At this point in the movie, Roy is reaching the end of his short, pre-programmed life, “The poignancy of his death scene comes from the contrast between that bitter truth and the fact that he still feels his life has meaning, and for lack of a better word, he has a soul,” said Galef. “To me this is the situation we as humans have found ourselves in over the last century. Turns out we are survival machines created by ancient replicators, DNA, to produce as many copies of them as possible. This is the bitter pill that science has offered us in response to our questions about where we came from and what it all means.”

The Singularity Summit bills itself as the world’s premier event on robotics, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies. The attendees, who shelled out $795 for a two-day pass, are people whose careers depend on data, on empirical proof. Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, discussed advances in probabilistic first-order logic. The Nobel prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman lectured on the finer points of heuristics and biases in human psychology. The Power Point presentations were full of math equations and complex charts. Yet time and again the conversation drifted towards the existential: the larger, unanswerable questions of life.

A really great article about the Singularity Summit, where some very smart people come together to discuss the possibility, and implications, of an artificial intelligence technological singularity. There is a focus in the article on Ray Kurweil, the most vocal and visible proponent of the merging of human beings with machine intelligences.

I’ve read a couple of Kurweil’s books, and while there are some really interesting insights in them, I think in other areas he’s simply blinded by his own overwhelming desire not to die. A perfectly understandable desire, but it clouds his objectivity to a degree. To Kurzweil, the Singularity has to happen in the next several decades because that’s all the natural lifespan he has left, and if he’s to take advantage of its promise of greatly extended life—and perhaps true immortality—then that has to be the timeframe.

Personally, I believe a true AI is a long way off—it’s not going to be just a function of computational power, but something more ineffable, harder to define and quantify, and therefore much harder to program.

Read the full article at theverge.com.

Singapore’s Ong & Ong has a recognisable look, one that absorbs urban Singapore’s sumptuous colonial history and modernises it.

Great design, and I especially love the gigantic spiral staircase.

See more pictures at homedesignfind.com.

Really nice design effort. I love it when someone takes the time to make everything work together so perfectly to support a brand.

See more at serifsandsans.com.

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim novels. (Reviews of the first three are here, here, and here).

Devil Said Bang is another fine entry in the series, living up to the high standards created in the earlier installments.

Some slight spoilers follow, so if you haven’t read the first three books, go read them right now before reading this post.

When we last saw James Stark, aka Sandman Slim, he’d recently defeated the warped pseudo-angels known as the Kissi at the gates of Heaven, crushing them between the Legions of Hell and the Armies of God. All Stark wants when it’s over was to get back to LA and his girlfriend Candy so they canget naked and break more furniture.

Lucifer, having grown tired of dealing with all of the bullshit in Hell and wanting to reconcile with God, splits town and leaves Stark in charge as the new Lucifer. It’s a job he doesn’t want, since ruling Hell largely involves endless bureaucratic meetings about zoning, construction, and politics, and avoiding the servants who wander into his rooms unannounced. It doesn’t help matters that at least half of the denizens of Hell want him dead and are enthusiastically trying to make that happen.

He escapes from Hell and makes his way back to the real LA, but finds it almost as bad as the place he just left. People are being murdered by the ghost of a little girl with a penchant for knives, he comes across an ancient weapon that’s almost too dangerous for anyone in the universe to handle, and uncovers a plot to rewrite the rules of reality itself into something that’s even less appetizing than Hell.

The writing is Kadrey’s trademark blistering prose—hardboiled, evocative, laugh-out-loud funny, and at times strangely touching.

Highly recommended.

Yeah, okay, I really am this kind of typeface geek. (I got the bug from my wife, who’s a graphic designer.)

Read it all at smokingdesigners.com.

This modern day re-interpretation of the 300SL grand tourer convertible is a return to the speedy, striking Mercedes-Benz of yesteryear. Sharing the same design DNA as its predecessor, the modern vision maintains the characteristic gullwing doors, elongated nose, low roof, wide stance and polished… well… everything… for visual drama only a Merc can pull off!

Drool.