Clinging to retaining walls built in the 19th and early 20th centuries these Hong Kong wall trees are impressive.

Because pizza-eating turtles dominated my childhood and I enjoy nonsense: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Noses is my new favorite silly thing on the internet.

I previously featured artist Janet Echelman’s string sculptures which create an aurora borealis-like effect – now here’s the real thing, gussied up with time-lapse photography, by way of TSO Photography.

Spike Jonze: Mourir Auprès de Toi on Nowness.com.

Director Spike Jonze and designer Olympia Le-Tan made all kinds of charming, stop-motion goodness happen. Watch Macbeth’s skeleton get all wound up over Mina Harker and the trouble that ensues.

Via Brain Pickings.

Artist Janet Echelman weaves sculptural installations made from string. Then she hangs them from buildings and poles in public space so they can interact with the environment and create a stunning effect that invokes aurora borealis. She honed her weaving skills with local fishermen in India and collaborates with aeronautical and mechanical engineers, architects, lighting designers, landscape architects, and fabricators to create these large-scale installations. Read this article on Inhabitat for more photos and info on Janet Echelman’s work.

Sitting up in the northern end of the East River is North Brother Island. In 1885 Riverside Hospital moved there in order to treat patients under quarantine. Since then it’s also served as housing for WWII veterans and as a drug rehabilitation center for adolescent offenders. It has been abandoned since 1963. These stunning shots of the island as it stands today come from The Kingston Lounge, who runs through the North Brother Island’s fascinating history.

I’m really liking these tracks from the Alabama Shakes off their debut EP. In the words of Everybody Taste:

Fans of sweaty heart-on-the-sleeve soul music and southern-fried rock will find a wealth of musical riches here from the Brittany Howard-led Athens, Alabama group.

A gnarly serpent by way of this list of photographs from National Geographic. Dig that blue-black water. Evil things kick it in that water.

As computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets and public spaces of the city, information processing becomes embedded in and distributed throughout the material fabric of everyday urban space. Pervasive/ubiquitous computing evangelists herald a coming age of urban information systems capable of sensing and responding to the events and activities transpiring around them. Imbued with the capacity to remember, correlate and anticipate, this “sentient” city is envisioned as being capable of reflexively monitoring our behavior within it and becoming an active agent in the organization of our daily lives.

You can read more about the Sentient City Survival Kit here. I like the camera-blocking umbrella. Make a shirt that jams the video/photo/messaging capabilities of nearby mobile devices and I’m sold. I’ll most likely just head for the hills when the sentient city comes online. If hills still exist in the near-future.

Here’s some Bahamian soul courtesy of Wendell Stuart & The Downbeaters to help mellow you out on your Labor Day afternoon. I discovered these tracks via Aquarium Drunkard, who found them courtesy of Ghost Capital (who did us all the favor of ripping the entire LP and sharing it. Go get it.)

Wendell Stuart & The Downbeaters – “Always Something There To Remind Me”

Wendell Stuart & The Downbeaters – “Hey Jude”