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March 31, 2005
The Force is strong with this one
Hmmm, could be my son is watching too much Star Wars.
Today he was sternly reprimanded for smacking his little brother in the face while he demonstrated his light saber tactics.
Later, while crapping, he noted that his staccato farting sounded like laser blasts.
Then, he announced that he needed to go to Alabama because his imaginary friend’s sister Janey was being attacked by AT-AT Imperial Walkers there. (The fact that he knows Alabama being the most troubling part of that exchange.)
Back to Mary Poppins?
Posted at 8:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: The Darnedest Things
March 30, 2005
It was a different time back then, 1957 or '58
This is one of the funniest things I have seen in ages. The Old Negro Space Program is a ten-minute documentary that’s one part Negro Baseball League, one part NASA, and all Spinal Tap. The parody of the professor and the crappy Photoshopping cracks me up. Keep your eye out for Peter ‘Stinky Pete’ Carver.
As a sidenote, NASA had a single African-American astronaut, Robert H. Lawrence Jr., during the race for the moon, but he died in an air crash in 1967.
[Via Coudal]
Posted at 4:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Fun | Topic: Space
Recontextualizing the Collection
The paper I will be presenting at the Museums and the Web conference in Vancouver next month is now online. I know you can’t wait to get at it, so here’s an appetizer from a section called Tools of Representation.
All museums are places of technologically-enhanced representation. At its most fundamental level, a museum is a place for the re-presentation – the presenting again – of something created, used, or identified with someplace else. Many technologies or tools assist in this enterprise. Plate glass, cases, framing, interior architecture, lighting, climate-control, and signage combine to form a sometimes surprisingly high-tech, if mostly transparent, “machine” for the presentation of a cultural artifact, artwork, or other exhibit. Certainly more complex mechanisms exist. Interactive technologies both in physical space and on-line enable museums to act as platforms for the creation of an experience. In the manner that a theater stage is a kind of machine for the production of an experience or a run-time application is a virtual machine for enabling lines of code to be actualized, the museum today operates as an enabler of visitor experience. For many museums and cultural organizations, this experience is made possible by providing context. But it has not always been this way.
I know, I know, how dare I leave you with such a cliffhanger? The whole thing is located here.
Posted at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Work
That warning paint comes in handy
Somebody’s an Illini fan on the Trump Tower construction site.
Thanks Laura and Jen!
Posted at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Fun
March 29, 2005
Confidentiality
My doctor’s office has signs everywhere informing patients that charts and presciptions will NOT be faxed or mailed to them for confidentiality reasons. OK, fine. But the walls in the office are so thin that you’d think you were in a confessional. As I was waiting to see my doc I overheard a fellow patient next door nervously-laughing his way through a conversation with his doctor about how he needed to lose ten pounds and change some of his eating habits if he wanted to avoid the heart disease embedded in his genes. Shhh, secret!
Posted at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Notes
Five ways to tell it is springtime in Chicago
- The radiant profusion of alabaster white skin blubbering out from beneath clothing more suited for the tropics temporarily blinds you as people joyously run, skate, and bike down the lakefront path for the first time in months.
- You’re asked to buy a Streetwise every half-block instead of every few blocks.
- People no longer lunge for the heat lamp “on” button on the L platform the moment the timer runs out.
- It is easier to imagine a flower sprouting from dead brown grass than frozen white grass.
- Beer tastes way better.
Posted at 7:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Topic: Chicago
Eyeball-to-eyeball
My wife’s grandfather passed away a few weeks ago. He was an amazing man for dozens of reasons, but one part of his life that stands out for me was his service during World War II. Grandpa was a fighter pilot running missions out of the UK. In 1944 he was shot down and captured by the SS. He spent the rest of the war in POW camp, tortured but not broken. But that’s a story — and a fascinating one — for another time. Recently I was watching an interview that the National Archives did with Grandpa a few years ago. One section of the interview, which I have transcribed here, was rivetting. It does a good job of presenting this man as he really was: practical, brave, and merciful.
