Hsiufan

© Franco Banfi / Licensed for use on Colossal

Photographer Franco Banfi and a team of scuba divers were following a pod of sperm whales when suddenly the large creatures became motionless and began to take a synchronized vertical rest. This strange sleeping position was first discovered only in 2008, when a team of biologists from the UK and Japan drifted into their own group of non-active sperm whales. After studying tagged whales the team learned this collective slumber occurs for approximately 7 percent of the animal’s life, in short increments of just 6-24 minutes.

The image, Synchronized Sleepers, was a finalist in the 2017 Big Picture Competition in the category of Human/Nature. You can see more of the Switzerland-based photographer’s underwater photography on his website and Instagram. (via kottke.org)

related: enter your phone number

In this blog post, we’ll look at MyRocks and the

LOCK IN SHARE MODE

Those who attended the March 30th webinar “MyRocks Troubleshooting” might remember our discussion with Yoshinori on 

LOCK IN SHARE MODE

I did more tests, and I can confirm that his words are true:

LOCK IN SHARE MODE

This quick example demonstrates this. The initial setup:

CREATE TABLE t (
id int(11) NOT NULL,
f varchar(100) DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (id)
) ENGINE=ROCKSDB;
insert into t values(12345, 'value1'), (54321, 'value2');

In session 1:

session 1> begin;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
session 1> select * from t where id=12345 lock in share mode;
+-------+--------+
| id | f |
+-------+--------+
| 12345 | value1 |
+-------+--------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

In session 2:

session 2> begin;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
session 2> update t set f='value3' where id=12345;
ERROR HY000: Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction

However, in the webinar I wanted to remind everyone about the differences between

LOCK IN SHARE MODE

FOR UPDATE

session 2> select * from t where id=12345 lock in share mode;
+-------+--------+
| id    | f      |
+-------+--------+
| 12345 | value1 |
+-------+--------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
session 2> update t set f='value3' where id=12345;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 1  Changed: 1  Warnings: 0
session 2> commit;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)

I reported this behavior here, and also at Percona Jira bugs database: MYR-107. In Facebook, this bug is already fixed.

This test clearly demonstrates that it is fixed in Facebook. In “session 1”:

session1> CREATE TABLE `t` (
    -> `id` int(11) NOT NULL,
    -> `f` varchar(100) DEFAULT NULL,
    -> PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
    -> ) ENGINE=ROCKSDB;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
session1> insert into t values(12345, 'value1'), (54321, 'value2');
Query OK, 2 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 2  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0
session1> begin;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
session1>  select * from t where id=12345 lock in share mode;
+-------+--------+
| id    | f      |
+-------+--------+
| 12345 | value1 |
+-------+--------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

And now in another session:

session2> begin;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
session2> select * from t where id=12345 lock in share mode;
+-------+--------+
| id    | f      |
+-------+--------+
| 12345 | value1 |
+-------+--------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
session2> update t set f='value3' where id=12345;
ERROR 1205 (HY000): Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction: Timeout on index: test.t.PRIMARY

If you want to test the fix with the Facebook MySQL build, you need to update submodules to download the patch:

git submodule update

For years, Nick Bertke aka Pogo was one of my favorite remix artists, deftly cutting and splicing classic children’s films like Alice in Wonderland, Snow White, and Willy Wonka into ambient aural landscapes.

Collectively, the Perth-based producer’s videos have over 160 million views on YouTube and over 600,000 subscribers.

His viral success led to a thriving career: Pixar hired him to make authorized remixes for Up and Toy Story, he made Catchatronic for the Pokemon Company, and was commissioned to make remixes for Dexter and SpongeBob Squarepants, among others.

More than anything, a sense of joy, sweetness, and innocence pervaded his work.

So, like many other fans, I was shocked to see his series of blog posts two years ago about the evils of feminism, how it “raises a breed of self victimizing gold diggers,” a “camouflaged push for gender supremacy,” and “self-entitling social status posing as a humanitarian ideology.”

A second post, “Why We Should Envy Women,” argued that women get preferential treatment in society without accountability. “You have a lot more privileges than men, and you have a pass through life that us gents can only dream of.”

An accompanying video, “Why I Don’t Take Feminism Seriously,” is a four-minute elaboration on his post, opening with this salvo:

“I’ve always found that the more I treat a woman like a child, the stronger the relationship, the better the sex, and the more often it happens. Discipline, reprimand, and complete indifference. I think the feminine woman craves the attributes of a firm father in the man she enters a relationship with. The more I realize that women want to be manned around, the more I see modern feminism in a different light – it could well be little more than the collective feminine cry for drama and childlike retaliation.”

