Bird’s Eye: Three meditative sites. Calm offers you natural views/sounds of the world (with or without music and guided meditation. Recommendation: without.) Infinite Painting gives you a canvas and an always changing paintbrush and palette, which turns out to be surprisingly involving. (Two hints: clicking makes the brush larger, and screen capture is the only way I found to save the results.) Enjoy.
* Calm (takes a few seconds to load)
* No Link
Bird’s Eye: Analysis of movie trailers, satire of movies, examples of bad writing, a factlet on emerging tech, and a hilarious film on piracy and its costs: there probably is a more catchy title for all that than “media roundup”, and if you think of it pass it on and we’ll use it next time. The movie trailers, all 13 of them, are a fascinating and insightful example of the sort of writing that wouldn’t have been possible a decade ago.
* The Movie Trailer Revolution Michael Barthel Salon
It can be hard to notice how much has changed since 1997 just by watching a contemporary blockbuster like “Transformers” or “Twilight.” But the shifts have been massive, and significant. The emergence of digital technology has given audiences more entertainment options than ever, while simultaneously opening up new ways for fans to find each other and discuss pieces of pop culture. As the Web provides ever-more information at an ever-quicker pace, new tools for making movies have allowed filmmakers to cut up and recombine images and sound at the furious pace our entertainment consumption now seems to require. And all of these changes are visible in a single piece of film marketing: the movie trailer.
* Modern Hunger Games Tom the Dancing Bug Toon BoingBoing
* The 2011 Lyttle Lytton Contest
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The red hot sun rose in the cold blue sky.(Judy Dean) |
To me this was the top of the heap… Intentionally writing a sentence that seems unintentionally bad is hard; writing one that suggests an author going for hyperbole and accidentally winding up with woeful understatement is masterful. Thus, we have our winner.
Runners-up: ‘Pfft’ — he knew the silent but deadly whisper of a silenced SIG SG 550 rifle with a 650mm barrel and a 254mm rifling twisting rate. (Chloe W.)
* What’s the Fastest-Adopted Gadget of the Last 50 Years? The Atlantic
When we think about the great consumer electronics technologies of our time, the cellular phone probably springs to mind. If we go farther back, perhaps we’d pick the color television or the digital camera. But none of those products were adopted as fast by the American people as the boom box. (<=select text to see the gadget–after you’ve thought about it!)
* Copyright Math TED talk via Boing Boing
Rob Reid examines the math behind the claims made by the copyright lobby and explains the mindbending awesomeness of the sums used to justify SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and the like.
Bird’s Eye: The list of unused Tikkunista potential articles (currently way over 1500) had a lot of fine recent entries whose only common factor was that they were all cartoons. So…. we open with a fanfare: a cartoon of six musicians. Click on them to hear their music. Invent new combos. Waste precious hours you’ll never get back. Then look at the last 60 years of the history of Rock, in cartoon form. Topics range over subject material, social impact, profitability, hair style, drug use…. Tom Tomorrow drew our sex talk with Rick Santorum, full of truthiness. And a fine editorial cartoon on Greece, just so you can feel virtuous and educated.
* Fanfare (click for sounds)
* History of Rock (click to enbigify)
* Sex Talk with Santorum: The Evil of Contraception
* Sisyphus
Bird’s Eye: OK, boils and germs, it’s fun time! Start by playing with fluid: drag your mouse through the “liquid” and watch. You can change the variables for a different effect. Then look at all the classic “restart” commands from computers back into the 1980’s. Click and watch that s.l.o.w restart. Remember those icons crawling across the screen, just as they used to? And learn about Spirals, Fibonacci, and pine cones in a pair of videos that pass “delightful” without even slowing down.
* The Restart Page: Free Unlimited Rebooting Experience From Vintage Operating Systems
* Doodling in Math: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant (Thanks, Bonnie!)
1. Joy to the World, (or at Least to You)
Bird’s Eye: As a gift to all readers, we’ll start with fun this week: a marvellous neo-Victorian card from the erstwhile Python, a gloriously performed neo-acapella song (accompanied by margarine containers), a wonderfully powerful story about looking for art in post-Taliban Afghanistan, and a music maker for you, because creativity has to be participatory. Enjoy!
* The Christmas Card Terry Gilliam YouTube
* Call Your Girlfriend Erato YouTube
* A Time of Hope Andrew Solomon15 minute audio
A writer travels to Afghanistan in search of art.
Click, then click again. etc.
Bird’s Eye: On the edge of science, we peer into the black hole of the unknown, (and it peers back into us). We look at the currant intimations of success in the search for the Higgs’ boson, and why it matters. A new MIT camera can shoot movies at 1 trillion frames per second, fast enough to watch a light wave propagate. And for the hardcore amongst you, we bring the showdown of the world Mentos/Coke powered rocket-car race. Infinity and beyond!