I was on my own, our flight was broken up. I got on the tail of a German who turned at me because he was being chased by two others. He didn’t see me, but he made a 90 degree turn so I had to turn in to him. By the time we passed head on I opened fire and in about two turns I was on his tail — the P51 was good, you could turn inside the other guy.I’ll post about his experience in the Nazi prisoner camp next week.I chased him all over the countryside, gradually losing height. Finally when he got near the deck he made a most peculiar move. Instead of evading the fire he pointed his nose straight at a church. I said to myself, this man is crazy — he thinks I won’t fire because he’s got his nose pointed at a church. But I realized it wasn’t Sunday and there couldn’t be any people in there so I opened fire.
So then he started going all over the place and finally I got him down to where he lost all his speed and all his attitude and he tried his last trick. It’s called “throwing the anchor out”. You cut the gun, you fishtail, you slow the plane down. He didn’t throw flaps, but all of a sudden he was trying to get me to pass him – that’s “throwing the anchor out.” Well I didn’t pass him because the P51 had a better propeller than the German [planes] did.
First thing you know as far as from here to that wall — 25 feet away — we were flying eyeball-to-eyeball. I was lookin’ at him and he was lookin’ at me. I’ll never know why I did it. I said this guy is going to be dead in about one minute. I felt sorry for him. I just wanted to give him a chance to save his life. So I just gave him the ol’ thumbs-down. Any aviator will tell you what that means: put your plane down. And he knew what it meant. I had those two guys [US fighters] behind me screaming to get out of the way and they’d shoot him down instantly but I gave him his chance, put my thumb down and he turned away put his nose down got the first open field. [He] bellied in, his plane tore itself up the two wings and the tail came off but he landed safely ‘cause he landed upright on his fuselage.
There was a huge cloud of dust and those two fellows who originally had him in their gunsights when he turned into me they circled him and if he had not been in that cloud of dust they would have strafed him. Everybody had their choice. I would not strafe a guy who was down, but some of the guys they’d strafe anything. When I was a POW the Germans were especially mad because some of our pilots would kill a man in a parachute. Some people think it’s sporting; others don’t I saved that German’s life by ordering him to put his plane down. He had less than 10 seconds to make up his mind he had lost all of his speed so he didn’t have a chance he was going to be shot down. He decided to save his life and he did.
Somebody asked me once, did you claim that plane was shot down? I said sure I did, what do you think? The plane went down and was tore up, but he saved his life. I hated to see a guy lose his life that could fly that well. I don’t know what happened to him he could have come back up and shot at some of our people the next day but we didn’t worry much about those German fighters as much as if they had been winning.
Posted at 8:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Topic: America
March 27, 2005
Codewords
It’s not hard to see the similarities between computer code and poetry. Like code, poetry is highly formalized and structural and almost all poems attempt to effect an experience greater than the sum of their words. Call the best of each examples of very artful data compression.
Perlgeeks have been re-writing poems in code for years. Some of it is really quite good, though none of it achieves the grail of actually executing something that might be meaningfully related to the poem. (How cool would that be? A poem turned into an executable program whose runtime output was some kind of answer or manifestation of the poem subject?)
Two gents at MIT have created an application that takes this idea one step further. Metafor is a system for visualizing the “programmatic” nature of the English language. Basically the app takes standard language and creates what looks like a a formalized program. The idea is to use this method of “scaffolding” natural language as a stepping-stone to the ideal of being able to program in plain English. This is sentence diagramming on overdrive.
INPUT: “There is a bar with a bartender who makes drinks.”
OUTPUT:
def __main__():
class bar:
the_bartender = bartender()
class bartender:
def make(drink):
pass
There’s also a great video available that makes the process clear.
Like the Perl-ified poems, this code does not actually do anything. And I fear that this method of translation will come crashing down (so to speak) when it encounters allusion, metaphor, or any of the myriad other figurative fossils embedded in the strata of English. But I like the exercise.
See also: E-mailing Richard Powers
Posted at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Words
March 24, 2005
So average
Amazing the complexity that simple innovations beget. Flickr continues to inspire and facilitate some really astonishing technical and artistic development. The latest is a set of images created by a user named brevity by averaging 50 photos of a single type of subject — an eye, a candle, a mountain, etc. The result manages to be both numinous and chthonic. Have a look-see.
And if you like this sort of layering, have a peek too at the work of Matt Wenc. He’s an artist (and good friend) who works in thick grids of color that often achieve the same kind of rear-lighting effect that the Flickr averages do.
Via alt text.
UPDATE: Matt points us to the artist Jason Salavon. Check out his averages of residential real estate markets.