He continues:

“Women crave drama. It comes with being an emotionally-driven creature. They need to stretch their emotions, to release and resolve. I look at feminism with all of its illogical arguments, self-defeating philosophies, and double-standards, and I’m hard-pressed to view it as anything more than a tantrum.”

It goes on like that for three more minutes.

Unsurprisingly, this led to a swift backlash from disappointed fans on social media, covered in depth by writer David Futrelle.

Bertke quickly deleted the blog post and video, and claimed it was all a social experiment gone wrong. “I mashed together the most radical views I could find about women and feminism on the internet, doing my best to present it as my humble opinion and honest observations.”

His post, now deleted, was far from convincing.

“I recently conducted somewhat of an experiment for myself that went with a much bigger bang than I expected. I’m awe struck by the enormous breed of hyenas out there taking gender equality and feminism hostage, and bending it into a social status to validate their feeling that the world owes them everything because of their gender.”

He deleted his Twitter “for good,” and promised to disable comments and ratings on his videos.

Four months later, he was back on Twitter, but I stopped following his work. After that series of tirades, like many others, I was no longer comfortable supporting or evangelizing him or his work.

But people grow and change, and when the subject of Pogo came up yesterday in the XOXO Slack, I was curious to see if his positions evolved at all in the last two years.

Well, no. The only thing that apparently changed is that he’s grown more careful about expressing his views on his own social media channels, though strictly for financial reasons.

In February, Nick Bertke appeared on Tommy Sotomayor’s call-in show.

If you’re not familiar with his work, Tommy Sotomayor is a controversial Atlanta radio host, Trump supporter, men’s rights activist, and prolific YouTuber, with his accounts repeatedly banned from YouTube, GoFundMe, Instagram, Twitter, and Patreon for hate speech. Black women are a frequent target of his videos, as are transgender women, gay men, and feminists. (Take a quick look through his most popular videos to get an idea.)

This hour and forty minutes of Nick Bertke and Tommy Sotomayor covers a lot of ground, focused on the evils of feminism, women’s rights, Islam, transgender rights, and Black Lives Matter. They talk about the greatness of Trump and Milo, and argue that hate speech, hate crimes, and the wage gap don’t exist.

Choice quotes from Bertke:

“I don’t think feminists ever do what they preach. I think it’s always an ulterior motive. I think it’s a divisive cult that doesn’t achieve much more than a flock of self-entitled narcissists at the end of the day. I’ve never liked them. I’ve always thought that driving a wedge between the genders seems like a funny way to achieve equality.”

“I think the left is bringing about the destruction of Western civilization, personally.”

“I don’t want to make massive generalization or anything, but I think female accountability is a myth. I think under the banner of feminism, females will never be held accountable for anything. You should not critique a woman unless you are prepared for the consequences.”

So, whatever. I’m diametrically opposed to his red pill MRA nonsense, and it’s disappointing to hear from someone whose work I love. He’s free to talk about his views, and fans who disagree are free to no longer support his work once they’re aware of them.

The nature of independent art online means that we know more about the people who make the work we enjoy than ever. We’re following and interacting with them on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, reading their blog posts, YouTube, and SoundCloud comments, following appearances on podcasts and streaming videos.

Before the internet, it was easier to separate the art from the artist, simply because we knew so much less about them, unless they committed a crime or otherwise made headlines.

Publishers, publicists, and agents could create a wall around an artist and their personal lives, so they could focus on their art instead of managing their fans. Personal interaction was limited to autograph signings or fan club letters.

The internet opened up the floodgates for a massive new class of independent artist to make a living, with some tradeoffs. Many new artists could sustain themselves directly from fans without traditional gatekeepers like a record label or movie studio, but it required engaging with them, building relationships over time.

Being more approachable and more available also makes independent artists more vulnerable—to harassment and abuse, to complaints from entitled fans, or simply the weight of expectations from those who love their work the most.

Or, in the case of Nick Bertke, the consequences of expressing your unpopular opinions to a large group of people who don’t share them.

To his credit, Bertke seems very aware of how his views are received and its implications on his career as Pogo.

In a followup appearance with Tommy Sotomayor in February, Bertke talked about the backlash to his initial posts in 2015.

“I’ve got no patience for political correctness, no patience at all. I’ve mouthed off on Twitter before, I’ve mouthed off on Facebook before, way back when. And then I kind of realized, this was paying my bills, I’m getting a lot of work here. I guess I have to clean up my shit and I have to be careful of what I say. Because, who knows, I might say that the Ghostbusters movie sucked, with the all-female Ghostbusters movie, and then the next thing I know, I’m moving back in with my parents.”

He went on with a story about how it impacted his client work:

“I’m at a point where I don’t speak out about my political views anymore… I’ve used Twitter for voicing my political views in the past, and most of the time, it hasn’t worked out. Most of the time, the reaction has been very, very negative.

