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Sat Jun 27 20:39:06 EDT 2009
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Robot Girlfriend - Sega has developed a 15-inch tall robot girlfriend, who can identify human heads and will kiss them on command. But they seem to be licensing it from WowWee, who call it Femisapien.
Parents keep child's sex a secret. - A pair of Swedish parents are keeping their child's ("Pop") sex a secret. The parents believe that gender is a social construction, and they want to keep Pop from being placed into any categories based on his/her gender. Psychologists, medical specialists, and other researchers disagree on how this decision may affect the child, and some believe this secret is similar to the one David Reimer's family kept from him. Via Feministing.
Tools made in German Prisons - Escape and other tools made by inmates in German prisons, from the photographer Marc Steinmetz. My favorite is the functional battery-powered shotgun, although the hand-made toaster is a testament to the love of a decent breakfast. via.
40 Years Ago... - In the heart of Greenwich Village, New York City at 1:20 a.m. on Saturday, June 28, 1969 eight New York City police raided a gay bar, the Stonewall Inn (later deemed a National Historic Landmark). "As the police raided the bar, a crowd of four hundred patrons gathered on the street outside and watched the officers arrest the bartender, the doorman, and a few drag queens [see: police arrest reports]. The crowd, which eventually grew to an estimated 2,000 strong, was fed up."* Thus began three days of rioting and the advent of the modern gay rights movement. In honor of the Stonewall Riots, many gay pride celebrations around the world are held during the month of June, including this week(end)'s NYC Pride, celebrating 40 years of Stonewall's impact on seeking to bring civil rights to all, including the LGBT community. Happy Pride!
Charlie Rose: The Legacy of the Stonewall Riots of 1969 [video | 57:21].
Remembering Stonewall [radio documentary | 38:50]
Jim Fouratt talks with Stephen Colbert the significance of the Stonewall riots for the gay rights movement and his frustration with Barack Obama [video | 06:00].
And ...rawrrr... Love Ball Marks 'Stonewall 40' with Skin and Hippies in Times Square.
Social Documentarian - Daryl Peveto is a freelance photographer and videographer with a passion for social documentary storytelling. Over the last few years he has worked on issues ranging from American nomads to bullfighting in Tijuana to Antarctica: The White Continent to the black market economies of Peru. His photoblog is a sketchbook for story ideas and visual explorations.
Mr SuperNatural - The Book of Genesis illustrated by Robert Crumb. Extracts of Crumb's latest work, years in the making and to be published in October, are serialized in the French cultural weekly Telerama during this summer (warning: bad interface, text in French). Short interview with the author here.
A scan (in English) from the New Yorker preview can be seen here, but with some images messed up in addition to being illegal.
Tree People! - Amazing Pooktre Sculptures. A gallery of living art. Previously. (with bonus extra Previouslies inside!)
Man-made earthquakes - There are worries that a new geothermal project in California may cause earthquakes (nice animation from NYT and here's the full article). These worries are not just theoretical, its happened before...
Enhanced Geothermal Systems (dry rock geothermal) are blamed for increased seismicity:
"The HDR project in Basel, Switzerland was suspended after it caused an earthquake. On 8 December 2006, only 8 days after water injection started, an event occurred measuring 3.4 on the Richter Scale with the focus at the bottom of the HDR borehole. The eventprompted concern from local residents. Water injection was immediately stopped, but minor events continued. Further tremors were recorded on 6 January (measuring 3.1) and 16 January 2007 (3.2)."
Short (12min) video segment from the California PBS science show Quest on geothermal in California (lots of details on EGS and California geothermal).
Flake and chips, thanks - Our new silicon overlords might end up carbon based after all.
The Videography of Michael Jackson - We had a great Obit post yesterday and a great post on the music video work of Michel Gondry. Why not join the two? After all, he was one of the great pioneers and innovators of the format and worked with some of the great film and art directors there were... Here's The complete videography of Michael Jackson to enjoy for your weekend. Actual videos inside:
You know the drill. Some are classic. Some have aged. Some are silly. Some transcend the awesome. But no matter what, anyone can acknowledge that Michael Jackson used the music video to maximum effect for creative output, marketing, spectacle, and even some pesky world issues.
