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Screw the Grammys. The only thing I want to see tonight is this tiny short by Wayne Unten showing the imagined takeoff of Olivia Wright in 1903, “the first to pilot the great grasshoppers of North America.” While taking my kids to the playground, I shot live-action footage of a grasshopper, using my iPhone. This…
This is one of the coolest buildings I’ve seen in a long time: a structure designed to turn everyone into Spider-man by allowing people to climb all over its interior and exterior. It kind of feels like a glitch in the Matrix: a computer-generated mountain that needs more polygons and some textures. And that seems…
There’s no such thing as bad publicity in show business, right? Except maybe when your band gains notoriety thanks to being mentioned in a slightly bigger band’s smarmy tantrum of a farewell letter to San Francisco and its rapidly gentrifying ways. https://gizmodo.com/techbrats-and-tech-buses-whats-ruining-san-francisco-1508180786 Thee Oh Sees front-man and Castle Face Records co-owner John Dwyer has had…
Google and Samsung have made an agreement to cross-license each other’s patents for the next ten years. That includes any patents already held, or any new ones issued in the coming decade. Long live Android!
Back in the day, vectorscopes used to measure the quality of analog video signals. Needless to say, that’s not exactly something we need done very often today. But some lucky old vectorscopes get badass second lives, in the form of an awesome retro clock. Aaron of Oscilloclocks is no stranger to turning old-school oscilloscopes into…
Documenting a crime scene well is super important. Once it gets reopened to the public, there’s no going back. You can take all the pictures you want, and they might not cut it, but the Roswell Police have a new future-cop style trick: scanning the whole dang place. Recently Roswell PD in New Mexico became…
Snowball fight? Those are for idle teens who have nothing better to do than to go windmilling around, awkwardly flinging globes of snow with little speed and even less accuracy. Snowball war, complete with its own customized slingshot arsenal? That’s what I’m talking about. It shouldn’t surprise you that that’s what our good buddy Joerg…
Your number of Twitter followers is sort of a badge of honor. It doesn’t mean much, but having more is something (stupid) to brag about. Thanks to a bug currently active on Twitter, you can have as many as you want, just by clicking one button a ton of times. Discovered by Karnesh Mehrah, the…
It’s amazing to see how different the sun looks depending on the filters you use. Here you can see it in ultraviolet light, looking as evil as the darkest pits of Mordor. I imagine those sinuous filaments are nefarious serpents made from the souls of dead evil people. Shown in ultraviolet light, the relatively cool…
Multi-gigapixel panoramas are rad. It’s like peeping at the world through a telescope from the comfort of your own ground-floor living room. But Microsoft has made the concept even more fun with its 20 Gigapixel “ArtZoom,” and has hidden a bunch of stuff for you to find. Shot as a series of 2,400 digital photographs…
You’d have to be crazy naive to think piracy flag-bearer The Pirate Bay is free of porn, but you’ll be forgiven for underestimating exactly how much is hiding out there. It’s 35 percent. The Pirate Bay’s new uploads last year were 35 percent porn, second only to TV and movies which combined make 44 percent.…
So maybe you’re not too keen on the idea of falling in love with a completely artificial computer personality. Who could blame you? That’s pretty weird. Maybe instead, the future will be a place where you can learn to love yourself. Wait, actually scratch that; that’s super weird too. Jonah Hill and Michael Cera illustrate…
30 years ago, the landscape of personal computing was vastly different. It hardly even existed, compared to what it is today. Footage of the Mac’s initial unveil is out there, but this second, more polished run—a presentation for the Boston Computer Society—hasn’t been available since the event itself back on January 30th 1984. The content…
Originally built as a supersonic strategic bomber for delivering nuclear strikes on Moscow, the B-1B Lancer has played a variety of roles for the Air Force in its nearly 30 years of service. And thanks to a newly upgraded cockpit—including four multi-function color displays and a modernized Fully Integrated Data Link (FIDL)—the B-One “Bones” of…
Like yesterday’s Downstream entry, today’s is of piano subsumed in noise. Yesterday’s noise has an industrial static to it. It is a thick forest of noise through which the piano occasionally becomes apparent. What makes yesterday’s piece, “Week Twenty Nine Project” by Madeleine Cocolas, work as a composition is how the melody’s slow development is…
The right editing can really make a video into something great. Just watch Sam and Martha’s wedding. It’s more beautiful than anyone remembers. For more of this week’s top comedy videos, including a look back at The Godfather and an insightful look into credit vs. debit, head on over to SplitSider. It was announced this…
I am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a…
I guess this makes sense when you think about it, but I never thought about it. Soap bubbles don’t stand a chance when it’s -4 degrees out, as YouTube’s NightHawkInLight elegantly shows us. At least it doesn’t look like a violent end for the bubbles. They don’t really shatter, they just sort of vaporize into…
This would be roughly the week of January 20 through January 26. 5 Years Ago (2009): The image of the week was a steampunk instrument by Mike Ford. … The quote of the week was the first two paragraphs of an essay by Eula Biss on the telephone (“The idea on which the telephone depended—that…
It’s pretty obvious that breathing in sooty air is bad. But just how bad is it? Scary bad—as The Allegheny Front explains. As if soot wasn’t bad enough on its own, researchers shows it’s a delivery system for super high concentrations of pollutants. Each particle acts like a magnet, collecting other toxic gases from the…
