Ok….now I’ve officially passed the one week mark without internet service. All the symptoms of withdrawal are present: lack of concentration and focus, appetite loss, continuous thought of shortcuts, and no posts. Sorry….Be patient, I’ll be back.
iTunes iSbogus is a mock-up of the iTunes site. It explains what goes on behind the scenes, and where the money goes. Revolutionary new distribution system? Not at all, buying songs for 99 cents a pop is still too expensive. For that kind of money you are not getting liner notes, no CD, and crappy compression. Why do we have to pay for the producers coke habit, or for that matter, all the other acts that don’t sell well and still get a huge mega publicity campaigns?
I still don’t have a connection! It’s been four days, and now the ISP says I have to wait for a month or more, for a mistake they made. I’d still have to wait that long even with a new provider….Internet services in Italy are lagging years behind the rest of the world. I am sorry for the lack of posts, but I’ll have to solve this first. Thanks for reading and take a look at the archives…They are full of nice, good things!
I’ll keep you updated…
Flames in microgravity are a strong blue color and are perfectly round. They have none of the turbulence and changing colors associated with fire on earth. I’d love to see a large scale fire in space (a controlled experiment, not a burning space station!!). You can find more info at CFM in Space. It explains in detail many experiments conducted in the Space Shuttle and MIR on candle flames.
Ok, ok here goes Frong #2….a lot different than #1…
Listen, and tell me what you think!
The Alphabet Synthesis Machine is an online font creator. It allows you to create and design the font of an imaginary civilization. Basing the look on a seed you draw, the creator evolves the shapes according to certain interactive parameters. But the really fun part is downloading your creation in True Type Font format and using it in your own projects. Cool!
When I turned 11 or 12 years old, my grandfather gave me a year subscription to Discover Magazine. (it wasn’t actually a subscription, he would buy it from the newsstand and then give it to me!) Every month I would wait patiently for the next one. I didn’t understand most of what I read, but I do remember a lot of the articles. The one I found the most fascinating was about fractals with its beautiful images, irregular curves or shapes which could be magnified many times and still see the same shape. Yesterday I was on the lookout for a fractal generator, and found Fractal Explorer. It is a great piece of software with many features, plus the graphics are simply breathtaking. Give it a try. It is easy to use, and can be extremely powerful on the hands of a pro. I rendered some images; Ill post new ones when I get better, these are almost default settings!
So there you go grandad…thanks for the scientific spark!
click for Hi-Res
SARS, West Nile, Ebola. Contagious viruses….Watch in real time as zombies infect the rest of the population in this amazing simulation. Using very simple rules zombiness can spread like wildfire!
Alexander Calder rigged the front door of his Paris apartment so that he could open it from his bathtub.
A simple stool with an added bonus: a revolving container to store things!
It is constructed in wood, and the revolving container is in plastic. To be offered in a variety of colors. If you are interested in producing this stool, send me an email.
Click for animation!
This piece was presented at a Future Vision Workshop organized by the Future Concept Lab during the Salone Internazionale del Mobile. The name of the seminar was New Basic, New Luxury. Here is what they said about Stool+:
One is witnessing the emergence of a new classicism as an archetype that gives rise to forms and aesthetics that are universally shared and usable. To this is added the absence of genres in a quest for absolute aesthetic values that are expressed through the rediscovery and implementation of the classic lines for a new modernity.
So there you go…contemporary classic! Yeeehaaaw!!!
Other projects can be seen at the Genius Loci Lab website.
Mega violent .gif animation. Amazing what can be done with only a GIF. I’d love to know what they are saying…
The Fever Nightmare Generator doesn’t actually live up to its name, but it is nonetheless a very cool interactive animation. Be sure to try several different nightmares.
My fever dreams are a bit different than this, they actually have problems of scale, were I feel that everything pressures against me and my head! Big shapes, magnified, no parallax….ahhh, forget it. Nobody understands your dreams anyway.
click for Hi-Res
From 1927 to 1954 Buckminster Fuller worked on what would become the Dymaxion Map. As you may well know the mathematics involved to turn a sphere into a flat surface are very complex, and the maps we usually use have a great margin of projection errors.
Fuller was looking for a way to produce a distorsionless map. The method he used, an unfolded icosahedron, results in nearly no distortion of either size or shape of the landmasses. Click here for an animation.
I sure wish the dadaists had lived long enough to see what is possible with todays technology. Webcollage takes random pictures from the web and makes collages out of them. Clicking on one of the images in the collage will take you to the page on which it was found. It updates the image once a minute.
15,700,003 Model T Ford’s were manufactured, and all shared one thing in common: they were all painted black. Black paint dried the fastest. Henry Ford is reputed to have made the statement: “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”
