Tomorrow is Obscura Day, coordinated by the team behind Atlas Obscura, “a compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica,” with interesting events planned in places around the world.

In Brooklyn, New York, for example, you can join expeditions to explore Dead Horse Bay and the “slew of wacky trash from eras past” or go underground and explore the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel. Or, drive from Brooklyn to Pennsylvania to sound ringing rocks.

You can find explorations taking place tomorrow around the globe on the full Obscura Day list. (And if you know of a curious place, you can add it to the Atlas.)

So whether you venture like John Priscu beneath Antarctic ice (his PopTech 2008 talk), or closer to your neighborhood, we hope your weekend adventures are full of moments “where the world briefly reveals itself to you,” like the narrator’s encounter with butterflies in this story from Anthony Doerr at PopTech 2009:

At PopTech 2009, artist-programmer Zach Lieberman explained why he thinks “artistic practice is a form of R&D for humanity,” connecting technology, human interactions, and breathing.

Zach stopped by the PopTech Brooklyn office last week to tell us about his recent inspirations (video), and spoke at last weekend’s SxSW Interactive Festival (blog post on his presentation) about the

Do you think, like Zach, that an open mouth (from wonder) is the pathway to someone’s heart?

At PopTech 2009, artist-programmer Zach Lieberman explained why he thinks “artistic practice is a form of R&D for humanity,” connecting technology, human interactions, and breathing.

Zach stopped by the PopTech Brooklyn office last week to tell us about his recent inspirations (video), and spoke at last weekend’s SxSW Interactive Festival (blog post on his presentation) about the

Do you think, like Zach, that an open mouth (from wonder) is the pathway to someone’s heart?

For the past few weeks, along with you, PopTech staff has been reading Connected, the book PopTech 2009 speaker James Fowler co-authored with Nicholas Christakis (find the book on Better World Books or through an independent bookseller on Indie Bound).

Tell us: what did you find curious, alarming, or fascinating in Connected?

Please leave your questions for James in the comments, and let us know some of the parts you found especially interesting.

Four things I found particularly relevant:

- Some of the research in the book is becoming known as the “your-friends’-friends-can-make-you-fat” effect; this indirect influence is called hyperdyadic spread.

- We have heard, thought, and considered exhaustively the success of Barack Obama’s political campaign; the twist in chapter six of Connected:

Obama’s campaign was a historical milestone in all kinds of ways, but the most revolutionary way may not have been its fund-raising. Many have commented on Obama’s remarkable ability to connect with voters, but even more impressive was his ability to connect voters to each other.

- In chapter nine we learn that social networks are self-annealing. “They can close up around their gaps, in the same way that the edges of a wound come together.”

- The final pages return to the underlying overall theme, that networks facilitate contagion as well as altruism, but that’s not to say networks accelerate charity or even, perhaps, microdonations without befriending the group or individual; “We would rather give a gift to a friend who will never repay us than to give a gift to a stranger who will.”

Here is James’s talk at PopTech 2009:

and an update from James in February 2010 about the danger of not thinking of ourselves within networks:

Please leave questions and thoughts in the comments below.

Know a great book we should read together in 2010? Drop us a recommendation: hello [at] poptech [dot] org

Yesterday, artist and computer programmer Zach Lieberman came by the PopTech Brooklyn office—it’s actually right down the hall from his working space—to tell us what projects he’s worked on recently.

Last October, Zach spoke at PopTech about his EyeWriter Initiative, “a low-cost eye-tracking apparatus & custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes.”

Look for Zach’s PopTech talk next week; for now, more on his recent travels and inspirations:

Zach will be speaking at SxSW this Saturday morning on a panel (details) about openFrameworks, an open-source c++ library “designed to assist the creative process by providing a simple and intuitive framework for experimentation.”

I’ll be at the Interactive part of SxSW this weekend (do @poptech or leave a comment if you’d like to meet up and talk about PopTech) attending panels on the SXSW Greater Good Programming track.

Can you think of other ways to use Zach’s technologies? What are some of your recent inspirations?