* Higgs boson: LHC scientists to release best evidence BBC News
The Higgs is a sub-atomic particle that is predicted to exist, but has not yet been seen. It was proposed as a mechanism to explain mass by six physicists, including Peter Higgs, in 1964. It imparts mass to other fundamental particles via the associated Higgs field. It is the last missing member of the Standard Model, which explains how particles interact
Asked where a Higgs discovery would rank among scientific milestones of the last 100 years, Dr Shears said: “I don’t think that I could compare it to any other scientific advance… it is quite different. This is a prediction that stems from a very mathematical approach to understanding the Universe, which is guided by the idea that it is simple at heart. If the Universe really is like that, I find it really quite breathtaking and humbling that we can understand it.”
(want more science? Read on here)
* New ultrafast camera from MIT makes it possible to see how light moves. It captures a trillion fps. via Reddit
We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionth of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second. Direct recording of reflected or scattered light at such a frame rate with sufficient brightness is nearly impossible. We use an indirect ‘stroboscopic’ method that records millions of repeated measurements by careful scanning in time and viewpoints. Then we rearrange the data to create a ‘movie’ of a nano-second long event.
* The Coke Zero And Mentos Rocket Car Showdown The Presurfer
It’s the Coke Zero and Mentos Rocket Car Mark I, powered by 108 bottles of Coke Zero and 648 Mentos mints, versus the Coke Zero and Mentos Rocket Car: Mark II, powered by 54 bottles of Coke Zero and 324 Mentos mints. Driver on closed track. Don’t try this without professional help.
Bird’s Eye: “You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead….” If you recognized that as The Beatles’ The Long and Winding Road you’re probably one of us. And these links are for you.
* 11 Sounds That Your Kids Have Probably Never Heard – Mental Floss
Rotary phone, typewriter, gas station driveway bell, etc
* XKCD brilliantly diagrams Christmas sentimentality
“An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice”
Bonus: Link to boomer secular Xmas Songs
* The 5 Best Toys of All Time GeekDad Wired
Here at GeekDad we review a lot of products — books, toys, gadgets, software — and I know it’s impossible for most parents to actually afford all of the cool stuff that gets written up. Heck, most of us can’t afford it either, and we’re envious of the person who scored a review copy of a cool board game or awesome gizmo. (Disclosure: that person is probably me.) So while we love telling you about all the cool stuff that’s out there, I understand that as parents we all have limited budgets and we sometimes need help narrowing down our wishlists.
So to help you out, I’ve worked really hard to narrow down this list to five items that no kid should be without. All five should fit easily within any budget, and are appropriate for a wide age range so you get the most play out of each one. These are time-tested and kid-approved! And as a bonus, these five can be combined for extra-super-happy-fun-time.
Bird’s Eye: As Bo Diddley sang, “You Can’t Judge a Book By Its Cover”. We have a mixed selection here: four photos from the Guardian Eyewitness… see if you can guess what you’re looking at. After you’ve looked at the picture, select the the blank line beneath each link and the answer will magically appear. And a wonderfully intricate Subnormality comic meditates on the same topic. (Make sure to read the book titles in the background.)
Nurses throw rose petals and red ribbons to mark the 24th World Aids Day at a medical school in China
A lorry and cars travel on a road over the ice-covered Vistula river near the village of Kiezmark.
Electoral symbols of candidates displayed on posters in Cairo, Egypt
Rhine II by Andreas Gursky sold for $4.3m at Christie’s setting a record for any photograph
* Every Day Is HalloweenSubnormality
Bird’s Eye: Some lovely pictures of Tokyo’s mythical animals, and a joyously mind-blowing video of new animals created by Theo Jansen. And some updates on mythical Angry Birds, the most downloaded app of alltime. Tikkunista is proud to mention (but casually) that we completed all levels of Angry Birds this week. Now we can be more efficient….
* Tokyo’s Top 10 Mythical Beasts cnn
Everyone knows Tokyo’s home to some pretty strange inhabitants. No, we aren’t talking about the ones you wake up next to after a long night in Kabukicho or Roppongi. Even weirder than that. And much, much older. Creatures from myth, legend, fairy tales, arcane religious texts. They’re there, lurking quietly in the shadows … and sometimes right out in the open.
* Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests (Thanks, Dave and Eddie!)
* Angry Birds tops 350m downloads, 1m toys a month cnet
It seems that Angry Birds isn’t only the most downloaded app of all time, it’s also a global player in terms of merchandise. Or, in non-marketing speak, a licence to print money. Speaking at a blog event in San Francisco, Rovio’s North American general manager Andrew Stalbow revealed Angry Birds has been downloaded over 350 million times. Not only that, the merchandise is also selling like hot cakes. To the tune of a million a month, per unit, if you’re interested. That’s right, Rovio is selling a million Angry Birds soft toys a month. Which works out to over 33,000 a day. That’s every month. And it’s not like it’s a one off either; the company is also selling a million Angry Birds t-shirts a month. Every month. Staggering.
Bird’s Eye: These people are the enemy. Right up there with the purveyors of bottled water. Find a wall, and a revolution, quick.
