A guy in Boston took 3,000 photos over the course of three days and then stitched them together into this excellent stop-motion video:

The music is “Dry Lips,” by Lightspeed Champion.

[via The Big Noob, again.]

Starting on April 1, the city of São Paulo, Brazil, began strictly enforcing its ban on many kinds of outdoor advertising, particularly billboards. A photographer named Tony de Marco has been chronicling the rollback, and his Flickr set is beautiful and amazing.

The Flickr set is here.

[via The FontFeed.]

Happy new year, and apologies for the extended break. I was both busy and lazy during the holidays, and now I’m waist-deep in my first-ever New York apartment search. I’ve lived in New York since 1987, but this is the first time I’ve ever actually had to look for a place. After a decade in a rent-stabilized 400-square-foot studio on a great Upper West Side block a few yards from Riverside Park, I’m planning to move downtown in the next month or two, probably to the East Village. I spent most of the weekend racing around looking at apartments in a few downtown neighborhoods, and I actually found a couple of places that I’d be happy to live in. I’m hoping to score one of those places in the next few days.

I have a big backlog of cool links and other material that I’ve been meaning to post. I’m going to be swamped this week, too, but I’m planning to get back to a more regular posting schedule by next weekend.

I’ve got apartments on the brain, so for now I’ll leave you with a link to Architecture of Density, an amazing series of Hong Kong images by the photographer Michael Wolf. Here’s a brief description of the project from Wolf’s site:

One of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world, Hong Kong has an overall density of nearly 6,700 people per square kilometer. The majority of its citizens live in flats in high-rise buildings. In Architecture of Density, Wolf investigates these vibrant city blocks, finding a mesmerizing abstraction in the buildings’ facades.

The photographs are on display through February 26 at Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco.

Here’s the coolest thing I’ve seen online in weeks: an astonishing eight-and-a-half-minute reel in which an incredibly agile young man demonstrates his skills at parkour, a physical discipline of French origin that’s equal parts extreme sport, urban dance, and life philosophy. Parkour really took off in Europe a few years ago, thanks partly to a fantastic 2002 promo ad for the BBC that starred the founder of parkour, David Belle, as a man who traverses dozens of physical obstacles—roofs, walls, fire escapes, people—as he rushes home to watch his favorite BBC1 shows.

The dude in the video below is apparently Russian or Latvian. You can watch the video here (a decent-quality Flash version) or here (a lower-quality streaming version). The first two or three minutes are a little slow, but then it really takes off. The bleak postcommunist landscape is somehow the perfect setting for this guy’s amazingly graceful moves.

Lots more info about parkour here.

At the end of the night on Wednesday, after drinking here with this person and this person and this person, among others, I worked my way to the 14th Street 1/2/3 stop to wait for the train to take me uptown. After peering south down the express track and seeing no evidence of an approaching train, I reached into my man purse for my iPod … and it promptly slipped from my fingers and down onto the tracks:

I wasn’t about to jump down to retrieve it without being absolutely sure I’d be able to get back up again very quickly. I’ve seen the occasional news stories about New Yorkers who’ve jumped down to the tracks to fetch a dropped cellphone only to be crushed by several thousand tons of high-speed metal. I don’t want the end of my life to serve as a cautionary tale about modern man’s dangerously misguided worship of technology. I just like listening to music on my iPod.

So I stood there for a few minutes pondering what to do. I decided I’d wait until right after the next express train left the station and then recruit a couple of strong men to spot me as I jumped down. I waited five minutes, then ten, before realizing that all express trains were apparently being routed to the local track. And then I spotted my opportunity: A very tall man, maybe six-foot-six, walked by with a burly friend. I approached them and sheepishly asked if they’d help me up from the tracks after I’d retrieved my iPod. But without any prompting from me, the tall guy simply jumped down to the tracks, grabbed the iPod, and hoisted himself back up. I thanked him, and as he and his friend started to walk away, I pulled out my wallet so I could give him a twenty or something. But he refused. Thanks, iPod Man, whoever you are.

According to Work magazine’s Work Blog, which is where I found it, the detourned New York subway map below was created by an artist named Marc Grubstein, who actually distributed it to unsuspecting New York tourists a few years back. I wish I had a high-res copy of this.

I was planning just to write a short post about the curiosity at right, a 12-sided Rubik’s-style puzzle called a Megaminx. I’ve had one of these things stowed away in a box for more than 20 years, and I stumbled across it a few weeks ago. My Megaminx is in its solved state, but I doubt this means I ever knew how to solve it. I think I acquired this thing toward the end of the early-’80s Rubik’s Cube fad, when I was 12 or 13, and by then I had already gotten interested in other things. Like, um, boobs and stuff.

Anyway, I was looking for a couple of good Rubik’s-related links for this post, and on the official Rubik’s Cube site I discovered a recent Manchester News story about the maverick architect Will Alsop’s plans for an 80-mile-long, 15-mile-wide hypermodern “super city” that would run from coast to coast in Northern England. Alsop’s plans for downtown Manchester include a “50-metre teddy bear” and “a revolving building shaped like a Rubik’s cube puzzle”:

Urbis, Manchester’s Centre for Urban Culture, is hosting a SuperCity exhibit. The Manchester News story explains that the Rubikian building, conceived to be a cinema, will probably never be built: “Mancunians needn’t start writing protest letters just yet. Urbis said the bear-and-cube picture was simply an image chosen to get people thinking creatively. And the city council said it had no plans to act on the ideas….”

You can buy all sorts of unusual Rubik’s-style puzzles here.