By Xeni Jardin at 10:48 pm Sunday, Apr 11
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Mr.
Bruce Sterling just
dreamed up a new
Viridian Design contest. Here's what it isn't:
"Smell- o-vision" has already been suggested. Smell-o-vision is a dead medium, however, and the addition of smell to computer games seems corny and too limited.
Here's what it is:
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 10:35 pm Sunday, Apr 11
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I just saw
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and liked it rather a lot. If you are a geek, there's a high probability you will too. It's
Michel Gondry's second feature-length film, and it's been out for about a month.
Here's what Elvis Mitchell says about it in the
New York Times. Check out the trailer
here.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 8:11 pm Sunday, Apr 11
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Nice site covering a bunch of inventions that won't work because they go against one or more laws of physics. It also looks at impractical, but interesting inventions, like this water fountain that squirts water out of a replica of a woman's head.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 7:32 pm Sunday, Apr 11
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Delightful MP3 of a 1951 children's record about Gerald McBoing Boing, a boy who spoke in sound effects.
Link (Halfway down page)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:56 pm Sunday, Apr 11
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Writings on the Stall is a site that collects bathroom graffiti -- they want your submissions.
Link
(
Thanks, Jonathan!)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:12 pm Sunday, Apr 11
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Lisa rein has posted a bunch of great clips from recent Daily Shows to her blog, covering
spam,
Tyco's birthday party write-off,
Richard Clarke's appearance, and
the GOP response to the Clarke testimony.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 6:09 pm Sunday, Apr 11
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Here's a great glossary of outré kinks exemplefied in cuttin-edge Japanese pr0n.
chin chin kenkyu - (literally "study of the penis"). Chin-chin is a cute, childish term for penis. In chin-chin-kenkyu videos, average women on the street are given a lecture about the penis by some porno actors. The 'professional' will measure the penis, and describe how to make it stand up. there's lots of reaction shots of the embarrassed average women. it's kind of Benny Hill.
Link
(
via MeFi)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:32 am Sunday, Apr 11
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In 1882, astronomer David Peck Todd shot 147 consecutive plates of the transit of Venus across the sky. Now, two modern astronomers at the Lick Observatory have scanned them and turned them into a Quicktime movie -- a film "shot" years before Edison made his first moving picture. This makes me wonder if we'll be able to pull off neat tricks like improvising stereoscopic, moving, and/or panoramic images of the present at some time in the future, say by pulling thousands of moblogged images of a single event off the net and using software to interpolate and assemble them.
Spurred by a reference in one of Todd's letters in Lick's Mary Lea Shane Archives, Bill Sheehan and I found all 147 negatives, still in good condition, at the observatory. To our knowledge, this collection of photos constitutes the most complete surviving record of a historical transit of Venus.
As we looked at Todd's extensive sequence of images, we realized we could turn them into a movie. A similar thought may have occurred to Todd himself, for a number of his contemporaries were already making the first forays into chronophotography — the recording of sequential motion and the forerunner of cinematography. Indeed, Pierre Jules Janssen invented his famous photographic revolver to capture the 1874 transit of Venus.
Link
(
via /.)
Update: The Slashdot discussion points to even older examples of this, like animations of Galileo's 1613 sunspot drawings, not to mention this 1865 QTVR (Thanks, Ardes!).
