Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Earle H. Hagen, who not only composed the theme from the Andy Griffith Show but also whistled the familiar melody, died yesterday. He was 88 years old. From the Associated Press (photo from EarleHagen.net):
During his long musical career, Hagen performed with the top bands of the swing era, composed for movies and television, and wrote one of the first textbooks on movie composing.
He and Dick Rogers were nominated for an Academy Award for best music scoring for the 1960 Marilyn Monroe movie "Let's Make Love."
For television, he composed original music for more than 3,000 episodes, pilots and TV movies, including theme songs for "That Girl," "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C."
Richard sez, "A fan of both Fred Astaire and Michael Jackson has cut this short film in the hope of introducing new generations to Astaire and the influence he had on Jackson."
I love both Astaire and Michael Jackson. I want young people to know Astaire stuff, that is why I made this. The video features scenes from the Girl Hunt ballet in The Band Wagon (1953) starring Astaire and Cyd Charisse (those supreme legs!! The most perfect body a woman could have. So sensual, so elegant), to which MJ gave homage in his Smooth Criminal vid (also in a performance of Get Happy on the Jacksons show in the 70s as well as You Rock My World in 2001), and, as an intro, a sequence from Daddy Long Legs (1955) featuring Leslie Caron (in motion pictures, you mustn't put a coin into a jukebox in an ordinary way!).
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Police forensic artist Shawn Feeney launched an interesting side project where he's combining the faces of 64 pairs of friends into single drawings. Send him the photos and he'll hand-morph you into a single being. The project is titled BFF. From the BFF page:
I'm drawing 64 facial images of composite friends. Then I'll draw a series of composites from the composites; 32 drawings combining four faces each, 16 drawings combining eight faces each, and so on until finally there is one drawing derived from all 128 faces...
Here's the final installment in the amazing Instructables series of HOWTOs inspired by my young adult novel Little Brother. This week, it's a HOWTO on TOR, The Onion Router, a technology for increasing your privacy and anonymity when you look at the web, and for getting around censorwalls.
The Instructables folks did an amazing job with this -- and the response has been great!
When you go online, you leave tracks all over the place. You could be hanging out with friends on IM, checking out websites, or downloading music. If you live in a country where snoops are prying into what ordinary citizens do online (lke, um, the US) you want a way to cover those tracks.
If you're in school, though, then it's even worse. No matter what country you're in, chances are that your access to the internets is as snooped-on as any police state in the world.
So, how do we escape our little virtual prisons? In this Instructable, I'll tell you about something called Tor (The Onion Router.) I'll tell you how it works, and then offer some simple instructions on how to get your web browser hooked up. No more getting snooped!
dwiff says: "design:related covers a coffee table book devoted to Wacky Packages, with a forward by Art Spiegelman."
“Wacky Packages – a series of collectible stickers featuring parodies of consumer products and well-known brands and packaging–were first produced by the Topps company in 1967, then revived in 1973 for a highly successful run. In fact, for the first two years they were published, Wacky Packages were the only Topps product to achieve higher sales than their flagship line of baseball cards. The series has been relaunched several times over the years, most recently to great success in 2007.
Know affectionately among collectors as “Wacky Packs,” with artist Art Spiegelman, as a key creative force, the stickers were illustrated by such notable comics artists as Kim Deitch, Bill Griffith, Jay Lynch, and Norm Saunders.
This first-ever collection of Series One through Series Seven celebrates the 35th anniversary of Wacky Packages and is sure to amuse collectors and fans young and old. “Includes interview with Art Spiegelman and bonus pack of four rare and never-before-printed Wacky Packages stickers.” -- from publisher Abrams
In this ~9-minute video, Daniel Floyd, a professor at Savannah College of Art and Design, convincingly advances the theory that the major problem with sex in video-games is that there isn't enough sex in video games -- that video-games' failure to come to grips with sex as part of the artistic message and aesthetic in games (in addition to the hypersexualized juvenile Lara Croft/Duke Nukem stuff), it can't convincingly argue that games are an actual artistic medium that deserves to be considered on the same terms as painting, literature, sculpture, film, and other media that often feature sexual material.
Link
(via Wonderland)
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
This crystal skull from the British Museum was once believed to have been ancient Aztec handiwork. Then, electron microscopes revealed that it's a fake from the mid- to late-1800s. In fact, according to National Geographic, the museum's "examinations and the fact that no such skull has ever been uncovered at an official archaeological excavation led the British Museum to extrapolate that all of the famed crystal skulls (around the world) are likely fakes." Of course, none of this should have any impact on whether you think the Indiana Jones movie sucked or not. From National Geographic:
Many believe (crystal) skulls were carved thousands or even tens of thousands of years ago by an ancient Mesoamerican civilization. Others think they may be relics from the legendary island of Atlantis or proof that extraterrestrials visited the Aztec sometime before the Spanish conquest...
Skulls were prominent in ancient Mesoamerican artwork, particularly among the Aztec, so the connection between these artifacts and these civilizations is apt.
"[I]t was a symbol of regeneration," says Michael Smith, a professor of anthropology at Arizona State University. "There were several Aztec gods that were represented by skulls, so they were probably invoking these gods. I don't think they were supposed to have specific powers or anything like that."
A group of self-described "electro-sensitives" in New Mexico say they are being discriminated against because public buildings such as libraries have Wi-Fi in them, and they claim that WI-Fi make them sick.
Arthur Firstenberg says he is highly sensitive to certain types of electric fields, including wireless Internet and cell phones.
"I get chest pain and it doesn't go away right away," he said.
Firstenberg and dozens of other electro-sensitive people in Santa Fe claim that putting up Wi-Fi in public places is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The city attorney is now checking to see if putting up Wi-Fi could be considered discrimination.
I wish someone would run a test on these electro-sensitive people by putting them in a room and then asking them to say when a Wi-Fi access point under a box in the room is on or off. Link(Thanks, Sally Airy!)
This 1 oz. video camera, meant for R/C planes, could be used for a number of fun projects.
3" x 1-1/2" x 1/2" (camera only), 1 oz. V.2 changes include: larger resolution, LCD display, rotating lens, longer battery life, and a thermal activated motion detector. Video camera includes audio, still photos, a voice recorder, USB drive, and a Webcam. Unit is small enough to mount on just about any model FlyCamOne2 micro video cameraairplane, small parkflyers, RC cars, trains, skate boards, or even a kite. Can be remotely activated using an additional servo. Videos are recorded with a resolution of 640x480 for clear playback, complete with sound, and 1280x1024 pixels for still photos. Camera lens rotates 90 degrees so you can take photos or video from multiple angles. Built-in rechargeable 200 mAh Li-Ion battery that charges via the USB port on your computer in about 1 to 1-1/2 hours.
Keep an eye-out for Make Vol. 14, which has a special section on optics. You'll learn how to make an inexpensive but powerful digital microscope that will allow you to display bacteria colonies on a video monitor, a vintage-looking opaque projector that can display artwork from books onto a wall, a model of a crazy-angled room that makes things appear to change size, and a cool kaleidoscope. Also in the issue, we'll show you how to build the following: a mesmerizing taffy pulling machine, a remote control dune buggy with a built in video camera, a dollar-store parabolic microphone, and many more fun and fascinating projects (higher res video here, M4V).
Freeman Dyson, professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, reviewed two books about global warming for the New York Review of Books. His lengthy review is loaded with fascinating insights and ideas. Here's one highlight:
At this point I return to the Keeling graph, which demonstrates the strong coupling between atmosphere and plants. The wiggles in the graph show us that every carbon dioxide molecule in the atmosphere is incorporated in a plant within a time of the order of twelve years. Therefore, if we can control what the plants do with the carbon, the fate of the carbon in the atmosphere is in our hands. That is what Nordhaus meant when he mentioned "genetically engineered carbon-eating trees" as a low-cost backstop to global warming. The science and technology of genetic engineering are not yet ripe for large-scale use. We do not understand the language of the genome well enough to read and write it fluently. But the science is advancing rapidly, and the technology of reading and writing genomes is advancing even more rapidly. I consider it likely that we shall have "genetically engineered carbon-eating trees" within twenty years, and almost certainly within fifty years.
Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its grasp. Keeling's wiggles prove that a big fraction of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes within the grasp of biotechnology every decade. If one quarter of the world's forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by half in about fifty years.
It is likely that biotechnology will dominate our lives and our economic activities during the second half of the twenty-first century, just as computer technology dominated our lives and our economy during the second half of the twentieth. Biotechnology could be a great equalizer, spreading wealth over the world wherever there is land and air and water and sunlight. This has nothing to do with the misguided efforts that are now being made to reduce carbon emissions by growing corn and converting it into ethanol fuel. The ethanol program fails to reduce emissions and incidentally hurts poor people all over the world by raising the price of food. After we have mastered biotechnology, the rules of the climate game will be radically changed. In a world economy based on biotechnology, some low-cost and environmentally benign backstop to carbon emissions is likely to become a reality.
Andrew Hearst of Panopticist has a great post about the surprising origins of a movie I love, Martin Scorsese's After Hours (1985)
Much of the plot setup and some of the dialogue in Martin Scorsese’s excellent 1985 film After Hours–a significant portion of the movie’s first 30 minutes, in fact–were brazenly lifted from “Lies,” a 1982 NPR Playhouse monologue by Joe Frank, the great L.A.-based radio artist who’s gotten a lot of love here on Panopticist. Joe Frank never received official credit for his contributions, and he appears to have been paid a generous amount of money to settle the plagiarism suit and keep everything quiet. It’s possible that this scandal was reported in the film-industry trade press around the time of the film’s release, but neither Nexis nor Google reveal evidence of any media coverage. I learned of the similarities in 2004 or 2005 through chatter on the unofficial Joe Frank mailing list. The closest thing I’ve found to a reference in a traditional media outlet is in this March 2000 Joe Frank profile in Salon, which mentions that Frank was “paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film (which he won’t name) that plagiarized his dialogue.”
Hearst includes a link to Frank's entire 11 minute monologue. Link
Once again, Derrick Bostrom of Bostworld provided an invaluable service to the world by scanning a vintage educational filmstrip and uploading it to YouTube. (Here's the previous filmstrip he converted).
Cathedral Filmstrips’ “Bicycle Safety” is kind of like a “Mechanized Death” for the Saturday morning cartoons crowd. Not gory by any means, but definitely designed for extreme impact – in a Saturday morning cartoons kind of way. The art itself is entirely in the style of the classic matinee short. The harassed citizens pop their eyes and flap their tongues comically. The foolish children show their agony with stars, corkscrews and tweety birds. But the underlying message remains grim: those deviating from cycling best practices face grievous injury, possible death and certain ridicule.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
The work of artist Roberto Osti, whose paintings are often featured in Scientific American magazine, is part of the 2008 Scientific Illustrators Exhibition in Bologna, Italy, sponsored by the Association Européenne des Illustrateurs Médicaux et Scientifiques. To honor Osti, Scientific American posted a lovely slideshow of his work. From Scientific American:
Published in July 1995, this watercolor illustration (above) depicts several deep-sea hunters and their prey, including [from left to right] dragonfish, the bioluminescent and bell-shaped Colobonema, the vertically hanging paralepidids, the tentacled Bathyphysa, and the curled-up eelpout attempting to avoid the hake.
Link to Scientific American article, Link Osti's site
During his long musical career, Hagen performed with the top bands of the swing era, composed for movies and television, and wrote one of the first textbooks on movie composing.
A group of self-described "electro-sensitives" in New Mexico say they are being discriminated against because public buildings such as libraries have Wi-Fi in them, and they claim that WI-Fi make them sick.