1979
"Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough" by Nick Saxton
"Rock with You" by Bruce Gowers
1980
"She's Out of My Life" by Bruce Gowers
1983
"Billie Jean" by Steve Barron
"Beat It" by Bob Giraldi
"Say Say Say" by Bob Giraldi
"Thriller" by John Landis
1987
"Bad" by Martin Scorsese
"The Way You Make Me Feel" by Joe Pytka
1988
"Dirty Diana" by Joe Pytka
"Man in the Mirror" by Donald Wilson
"Another Part of Me" by Patrick Kelly
"Smooth Criminal" by Colin Chilvers
"Come Together" by Jerry Kramer and Colin Chilvers
1989
"Leave Me Alone" by Jim Blashfield and Paul Diener
"Liberian Girl" by Jim Yukich
1991
"Black or White" by John Landis
1992
"Remember the Time" by John Singleton
"In the Closet" by Herb Ritts
"Who Is It" by David Fincher
"Jam" by Michael Jackson and David Kellogg
"Heal the World" by Joe Pytka
1993
"Give Into Me" by Andy Moharan
"Will You Be There" by Vincent Paterson
"Gone Too Soon" by Bill DiCicco
1995
"Scream" by Mark Romanek
"Childhood" by Nicholas Brandt
"You Are Not Alone" by Wayne Isham
"Earth Song" by Nicholas Brandt
1996
"They Don't Care About Us" (Prison version) by Spike Lee
"They Don't Care About Us" (Brazil version) by Spike Lee
"Stranger in Moscow" by Nicholas Brandt
1997
"Blood on the Dance Floor" by Michael Jackson and Vincent Paterson
2001
"You Rock My World" by Paul Hunter
"Cry" by Nicholas Brandt
"Ghost" By
Apologies for any poor quality vids... there was... too... many links [lies down and takes nap]
"Unquiet meals make ill digestions." --William Shakespeare, "The Comedy of Errors" - "The digested mouse generates the energy to power the trap door, sensor and an LED graphic display on the front of the table."
Transformations of the world - Giovanni Arrighi, the renowned authority in the fields of world systems analysis and historical sociology, died earlier this month. A retrospective interview on his intellectual trajectory was published in the March/April 2009 issue of New Left Review. A major international conference was held in his honour in late May in Madrid, featuring several top scholars in an exploration of the insights of Arrighi’s work.
R2D2 is funny, he is cute, and he is a fine fine actor - Raw footage from 1982 of Bill Murray doing takes for "Wired In," a never aired series on modern technological trends and innovations: "People have hands - I think that watches should have hands."
Raw footage of Bill Murray and his brother Brian Doyle-Murray at the 1976 Superbowl: Bill pretends to be a goofy Cowboys fan while Brian interviews him, confusing some fans.
Videos are in Java but switchable to Quicktime.
Giant pebbles from outer space - Stephen Hawking: "Asteroid Impacts Biggest Threat to Intelligent Life in the Galaxy" Dare I say... there's more outside.
In a world distracted by global warming, struggles in Iran, and the death of Michael Jackson, it's hard to focus on the very long-term. But it's more than likely that the Earth will experience another event like Tunguska eventually. We're really at the infancy of deflecting a hazardous near-Earth object.
Dream A Little Dream - Dreaming of Nonsense: The Evolutionary Enigma of Dream Content. Why on earth do our minds conjure up such ridiculous imagery, such inane thoughts, such spectacularly vivid and surreal landscapes, intense emotions—such narrative trash?
Related:
Interpret Your Dreams (with Dream Dictionary)
The International Association for the Study of Dreams
Pastor Urges His Flock to Bring Guns to Church - As soon as you start saying that it’s not something that Christians do, well, guns are just the foil. The issue now is the Gospel. So in a sense, it does become a crusade. Now the Gospel is at stake. Of the 40 states with right-to-carry laws, 20 allow guns in churches.
The National Rifle Association says its membership is up 30 percent since November. And several states have recently passed laws allowing gun owners to carry firearms in more places — bars, restaurants, cars and parks.
“We have a very active agenda in all 50 states,” said Chris W. Cox, legislative director of the N.R.A., widely considered the country’s most powerful lobby. “We have right-to-carry laws in over 40 states; 20 years ago, it was in just six.”
Public attitudes also seem to be turning more sympathetic to gun owners.