Posted at 9:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Art/Design
The need for feed
Recently I switched from the trusty Sage plugin for Mozilla to the standalone FeedDemon RSS/Atom reader for PC. Sage did the job, but the number of feeds I was tracking was getting too large and I was never completely comfortable (nor have I ever been) with that sidebar window on Moz. So I am here to state my incredulity that I ever lived without FeedDemon. Goodness gracious, that’s a well-done app! Very clean with lots of advanced features like podcast organization and keyboard shortcuts. Highly recommended.
Seems like there isn’t any information source that I care about that doesn’t have an RSS feed these days. Would be interesting to clock time spent in the reader versus in the browser, no?
Posted at 6:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: I Like
March 23, 2005
Content provider
You gotta admire the audacity of this. Guy walks into four of the most prestigious art museums in NYC, hangs his own art complete with labels, snaps some shots, and walks out. If nothing else the act itself deserves mention as a superb piece of performance art.
He says - “This historic occasion has less to do with finally being embraced by the fine art establishment and is more about the judicious use of a fake beard and some high strength glue.” Banksy continues -“They’re good enough to be in there, so I don’t see why I should wait”Staff at the New York Met discovered and removed their new aquisition early Sunday morning while Banksy’s discount soup can print took pride of place in the MoMA for over three days before being torn down.
As of now, the other two pieces currently remain firmly in place.
Full photos here.
Via Kottke.
UPDATE: MoMA took Banksy’s piece down (it was not in a gallery to begin with), but they didn’t throw it out. Wonder what they’ll do with it?
Posted at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Art/Design
March 22, 2005
A stage that needs to ascend
Much has changed since the shuttle last went aloft, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important for the US and for manned flight in general to get it back up a few times before phasing it out for something better and letting private industry take over orbital trucking.
NASA is still hoping to launch Discovery as mission STS-114 on May 15, though it is not at all certain they will hit that date and the launch window closes on June 3. As you might expect the spacewalks planned for this mission focus on feasibility tests of repairing damage during a mission. Also on the task list are delivery of the Raffaello module to the International Space Station and the installation of a digital camera (yes, they were using film) on the underside of the shuttle to snap pictures of the external tank separation. NASA has said that another shuttle could go up as early as June 14 if there was a need for a rescue mission.
Get ready, spacegeeks, live telemetry feeds will soon be coming your way!
Posted at 6:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Space
March 19, 2005
Always back up
My 3½-year-old son has become a Star Wars freak in the last few weeks. He watches all five movies (and recently the new trailer) every weekend — though not in order and not even in the order of their chapters. This constantly-on video mash-up does a good job of highlighting patterns in Lucas’s thinking.
- Both Death Stars were destroyed by single shots to essentially unprotected (though difficult to reach) Achille’s heels.
- The shield protecting the unfinished Death Star on Endor was disabled by blowing up a single power station.
- Young Anakin destroys the trade federation ship — accidentally! — with a single shot to something.
- The entire battalion of battle droids on Naboo is disabled by the explosion of the trade ship.
Posted at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Movies
March 18, 2005
Urban library
A line in Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World comparing the streets of London to bookshelves crystallized something I had been thinking about in an informal way since I first played with the A9 Yellow Pages Search. Well, a few things. First, seen edge-on a shelf full of books does in a way resemble the variegated facades of an urban streetscape. But more than the physical resemblance, there’s a kind of functional similarity. The front of a building, like the spine of a book, is both its human interface and its metadata. Not only do you judge a book (and a building) by its cover, but you must. This is how we apprehend reality, at least initially. One of my favorite tricks in a library is finding the location of a book I think I want then browsing in the region of the book once I find it. Kind of a physical fuzzy search. Same thing with urban streets, especially where businesses cluster based on some similarity (wares, targetted demographic, etc). And this is why the A9 Yellow Pages search is so cool. Amazon merely used the experience of bookshelf scanning as a model for browsing businesses by their building facades. (Though, strangely, you can’t browse Amazon’s book collection this way.) Seems that, at heart, Amazon’s still a bookstore. And I love that.
Anyone know of any other city-as-bookshelf conceits out there? Seems ripe for exploration, especially considering the many relationships between cities and narratives. Also, if urban streets resemble a bookshelf what about suburbia? How can we tweak the analogy to account for strip malls and parking lots?