The 2010 Shorty Awards had some fun with Twitter community conventions on Wednesday night at TheTimesCenter in New York—highlights below include financial celebrity (and Shorty Award Winner) Suze Orman pressing a caller for why he would want to buy Twitter and the serious note that ended the evening, awarding the use of Twitter in Haiti:

What do you think should be rewarded and acknowledged in the Twitter community?

Nick Bilton thinks about the future of storytelling and media as Lead Technology Reporter for The New York Times “Bits” blog (see his post today on controversial British online copyright laws), and he spoke at PopTech 2009 about what’s next for journalism and why multitasking is important:

Yesterday, I visited Nick at the NYT, finding out how his NYU class is using sensors, how his book (I Live in the Future: & Here’s How it Works) research is going, and why he thinks everyone has a social responsibility to report the news:

What do you think about the public’s involvement with reporting the news; are using sensors to collect data an inevitable future journalism practice?

Our PopTech Social Innovation Fellows are a very busy group—here’s some of their recent news (nominations are open for next year’s class, please help us find the 2010 PopTech Fellows by nominating now):

Emily Pilloton of Project H Design has been eating pie (recap) from PieLab in Alabama,

Flickr image from Project H Design.

and the Design Revolution Road Show Airstream is on its way right now to Savannah, Georgia. You can help Project H Design win funding from the Pepsi Refresh project by voting for their rural North Carolina design program in the next two days.

Also in the running for funding, Jason Aramburu of re:char is a finalist in the Unreasonable Institute’s summer incubator program. You can fund his attendance through the Be Unreasonable site during the next 25 days.

Worth Noting

Hayat Sindi’s Diagnostics For All has been granted exclusive rights to microfluidic technologies developed in George Whitesides’ lab at Harvard Univeristy.

FrontlineSMS founder Ken Banks is on his way to the MENA Women’s Leadership and Technology Development Conference in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), that “aims to help women innovators from the MENA region take their causes/projects to the next level through social media and emerging online tools.”

At Thursday’s Greener Gadgets Conference in NY, Eben Bayer talked about Ecovative’s material that “can be molded into custom shapes…unlike some bioplastics, the material doesn’t require food crops.”

In Nairobi, PopTech friends at frog design are helping with the launch of the iHub, a social innovation coworking space that Erik Hersman and the Ushahidi team are launching with the Nairobi tech community in early March.

Applications are open for Abby Falik’s Global Citizen Year until May, the priority application deadline is March 15th. Find out more and see the video.

We just found this great video from PopTecher Jerry Smith of Peter Durand, better known as @alphachimp, who creates large, colorful visuals as talks happen on the PopTech stage and during the PopTech Social Innovation Fellow training.

In the video, Peter explains the difference between the new fields of graphic reporting and graphic facilitation—both use visuals to make learning easier and more accessible. He describes the challenge: “I turn the information into something.”

Find out why he thinks some kids can’t concentrate in school (and how graphic reporting might help those who learn visually):

For more on education and engagement, Dennis Littky spoke at PopTech 2009 about personalizing curriculum and why alternative approaches are crucial to learning.

For more of Peter’s PopTech art, see this section of the Alphachimp blog. And follow his thoughts on Twitter and on Tumblr.

Want to meet Peter and watch the art as it happens? Join us at PopTech 2010, October 20-23 in Camden, Maine.

You may have heard about Nicholas Felton’s personal Annual Report, where he compiles the sum of his yearly experiences—in 2009, 33,817 music tracks, 38 chairlift rides, $0.05 per mile to fly—into a comprehensive view of his daily life patterns. (Want to visualize your habits? Use his site Daytum.)

For PopTech 2009, Nicholas collaborated with Rob Deeming and Ken Reisman to analyze one week of The New York Times’ front pages along with the associated comments and user-generated content.

From the research, they created the report What We Are Saying, where emoticons are weighted and findings include the profound: “We Are Not the Sum of Our Headlines.”

Find out more about the report and how conversations are mapped in the report:

What do you think the report says about larger patterns of conversation around the news?