Disney theme parks were, at one time, at the forefront of experience design. Their latest plans to address wasted time in long lineups is a step in the right direction to reclaiming their former glory. Having just visited Tokyo Disney Sea last month and only being able to ride three attractions and see one show before closing time, I can attest to how ridiculous wait times are in Disney parks and how it really does ruin the fun. Reading this news makes me excited – not so much about cool new stuff happening at Disney parks, but that Walt Disney Imagineering staff are remembering how important user experience design is. Just a shame it took them so long to wake up to this fact.

What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets photo-book visually captures what 80 people from around the world with different professions typically eat in a day. Such a great concept, I really wish I had thought of it first and had $1 million to travel around the world to take people’s photos. But I digress. The book is only $29.47 on Amazon. Please buy it for me.

Long ass article on The New Yorker profiling Super Mario brainchild Shigeru Miyamoto. I didn’t actually read the whole thing – though I’m told it is indeed very interesting. To be honest, this was my first time on the New Yorker website and I was too distracted by the typography. I wish all websites could have typography as beautiful as this. Even if you don’t care to read about Miyamoto, at least check out the article to drool over the web design.

And on the topic of web design, the opposite end of the spectrum: Warner Bros’ 14 year old website for the movie Space Jam is still online, unchanged. And what a difference 14 years makes, huh? Animated GIFs, bright coloured text on equally distracting and busy repeated background images, frames? These are the cardinal sins of today’s web design practices, but if you think about it, it was all pretty freaking awesome and cutting-edge at the time. I’m not sure why Warner Bros has kept the site up after all this time or why the site suddenly resurfaced on Twitter and became instantly retweeted, shared, reblogged by everyone?

What would the world look like if a country’s population size determined its size? Well, obviously pretty different. China would take over Russia’s spot, while India gets Canada’s place. Interestingly, USA (third largest in size and population) stays the same, as does Brazil (fifth largest in size and population), as well as Ireland and Yemen. All other countries get shuffled around and instantly makes one think of how different the world would be if the map really did look like this? Larger version of the image can be found on Reddit.

Black Swan is literally the craziest movie I’ve seen in a long time. It’s been almost 21 hours since I watched it and I’m still thinking about it. Didn’t know what to expect coming into the theatre, and I left the theatre still not sure what happened — but I kinda think I may have really liked it..?

Natalie Portman must win the Oscar for Best Actress.

We all need to learn how to commit to our “passion projects” instead of always brushing them aside for “real life”. This is a great and simple list of things to do to make sure you actually go through with that one project – hobby or otherwise – that you really love but just never seem to have time for. I need to blow this list up to poster-size and hang it right in front of my home and office computers.

And if your passion project happens to be web-related, these free e-books will definitely help. Mashable compiled this list of “essential” free e-books for web designers a couple of months ago, but I haven’t had the chance to even look it over until now. First on my to-read list: Time Management for Creative People.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a link about Tokyo taxis providing free wi-fi to customers; China one-ups Japan by changing public phone booths into wifi hotspots. Makes sense, right? Mobile phones are so ubiquitous in today’s society, it’s almost wasteful to have as many phone booths around and so few public wifi hotspots. Not sure if these hotspots are free, but even for a small charge, they’d still be more useful to the average person than a phone booth.

For $140, you can turn your bathroom into a spa planetarium. This thing is amazing. Not only does it project the solar system on your bathroom ceiling as it floats in your tub, it can also light the bath water into a rose pink colour, or project a deep-sea theme into the water. This is like the technological breakthrough of the millenium. For real.

Thought this was pretty cool: Amazon’s getting more and more into the social media game and will soon allow book samples (usually the first chapter of a book) to be embedded into a Kindle-like reader similar to a YouTube player. It’s such a simple concept that it’s hard to believe Amazon is only just starting to do this now. Is it too optimistic to believe that we’ll see a lot less junk YouTube videos posted on Facebook and Tumblr and more books instead?

As many are aware by now, TIME has named its 2010 Person of the Year: Mark Zuckerberg. Now, I get it, I really do. Facebook is all over the world, blah, blah, blah, The Social Network, blah, blah, blah, social media, blah, blah, blah. But I just find the hype over Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg to be so three years ago, you know?

Why not some of these other 2010 buzz-worthy candidates? Love them or hate them, at least they seemed to be more relevant and current than The Zuckerberg.

• Conan O’Brien, for literally being the red-headed bastard child that NBC didn’t want, but everyone else loved;
• Steve Jobs, for upping the game yet again with the iPad and starting a whole new tablet movement;
• Julian Assange, for being on every nation’s government hitlist by making public what the public may actually want to know;
• Justin Bieber, for being every pre-teen girl’s dream and being a trendsetter in fresh lesbian fashion and style;
• Oh, and, I dunno, how about the German doctors who found the f’ing cure to HIV?!??

Yes, I realize both Steve Jobs and Julian Assange were candidates for TIME’s Person of the Year, but somehow both lost out to the young Facebook CEO. I really don’t get it. But then again, I’m not the editor of some out-of-touch print magazine that’s trying to increase sales by sticking the tech face du jour on the cover of its magazine. I’m just some guy with a blog that doesn’t make any money, so, really, what do I know?