It always takes 42 minutes to travel from one city to any other city on earth, provided you travel through it.
42 minutes is also a near-perfect length for almost any album. Coincidence?
11
Jun
08
It always takes 42 minutes
06
Jun
08
The signs of the Times
Boingboing had a great post about the ads in Times Square today. One of the most interesting things to note is that one of the most prominent and famous buildings, One Times Square (with the Coke and Samsung displays), is a completely empty building above the ground floor. The owner makes so much money off the advertising space, he has no need to make the building habitable for tenants. Advertising space on the building costs $300,000 USD a month. Clearly, the companies advertising on the building (or for that matter, in Times Square in general) have no need to reach a wider audience- who doesn’t know about Coke by now?- they just want to lord over the thousands of people that pass through each day.
We are fucking Coca-Cola, and we bought this screen just because.
03
Jun
08
The antiquated cartographer
This post’s title just sounds like a Casanova-like, monocle-wearing gentleman- but really it’s about a great site I stumbled upon (via StumbleUpon), simply known as (and I quote only about 1/4 of the shit between the <title> tags):
Ridiculously self-explanatory, inn’it?
And what’s what, most of them are for sale. However, if you don’t want to drop an undisclosed amount on a flimsy piece of ancient parchment detailed with out-of-date borders and laughable proportions, you can always click-to-see the high-res scans/photos of each map, and download/print at your leisure.
03
Jun
08
Sunset on Mars
Nasa released the above image as a part of their ongoing Image Of The Day. Sunset on Mars (full size), sent on May 19 by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit.
On May 19, 2005, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover’s 489th Martian day, or sol.
Sunset and twilight images are occasionally acquired by the science team to determine how high into the atmosphere the Martian dust extends, and to look for dust or ice clouds. Other images have shown that the twilight glow remains visible, but increasingly fainter, for up to two hours before sunrise or after sunset. The long Martian twilight (compared to Earth’s) is caused by sunlight scattered around to the night side of the planet by abundant high altitude dust. Similar long twilights or extra-colorful sunrises and sunsets sometimes occur on Earth when tiny dust grains that are erupted from powerful volcanoes scatter light high in the atmosphere.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornel
Ya know, I just wish there were larger resolutions.
30
May
08
Mustachoed Sensationalist
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
The philosophy of the West, when applied to Christianity, tends to be affirming of its values. However, you can deconstruct it so far as to destroy it, and we haven’t replaced it with any universal set of morals. So when it’s gone, what then? Chaos. The individual will reign and justice will be a self-centered entity, with every person will see the world as their oyster. Perhaps, as in Plato’s Gorgias.
26
May
08
Keytars
These key covers from GAMA-GO are most definitely a needed purchase in my life. I just wish I could justify the shipping cost (it’s over $1 more than the cost of the item). $6 is one thing, $14 is another..
I have real mixed feelings about Twitter. One on hand, it could be useful for keeping tabs on friends without having to check in via text messaging or IM; on the other, absolutely no one I know uses it, and I’m not about to follow a bunch of strangers online. And let’s not get into the idea that Twitter’s service could be used for stalking or harassment.
However, I have often overlooked the other uses of Twitter- which mostly turn out to be a really poor version of someone’s blog- and this one’s simply wonderful.
Over on http://twitter.com/towerbridge, you can follow along as London’s Tower Bridge opens and closes to allow various vessels access to the river Thames. Pretty useless to anyone not piloting those ships, but still fun to imagine the Tower Bridge multitasking to post to Twitter while it mindlessly cranks the draws up and down all day- talk about a monotonous job!
Found via this Ask MetaFilter thread.
On the 17th of March, 2008, Swedish artist Erik Nordenankar sent off a briefcase containing a GPS unit with the express transportation company DHL. 55 days later, the package returned to Stockholm with its journey around the world recorded on the GPS. What the data translated to was a giant self-portrait of the artist, which had traveled through 6 continents and 62 countries and comprised of one 110,664 km long stroke.
On his site, you can find his travel instructions given to DHL (which is extensive, and also available as a poster-size PDF), a video of the briefcase’s journey (and at times even Nardenankar himself accompanies the case wearing a ‘VISITOR’ DHL vest and pushing giant pallets of cargo around in their warehouses and planes), and of course the drawing itself. Below is a video showing highlights of the trip:
Truly a remarkable piece of work, and sort of reminds me of Chairface Chippendale’s failed attempt to carve his face in the moon, though obviously more successful.
UPDATE:
Thought a pretty neat idea, this project has been (to my understanding) logically debunked over on MetaFilter.
If you blow up the map by clicking on it, the scrolling line of the drawing becomes a series of straight line segments. The end points of those segments match the coordinates in the “instructions to DHL” chart/poster, which can be blown up as a PDF via the link below it. So, if this is to be believed, DHL followed instructions to make a long series of pointless flights (refuelling in mid-air?) all over the world. Not to be believed, clearly.
By the way, DHL, FedEx and the rest don’t ship stuff point to point like this. It all goes through hubs. I don’t know where DHL’s hubs are, but anything you ship by FedEx in the US flies to Memphis overnight, gets sorted, and flies out to the destination airport. So a series of multiple shipments would result in a starburst-shaped drawing, not a portrait.
Dave Faris comments on the unbelievably short amount of time it supposedly took to complete the project, given Beagle’s observation above:
Not to mention time. If this is some dude’s senior project, he had to have conceived it in, oh, 1969.
It helps if you see the original (hi-definition) trailer first, but either way fans of the eternal Batman/Joker rivalry will appreciate this.
About three weeks ago, Warner Brothers began a phase of their Dark Knight viral marketing campaign where teams of 300 gathered in 12 different cities to hunt throughout their respective domains, counting things like trees and stairs according to their appropriate instructions. Along the way, they were to gather information needed to unlock an online safe, and ultimately be rewarded with the then-unreleased Dark Knight trailer in a local theater.
One winner in each of the 12 cities also received a 35mm print of the new trailer- a nice surprise, especially considering studios rarely hand out film prints. But there was something unusual about these prints. Apparently, every last frame had been defaced (by hand!- thumb prints on the film to prove it) by the Joker.
Take a look:
Yes, that is a light saber you see at one point. It really is hilarious to think of the Joker sitting there yawning through the trailer scribbling things like “BORING PART” across the screen until his own mug shows up- at which point he lights up and draws dozens of arrows pointing at himself, effectively blocking out the rest of the scene. It’s so maniacally in character.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more influential sound byte than that of the six-second drum break from the 1969 song “Amen, Brother”- known as the Amen Break. The clip was usurped by sample-based music such as hip-hop, spawned entire underground cultures such as the jungle and dub scenes, and has finally has become ubiquitous in the world of advertising. Nate Harrison’s 2004 video on the loop is interesting, using the clip to explain the relationship between creative culture and copyright, among many other things.
From the video:
Why do I bring any of this up? What is significant of the Amen Break? I’m talking about it here because I think its story is a good example illustrating the rise and subsequent problematic of digital sampling in relation to today’s increasingly stringent copyright and trademark laws.
To trace the history of the Amen Break is to trace the history of a brief period of time when it seemed digital tools offered a potentially unlimited amount of new forms of expression.
Where cultural production, at least musically, was full of possibilities by virtue of being able to freely appropriate from the musical past. To make new combinations, and thus new meanings.
The story demonstrates that a society “free to borrow and build upon the past is culturally richer than a controlled one.” To use the words of Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor, copyright reform advocate, and co-founder of Creative Commons.
More resources on the Amen Break:
Wikipedia page on the Amen Break
The Amen Break and The Golden Ratio