See also: Virtual flâneur | The Pavilion of Literary Profundity
Posted at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Words
March 17, 2005
Bring it on!
This just in from building management:
One of the noisiest components of the Wabash viaduct reconstruction - metal sheet pile driving as part of the caisson installation - is scheduled to begin on Thursday, March 17, 2005. This activity may also cause the building to vibrate.
They’ve never warned of vibration before and this place certainly shook when they were ripping apart Wabash. I wonder if this is an attempt to proactively warn or if they really mean the Richter scale is going to be involved here.
The test will be if the building shakes enough to park the hard drive head of my ThinkPad. Sorry, boss, gotta go home, my hard drive airbag just deployed.
UPDATE (3/18): No piles driven, no buildings shaken, no airbags deployed. So very anticlimactic!
Posted at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago
March 16, 2005
Stuff in my backpack, international edition
click for annotated version
Today I booked four separate itineraries in three countries for travel before the end of May. Really the only way to manage such a schedule is to have the right gear. Jumping on the whatsinyourbag tagfest over at Flickr I have catalogued all those things that keep me sane and connected when I travel — in this case internationally. Bag contents differ slightly for the commute to work and for domestic travel.
(These inventory spreads remind me of a dated little travel book called Point It. For the international tourist who has absolutely no desire to learn any new terms whatsoever.)
So, what am I missing?
Posted at 7:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Is there anything cover art can't do?
Continuing the recent themes of cover art and interesting uses of web services and open API’s (in the marginalia sidebar), here’s AmazType, a creative little app that creates a word-mosaic of your search term from the covers of books and music at Amazon that are related to the term. So, “Shakespeare” would return that word created from the covers of all the books containing his works.
I consider this a perfect use of technology.
Posted at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: I Like | Topic: Music
March 15, 2005
ScrobbleViz
Audioscrobbler continues to amaze me. Profiling your listening tastes and creating a personal stream from that profile is cool, sure, but you soon crave a visualization of the network of relationships that your taste is at the center of. Enter the TouchGraph app for Audioscrobbler. It is pretty basic, plotting relationship maps of artists based on the same algorithm that computes your musical “neighbors.” But you could easily see a more generic app that could take your Audioscrobbler XML feed and continually morph the map (like the Eternal Egypt screensaver, blogged yesterday, does). Clicking on any node might take you directly to a stream of that artist (or the iTunes store). Or maybe there’s an integration point with the attractive (and more info-dense) LivePlasma.
My current thought-exercise, though, is what to do with the links between the music nodes. How could you sonify them? What does the musical connection between, say, Johnny Cash and Cake sound like?
See also: In the gutter
Posted at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Music
March 14, 2005
Museums and the Web 2005
I’ll be presenting at this year’s Museums and the Web conference in Vancouver, April 13-16. If you’re going to be there (or live in Vancouver) and want to meet up, drop me a line. Five years ago one of my projects won the Best of the Web award here. Here’s hoping Eternal Egypt can regain the honor amongst such worthy competition.
Posted at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Work
Eternally yours
The Eternal Egypt project — long my primary focus at work — has just released a screensaver for PC. It is actually a functional app, cycling between three separate modes. It will run a loop similar to the splash screen on the website and will download images randomly from the site (with a running history and ability to send an e-card). My favorite, though, is the mode where it continuously traverses the spatialized relationship web known as Connections. You can do so manually straight from the screensaver too. Have fun!
Posted at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Egypt | Topic: Work
March 13, 2005
Fantasy and reality
Baseball season’s almost here and that means fantasy leagues are gearing up. Steroid usage is all the talk too with fans on the slippery slope of a debate over what constitutes “real” athleticism. (Steven Johnson predicts that elective surgery is the next category of performance enhancement.) Meanwhile, more entertainment dollars are spent on computer games than attending actual sporting events. (And who knows how much more is spent gambling on sports — a meta-sporting activity, so to speak — than on the sport directly.) Hard to know the boundaries of the real sport.
What I’d like to see is an application that merges an online fantasy basball league, a sports-action baseball game, and a Sim Baseball-type universe (such as this). This way you could field your actual fantasy team (using current or past players) and, using the rich data of past performance, play out actual games at any level from just watching stats crunch against each other spreadsheet-macro-like to actually trying to make Aramis Ramirez hit a pitch from, say, Pedro Martinez. Then, layer in the Sim component (based on as much data as can be mined) to allow you to operate the virtual club and individual players as fully as possible. Salary caps, personality/compatibility issues, performance-enhancing drugs — you’d decide all of this. Or, at least let the data-rich simulation run its course based on a few parameters you set. For example, what would happen if everyone in the league was on androstenedione?
Maybe this kind of app already exists. Seems like it would be hellishly complex, though.
The real question is: how soon until the virtual derivatives of sport feed back into the sport itself? (Not counting gambling scandals, that is.) It happens in other forms of entertainment all the time. How long before there is a game that pits the actual human players of the two best fantasy teams — or some computer-modelled aggregate of the best fantasy teams at any given moment — in the world against each other?
Posted at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Fun
March 8, 2005
Networks and lines
Abstracted map of the Paris metro
I have been thinking about networks since Craig’s thought-provoking comment about the radial nature Chicago L system a few days ago. Thing is, I can’t shake the feeling that narrative and transportation networks are somehow related.
One easy relationship has to do with consumption. I enjoy being on the subway because it affords me time to read that I otherwise would not have. (I turn down rides home because I crave the time to read on the subway.) But what I really love is the way the L — especially when it is underground and impervious to cell transmission — eliminates options. You may be late for work, but there’s really nothing you can do about it. You can’t call anyone; you can’t get off the train and get to work any faster; you’re stuck. And that is wonderful. I feel like I suffer from a surfeit of options sometimes. It is so nice to just resign yourself to the moment. I’m going to keep reading until my stop, damnit. So nice to succumb to linearity.
But that’s not really what interests me. I’m still trying to tease this out, but clearly subway system design has conceptual similarities with new media. Stories can be point-to-point, multi-linear, radial, and true networks. They can even break out of the established route, creating new stations further afield. If you mapped these narrative arcs I bet they would bear a striking resemblance to the abstracted maps of subways around the world.
Posted at 9:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Topic: Art/Design | Topic: Words
March 7, 2005
The final timelapse
Video stitcher extraordinaire Jack Blanchard delivers this last timelapse (WMV, 10MB) of our officecam Sun-Times deathwatch. Now with music!
Meanwhile, A Daily Dose of Architecture presents a photographic homage to my building, newly — and temporarily — presenting a stunning view from the Michigan Ave. bridge thanks to the demolition.
Is that straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey or what?
Posted at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago
March 6, 2005
Word problem, the riveting conclusion
A follow-up to my previous post about water drainage on Harlem Ave. It was, of course, a trick question. At least one of you suggested as much, though no one actually got the answer right. You see, Harlem Ave. is the rough location of a miniature continental divide. Water to the west of Harlem flows west; drainage east goes east. What took me a while to realize is that there still is only one Continental Divide. Drainage west of Harlem doesn’t keep flowing west. Eventually it dumps into the Mississippi and thence to the Gulf. Going the other way ends up in the Lake or the Atlantic. So the answer, assuming no sewer craziness, is that the hydrant run-off will end up in the Gulf.
The Chicago Public Library explains this a bit better. Among other things, this divide is what made the area so attractive to early explorers. A short portage and you could be headed to the Mississippi or the Great Lakes. (Before the Chicago River was reversed, that is.)
Oh, by the way, that little traffic incident didn’t really happen. Just a story in the service of the contest. But thanks for the concern!
Posted at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago
In the gutter
I’ve been messing around on the right side of the blog alot lately. Here’s what’s new.
I’ve felt the need for some way to post blurbs that either have no relevant link or don’t warrant the focus of the main flow. Thus, the micropost. Right now it is updated manually, but I am looking to automate. Gotta be an MT sideblog plugin or something, right?
The marginalia section is a del.icio.us-powered link farm. I’m not quite done tagging the links themselves, but when I am that’ll start all kinds of fun. Like this.
Recently played tunes comes courtesy of the excellent Audioscrobbler service. If you have not checked this out yet, do. Basically, you install plugins for your audio programs (iTunes, etc.) and everything you listen to is logged at Audioscrobbler. Over time the site develops a very nuanced profile of your musical tastes. But the real value is in the social functions. You develop musical “neighbors” and can track musical “friends”. Best of all your profile powers a customized radio stream called last.fm. Personalization and social computing done so right.
