Saturday, November 20, 2010

I intend to live forever...

I suspect you may be tired of hearing about Eno's new album but he also has a companion project, Seven Sessions on a Milk Sea, consisting of weekly releases of short improvisations shot on video in Eno's London Studio.

Still on the fence about a career in science?  Perhaps these Science Cheerleaders can influence your decision.  Seriously.  And once fully engaged in your scientific career, you too can launch a paper airplane from space.  The logic of this is clear: "Somebody launched a bit of cheese out of a balloon, which we thought was a bit stupid."  That'll show 'em.

Another failure of communism: Russia seeks to regain its pre-revolutionary status of having the best lavatories.  If dog poo can power a streetlight, can astro-poo power spacecraft?

 They have a suppository for sufferers of connocting poopie.

Top 20 hard-learned lessons from 20 years of programming.  (#17 No project is ever simple.)  Which of the 6 types of software engineers are you?  (The hot-shot: "Drinks Red Bull and stacks empty cans up in his cube as some sort of offering to the God of Unmaintainable Software.")

With Xmas just around the corner, now's the time to stock up on bacon goodness.  Sweet Meats offers the Shapin' Bacon plush toy and pillow while the kids might prefer My First Bacon talking plush.
  • Intelligent Lights brings FieldView into the cloud. 
  • RealFlow is fluids and dynamics simulation software for creating visual effects for film.
  • David Meerman Scott's latest book, Real-Time Marketing & PR, is on both the NY Times' and USA Today's best sellers lists.
Deelip pulls no punches in describing the Adobe 3D PDF train wreck.  Maybe Adobe should've read this tongue-in-cheek piece about How to Piss Off Customers.  (#12, Without advance warning, drop features from the product that the customer depends on.)

Need data?  Try Infochimps where you'll find everything from a list of over 100,000 Scrabble-suitable words to the first billion digits of pi.  Listen and compare the different regional accents of English at the Speech Accent Archive.  "Please call Stella..."

Roy Lichtenstein's Ohhh... Alright... sold at auction for $42.6 million.

The recent Christie's auction of Post-War and Contemporary Art featured some awesome paintings and set some sales records.  Roy Lichtenstein's Ohhh... Alright... (above) sold for an auction record $42,642,500.  Mark Rothko's No. 18 (Brown and Black on Plum) sold for a relative bargain price of $9.6 million and Jackson Pollock's Eyes in the Heat II brought in $6.2 million.

In other auction news, Edward Tufte is auctioning his collection of rare books on 02 Dec.  You can bid on Galileo's Sidereus Nuncias for about $800,000 (I've seen the book - it's impressive) or a first edition, signed copy of Josef Albers' Interaction of Color for around $4,000.

Watch as a Saab Viggen lands, stops, and takes off again in 60 seconds.  Ogle this 360 degree interactive panorama of an Airbus A380 cockpit.   Not sure Han Solo will like this but the Millenium Falcon blueprints (including secret compartments) are now online.

 Convert any image to a cartoon with Convert to Cartoon.

Convert a YouTube video to an animated GIF using GIFSoup. Convert yourself (or a friend) into an action hero toy with Be A Doll.

In an interview with Joseph Gelmis in 1969, Stanley Kubrick talks openly about the meaning of 2001: A Space Oddyssey. "2001, on the other hand, is basically a visual, nonverbal experience. It avoids intellectual verbalization and reaches the viewer's subconscious in a way that is essentially poetic and philosophic. The film thus becomes a subjective experience which hits the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does, or painting."   The interview is quite long and quite worth the time to read.

Guitarist Adrian Belew shared insights into his music at a class conducted at the Enjoy Jazz Festival earlier this month in Germany.  Timekeeping and mathematics are at the core of his playing on tunes such as King Crimson's Frame by Frame where he and Robert Fripp start out in unision on a 14 note phrase but Fripp drops the last note so that the two phrases only synch up every 14th cycle.  This technique gets even more exciting in other tunes where the phrasing is not only rhythmically offset but played in a different key.


Back in '42 the outcome of WWII wasn't certain by any stretch of the imagination.  Perhaps that's why Life magazine's publication of maps of potential invasions of the continental U.S. are so intriguing.  If you prefer something more current, here are several nuclear war scenarios.

Fresh Balls is either one of the most elaborate faux-products on the internet or a must-have holiday stocking stuffer.

...or die trying.  ~Groucho Marx

No comments: