June 20, 2007
Love them Factories
Koujou Moe. Photographs of factories from a blog, Koujou-moe na hibi (Factory-Loving Days) (Japanese). Also available in book form.
See also, Deep Inside by Joe Nishizawa.
Video Editing on the Net
Ten years ago, video editing (especially nonlinear editing) was the realm of professionals [youtube]. An Avid System cost close to a $100k or you could rent an editing suite by the hour. i-Movie, and mini-dv camcorders lowered the price barrier quite considerably. Times have changed. By 2007, all you need to cut video is flash. Will Youtube's new video editing application stir things up? Maybe Walter Murch ought to have a look.
Hiyaaaa!
Bangcook
Tastier tofu courtesy of Shiok Food, a fantastic Thai cooking blog run by chef and restauranteur madman.
Chip, seconds before Dale kills him ...
The best five-second video on the Internet.
Safe for work; watch speaker volume.
M Is For Montage
How to make a film like Hitchcock would have. Also, a sociological perspective on guilt and innocence in Hitchcock's work - rituals of liminality (pdf). (via)
PepsiBoo!
The entire sequence takes 26 seconds. There’s too much to take in. Or, you don’t know what you’ve taken in, and how deep the impression has been.
The Flow, by Paul Myerscough
That image gives way, quickly and successively, to a series of others: a young black woman smoking, smiling at the camera through a reinforced glass window; three teenage girls in a car, laughing, filmed through the windscreen; a whip-pan to the American flag, pierced by sunlight, drifting in the breeze; a DIY programme on a pixellated TV screen; a ride-along shot of a family in an oversized golf buggy; two different angles of a man alone in a lecture theatre; two more of traffic at night; a woman, suspicious of the camera, wearing a polka-dot dress and partly obscured by glassy reflections; a blurry shot of a long windowless corridor; a man wearing shades in a crowded street; a woman pursued down the cosmetics aisle of a supermarket; and, as Curtis comes to the end of his three short sentences, a woman seen jogging in the wing-mirror of a moving car. The entire sequence takes 26 seconds. There’s too much to take in. Or, you don’t know what you’ve taken in, and how deep the impression has been.
Zombie Blue
Monster By Mail Get yours today! (What? You expected to get Pepsi?)
Pao, right in the Kisser
"Honor Your Process," read some of the signs held by protesters in a recent school board meeting here in sunny Madison, Wisconsin. They were protesting naming a new elementary school after General Vang Pao, Secret Army fighter during the Vietnam war, and ex-patriot of Laos after the Communist government took over in 1975. Amidst local Hmong leaders' charges of racism against the Hmong community (Wisconsin is no stranger to these charges, as Mefi featured here), protesters pointed to the recent arrest of Pao in California, charged with weapons trafficking to support a revolution against the government of Laos. The school board ended up agreeing with the protesters, and have returned to their original list of finalists for the elementary school's name.
Immortality in a Pill
UNBELIEVABLE??? But this invention was invented by the famous Alex Chiu himself. And if you can't trust Alex Chiu technology, you can't trust nobody's technology. Alex Chiu (previously) is back with Gorgeouspil, a pill that turns a user prettier each time it's taken.
Thomas Barnett draws a new map for Whirled Peas
TED does it again. See you in Monterey. What happens when the war machine goes improv?
Won't get not-fooled again
Garbage + illumination = art? Various artists carefully pile rubbish on a gallery floor, or meticulously assemble a collection of ordinary items, plug in a light source, and create incredibly detailed and surprising shadows on the wall. Meanwhile, blog commenters cry "Fake!" and "Photoshop!". I guess they didn't see any of the Quicktime movies of Shigeo Fukuda linked here.
vayama
Following in whose footsteps?
On the heal of her husbands fairly recent op-ed in WSJ, Laura Bush writes her own op-ed (subscription possibly required) about the whole Burma situation (or Myanmar) of all topics. Why did she do it? The Huffington Post speculates.
What's with all the water?
The X Finger
The X Finger a prosthetic for digital amputees.
The Library Of Unified Information Sources (LOUIS)
The Library Of Unified Information Sources (LOUIS) is a beta-release project of the previously mentioned Sunlight Foundation, the goal of which is "to create a comprehensive, completely indexed and cross-referenced depository of federal documents from the executive and legislative branches of government." LOUIS currently contains searchable full text documents of Congressional Reports, the Congressional Record, Congressional Hearings, Presidential Documents, the Federal Register, GAO Reports and Bills & Resolutions, going back to 2001. Other interesting Sunlight Foundation projects include Visualizing Earmarks, 3 (non-satirical) Modest Proposals, The Congressional Family Business Project, and Congresspedia.
Hate Crime?
Return to Crothersville: Aaron Hall probably wasn't gay, but his murder in April has become an argument for passage of the Matthew Shepard Act, which would add attacks based on a victim's perceived sexual orientation to the list of federal hate crimes. The men accused of Aaron's murder are invoking the "gay panic" defense. A citizen journalist at the Bloomington Alternative has published a
fascinating article on her investigation of the circumstances of the crime and of Aaron's life, and why uncovering the truth in a place like Crothersville, where the social network is so tight-knit and there's no local hate crimes law, requires an outside (federal) investigation.
Voice Pitch, Hair Whorl, Ring Finger Length
The Science of Gaydar. "That’s what we mean by gaydar—not the skill of the viewer so much as the telltale signs most gay people project, the set of traits that make us unmistakably one....A small constellation of researchers is specifically analyzing the traits and characteristics that, though more pronounced in some than in others, not only make us gay but also make us appear gay."
What is Fitness?
“What is fitness?”(large PDF) is an essay by the leaders of the CrossFit movement. The ideal they propose is an athlete who is “equal parts gymnast, Olympic weightlifter, and multi-modal sprinter or ‘sprintathlete.’ Develop the capacity of a novice 800-meter track athlete, gymnast, and weightlifter and you’ll be fitter than any world-class runner, gymnast, or weightlifter.”
The Conceptual Scoop AKA the way they used to do it back in the day....
"A smart story often does contain new facts," Bennett explains. "But just as often it takes facts that are lying in plain sight and synthesizes them, or arranges them in a way — sometimes in a narrative — that really exposes some new meaning on an important subject. And I think that's a conceptual scoop." (via ATC)
Dickworld
"Sense your customer's eyes from up to ten metres." Xuuk's eyebox is a long-range an eye-counting video camera. The device "simply shines a beam of IR light and counts how many times it sees redeye in the ensuing images, indicating that the subject was looking right at the camera". "We decided not to incorporate iris scanning," says inventor Roel Vertegaal. "We don't need to know the identity of the people looking at the ad. That's for other companies to do. And when that happens, we're happy to tag along, but we're not interested in moving in that direction if it's not necessary." Note: Some sites imply that Google is partnering with Xuuk, but that is a mistake. The device simply mimics Google's highly successful business model.
An Earth Without People.
An Earth Without People. An interesting (and I am sure it will be debatable) article in the current issue of Scientific American. Personally, I have always liked Douglas Coupland's version too
After Stalin in Poland and Hungary
Learn the Truth is an excellent (Flash) presentation on the years after Stalin's death in Poland and Hungary. There's also a plain HTML version.
1000 best songs from 1955-2005
The Definitive 1000 Songs Of All Time 1955 to 2005. They are up to 601 at the moment
President and CEO
Bloomberg running for prez as an independent? You'd almost have to give it low odds but, as an outside possibility, I find it intriguing.
Game theory, for money
Humraz is an auction site with a twist. Pay to bid, then once enough fees have been received, the lowest unmatched bid wins. Shall we play for £500? Or a house?
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