Two sidenotes on this section. First, like the marginalia, the recently played list is just an RSS feed formatted and served by RSS Digest, which I recommend. But the shortest refresh period is 30 minutes for RSS Digest and this really is not quick enough for the playlog feed. So I am exploring the MTRSSfeed plugin to take one step out of the process. Anyone had any luck with this?
Second, while Audioscrobbler has plugins for iTunes and syncs up with the recently played tracks on your iPod there was no “plugin” for the Audiotron networked audio device, the component that supplies music to the rest of my house. Not tracking the Audiotron would have meant radically skewing my listening profile since the genres I listen to throughout the house differ substantially from what I listen to in front of my computer. But, as happens so often on the web, as soon as you need something, it appears. Kelly Felkins posted a Perl script called Atronscrobbler for doing precisely what I needed. Not only that, but he was kind enough to make code revisions on-the-fly to get it to work for me. The script runs on a computer and just polls the Audiotron and pushes updates to Audioscrobbler. Now, with the exception of the kids’ music that is skewing my profile, I am completely covered. Anyone else have the Audiotron-Audioscrobbler combo going? If so, there’s a group devoted to it now.
The recommended music section is mostly the same, except that links to the iTunes Music Store now contain my affiliate code. If you don’t want Apple to make a micropayment to me for the referral then you can skip this. But why would you deprive me of these penny fractions? Note that, where possible, album info links to discogs.com. Also, I will link to un-DRM’ed files, if they exist, rather than to iTMS.
The outbound links section is redone and powered by Blogrolling. I’m not sure it is working entirely properly yet.
Lastly, the GeoURL badge links to this blog’s neighbors in meatspace.
There are other minor updates, but that’s the bulk of ‘em. Thanks for reading.
See also: Marginalia
Posted at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Topic: Housekeeping | Topic: Music
March 5, 2005
Slump driving
Stopping your car under a viaduct at night could remind you of being in your own garage at home, right?
Friday night as my wife and I were heading to a restaurant with some friends we had to navigate around a car strangely stopped in the middle of the road (going under the tracks just west of the Cortland street bridge, for you Chicagoans). As we drove past we glanced over to see the driver of the stopped car slumped over the wheel and looking very unwell. We stopped. Our friends stopped. Traffic stopped. My friend, an M.D., did a quick check. The driver was alive, but doc thought he O.D.’ed. We gently roused him, stopped the car (which was — oddly — in park), and removed him and the keys.
The paramedics and cops eventually came and we went on our way. I’m not sure the guy was drunk, but he was clearly on something. I’m convinced he thought he had pulled into his garage, calmly put the car in park, and then blacked out. Not that he’s not an idiot, mind you. Just my theory.
Posted at 7:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago
March 3, 2005
Arcade symphony
Call it recombinant audio archaeology. Andy Hofle has recorded the noises of classic arcade games of the 1980’s from the available ROM emulations and then mixed and layered them into a stunning simulacrum of the experience of being in an arcade. He’s got background noise, coin changers, and even people talking. A current-day casino might come close, but you’d hear so much more in a casino: slots cha-chinging, recorded voices entreating you to play, and more realistic noises. An arcade in 1983, on the other hand, was all about synthetic bleeps, bloops, and blow-ups. And this is why I love it. The background radiation of my youth.
Posted at 3:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: I Like
Thomas breaks through
The Henry Ford cultural complex in Dearborn, Michigan hosts a children’s day where a life-sized version of Thomas the Tank Engine comes to visit. So do many places. But they also host a day for children suffering from autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. Turns out, Thomas the Tank Engine is a source of special fascination with these special kids. A report from 2000 explains why this might be. Some highlights:
- Children with autism are often attracted to objects arranged in lines (like cars on a train), as well as spinning objects and wheels.
- The unique stop-action photography of the videos allows the background and scenery to remain still, allowing for greater focus on the “big picture” with less distraction.
- Thomas and the other characters have friendly faces, often with exaggerated expressions. In the videos, the expressions are set for some time and are often accompanied by simple narration explaining the emotion (“Thomas was sad.”), allowing children to identify the feelings and expressions.
Posted at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Science/Tech