Music is Math is Beauty - Glenn Marshall is an Irish computer video artist and musician whose recent work has focused on audio visualization programed in the Processing language. Generally the program is left to its own devices, though his work-for-hire has more intentional design, as in his video for the Peter Gabriel song "The Nest that Sailed the Sky." Marshall has also been hired to create video for Guinness for Sky TV and the Rugby Six Nations Tournament, and a looping animation for Hermes of Paris. Marshall discusses his works with some detail on his blog. (More videos inside)
The tree-like visuals employ his ZenO process, as seen in following videos:
Music Is Math (unfinished) (3:15) first animation in Processing. Inspired by the Boards of Canada track 'Music is Math' from Geogaddi (blog post)
The 'Mandela' Variation (3:45) variation of 'Music is Math,' using Nelson Mandela's prison number as the seed value (blog post)
Music is Math (final version) (5:24) "I just let the program run till the end of the music" (blog post)
Metamorphosis (2:49) based on Boards of Canada's 'Corsair,' also from Geogaddi (blog post)
Radiohead - 'Bodysnatchers' (4:11) song from In Rainbows. Marshall's first attempt at music visualization (blog post)
Waltz from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake suite (5:45) entirely generative/audio reactive animation, i.e. no keyframing or manual input or editing (blog post)
The Nest That Sailed The Sky (test) (5:06) Music by Peter Gabriel, from his album OVO – The Millennium Show (Millennium Dome, London) (blog post)
The Nest That Sailed The Sky (final) (5:07) with three extra visual ideas from photos from the original album shoot: single cells, an empty nest, trails of red berries (blog post)
Hermes window display animation (1:06) the first of a couple of commercial projects that employed Marshall's 'zeno' animation system (blog post)
Other videos:
Marbles (1:29) an early study/realism piece - a nostalgic homage to classic computer raytracing (blog post)
Landscapes (4:49) a test made with Terragen, music by Ligeti; inspired by Kubrick and Koyaanisqatsi cinematography (blog post)
Latte-mation (1:15) a test done with 3ds Max and After Effects (blog post)
Butterfly (10:00) Marshall's first short film, commissioned by the Irish Film Board in 2002, which made rounds at film fests (blog post)
The Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus (4:45) a short animated guide to Buddhist breath meditation, with narration adapted from a talk given by Ajahn Brahm (blog post)
Animated Guinness from Fractals (1:26) "One of my few minor claims in life is the first to animate Guinness for TV, and all using math" (blog post)
The Red Rose of Newcastle (2:58) a short film commissioned for a regional BBC series called Days Like This (blog post)
Work with Peter Gabriel:
The Drop (3:08) first music video, for Peter Gabriel, made in 2003 - made on his own time, but eventually included on an official DVD, and paid for his time. The song is from the album Up (blog post)
Quiet Steam (6:27) second video for Peter Gabriel, a b-side track from Digging In The Dirt (blog post)
Visuals for 'No Self Control' (live recording) (4:38) which consists lots of Processing work (procedural animation) and sequences from some of ‘Butterfly’ (blog post)
Glenn Marshall is now working on two projects: a Graphic Synthesizer program that uses the same principles of wave synthesis but to generate changing images, (blog posts 1, 2, 3 and Graphic Synthesiser Demo (3:51), 4, 5) and an iPhone App (blog post 1, 2 and iPhone App Test #1 video (1:06))
"There was nothing in the rules of the competition to say that rigged photos were banned. We pushed the clichés to the limit." - This year's winner of the Grand Prix Paris Match du Photoreportage, a stark B&W expose of student poverty in Strasourg, is a hoax.
Type Tart Cards - Tart cards [NSFW] are the means by which many London prostitutes advertise their services. Step into almost any central London phone box and you can contemplate up to 80 cards inviting you to be tied, teased, spanked or massaged.... [Wallpaper Magazine] asked designers – from students to superstars – to find the tart hiding in every typeface and create their own graphic numbers.... all 450 cards can be viewed here. [NSFW]
In among this plethora of brilliant, witty graphic designs we would like to highlight the serious issue that lies at the heart of the world of tart cards – the plight of trafficked women in the sex industry. It is a subject touched eloquently on by Mike Dempsey of Studio Dempsey, who is a volunteer at the Helen Bamber Foundation which helps rebuild lives broken by human rights violations. While our exhibition is an ode to the graphic qualities of the tart card phenomena, Dempsey's design is a pertinent reminder of the sinister world that lies beneath every card.Read Mike Dempsey's letter and design.