While driving through Dallas, I stopped to visit the museum in the old Texas Book Depository building from which Lee Harvey Oswald took a shot (or two, or three) at John F. Kennedy. Two X marks have been etched into the asphalt, marking the locations where the president was hit. I was fascinated to see tourists running out into the road to have their pictures taken while standing on an X.
The Book Depository looks especially good to me in infra-red
The ruthlessly modern, official Kennedy memorial, by architect Philip Johnson, is located just a couple of blocks away, but relatively few people seem to go there, perhaps because they are more excited by the guilty thrill of an assassination site which shamelessly admits what it is.
Another possibility is that Johnson’s memorial is shunned because it looks like a giant urinal. (Just my opinion of course. YMMV.)
Boing Boing Video, Offworld, and Boing Boing Gadgets have been on the scene at the Global Game Jam in various cities around the world, and we'll be bringing you some fun post-Jam documentary LOLs next week. For now, check out this meta Flickr photoset, which contains lots of sleepy developers, half-consumed energy drinks, and funny things people think up when they're hyperconnected and under-slept -- international dance-offs, for example.
Update: Here's the link for their liveblogging -- fun stuff afoot.
Below, Jolon writes:
Hey Xeni! We're at the site of the Global Game Jam in Costa Rica, and all the teams are going strong! We have a few casualties curled up in a corner behind me, but for the most part people haven't slept, or did so for 15 minutes sitting in front of their chairs before jerking awake and getting back to rocking their virtual world in the short time left.
With only 27 short sleepless hours ahead of them, everyone is surprisingly energized. We have had continuous communication with the other locations around the world via webcams and projectors everywhere, which has been a lot of fun. There have been Macarena dance-offs between Costa Rica and the rest of the world, we lost a contest with Brazil, but Scotland gave us a 10 for our efforts.
We polished off some giant tubs of Gallo Pinto and huevos revueltos earlier, and now people are just trying to push through with an unending stream of Sobe Adrenalin Rush (*cough* sponsors Thank you Sobe!)
-jgb 12.04.29 pm Saturday January 31st, 2009
Offices of Schematic, Costa Rica
PLaza Roble, Escazu, Costa Rica
Boing Boing reader Joe Sabia says he's created the first ever interactive photo hunt on YouTube. "There are 30 levels to the game, recapping all the big nominees for the oscars. 64 videos in all. i made use of youtube's annotations... thought you would enjoy." The subject matter may or may not be something that interests you, but I loved this clever and effective use of a mass-market web service feature (annotations) for a purpose other than the one for which that feature was originally developed.
Even this very humble shack in Louisiana looks mysteriously beautiful when the visible spectrum is blocked. If we had infra-red sunglasses, the world might appear a lot more pleasant than in its more usual shades of dull-brown, muddy-green, and dirt-gray.
My friend Richard Kadrey introduced me to infra-red photography. Sensors on digital cameras can detect infra-red, but normally are shielded from it by a protective filter that resides as a thin layer over the chip. You can hack a camera by removing the layer, but it is easier to buy a Fuji IS-1, which is infra-red-ready. If you use a lens filter that blocks the visible frequencies, the camera displays an image that consists of infra-red transposed into the visible spectrum.
Vegetation reflects almost all light below red, and thus appears “white.” Conversely, the upper atmosphere does not refract infra-red, and thus a blue sky appears “black.” An unexpected effect is that most fabric dyes reflect infra-red, so that a crowded sidewalk appears to be populated entirely by angelic people dressed in white.
During 2007 I drove across the country and took a bunch of infra-red photographs. The Southern states looked especially good, because they contain so much vegetation.
Yesterday on Boing Boing Gadgets:
• Samsung shoved 32GBs into a single stick of RAM.
• We examined some multi-chromatic electromagnetic chart porn.
• Pixel art makes good (if illegible) book jackets.
• Brownlee was nostalgic for the days of Prodigy and the <s> emoticon.
• Swaying in the wind, sixteen fabric inflatable robots.
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made out in the Macintosh Dating Game.
• We tried to formulate a question to ask sci-fi writers that would, fifty years from now, juxtapose the actual path of future technology with our own subconscious expectations of which way that path will wind. That won't make a lot of sense, so just read the post.
• Beschizza broke rocks with a hammer made of engine parts.
• The BBC got punked into believing in a magical cell phone created by Oompa Loompas.
• We looked at some cool wallets made from cassette tapes.
• We argued bitterly about the merits of a Space Invaders watch that doesn't actually play Space Invaders.
• Kittens rode a Roomba around the room.
• A clockwork trilobyte crawled out of the wreckage of the post-apocalypse.
• We jumped to our feet and applauded the world's first vertical backflip on a Big Wheel.
And more besides. Come read us!
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