I was lining up a job with a university here, a massive job. I would’ve done five or six videos for them. When they found out I was anti-feminism—anti-modern third/fourth-wave feminism—they gave me a call and said the deal’s off. We can’t have you.”

 

Those two appearances on Sotomayor’s show led to an invite to appear on Louder with Crowder three weeks later, a talk show hosted by Steven Crowder, a conservative standup comedian and former Fox News commentator.

Again, Bertke talks about why he tries to keep his personal opinions out of his work and the financial implications, commenting on the Trump remix he released before the election.

“I tried to keep the Trumpular piece as neutral as I could, because I didn’t know if he was going to win or not, and I really didn’t want to lose any followers. Pogo does pay my bills. I want to be careful.

“I have to kind of walk a tightrope. One of the things I have found recently is that there’s a line between your art and your self, as a person. If you go on to my SoundCloud and like my stuff, retweet or post or comment on it, it’s got nothing to do with me really.”

“I’m actually very different from my music. If you listen to Alice and Wishery, you think of someone who’s light and fluffy and bubbly and optimistic. I’m actually kind of the opposite, in a lot of ways. At least, I have been since my balls dropped.”

If you’re a right-wing conservative who believes political correctness is killing social discourse, then this may seem like a tragedy to you. The words you say and the beliefs you have can have an impact on your career. But that’s not censorship, political correctness, and it’s not a violation of the right to free speech.

It’s just the inevitable reaction to an audience hearing someone whose work they admire say things they find personally repulsive.

Nick Bertke seems to understand this himself. In October, he released Data & Picard, a loving remix of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He told this anecdote to Tommy Sotomayor:

“I love Brent Spiner, he played Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation. I put up my Data and Picard video a few months ago, where I played him and got all the makeup he used in the series and did my best to look and act like him. And then, that week, he’s putting up tweets about how stupid Trump is and how wrong he is. And then, I was like, well, I kind of liked you for a while there, Brent. *sighs*

I still love Brent Spiner as an actor. And it’s interesting, because a lot of the time, I get tweets like, ‘Wow, never meet your heroes. Nick’s a total misogynist, Nick’s a total racist and fascist. He says this about Trump and Hillary Clinton. Never meet your heroes, guys.’

And, look, I guess that hurts, to some extent. But I can understand it, as well.”

I probably feel similarly about Pogo as he now does about Brent Spiner.

For me, the luster is gone. It’s hard to truly enjoy art made by someone you can’t respect.

Turkish art director and visual artist Hüseyin Şahin has an uncanny eye for combining disparate photographs into cohesive scenes, where technology, nature, and humankind collide. Sahin works with a variety of digital photographs which he then edits into collages that he shares on Instagram and Behance. (via ARCHatlas)

Turkish digital artist and photographer Aydin Büyüktas continues his dizzying landscape series Flatland with this new collection of collages shot in various locations around the United States including Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. Each image requires around 18-20 aerial drone shots which are then stitched together digitally to form sweeping landscapes that curl upward without a visible horizon. As we’ve noted before, Büyüktas found inspiration in a century-old satirical novel titled Flatland about a two-dimensional world inhabited by geometric figures. You can see more from the series on his Facebook page.

Abby Phillip, reporting for The Washington Post:

Weeks after a U.S. Navy SEAL was killed in a covert mission in Yemen, Trump has resisted accepting responsibility for authorizing the mission and the subsequent death of Senior Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens.

In an interview with Fox News that aired Tuesday morning, Trump said the mission “was started before I got here.” He noted that the operation was something his generals “were looking at for a long time doing.”

“This was something that was, you know, just — they wanted to do,” Trump said. “ And they came to see me and they explained what they wanted to do, the generals, who are very respected.”

“And they lost Ryan,” Trump continued.

Harry Truman: “The buck stops here.”

Donald Trump: “They lost Ryan.”

In other news from the kakistocracy today:

• Trump accused Barack Obama of orchestrating the protests against him.
• Asked about the alarming spate of anti-Semitic attacks and threats across the nation (including hundreds of desecrated headstones right here in Philadelphia), Trump reportedly said “Sometimes it’s the reverse, to make people — or to make others — look bad.”
• Education Secretary Betsy DeVos issued a statement describing historically black colleges as “real pioneers when it comes to school choice”, when in fact they were created as a result of legalized segregation and Jim Crow laws — the opposite of choice.

So: cowardice, paranoia, anti-Semitism, and tone-deaf racism.

After many days of rain one lane of this two lane road collapsed into the canyon. It's been out for a month and it will be many more months before it will be fixed. Thanks to Google maps way too many drivers take this once sleepy local road. 

How do you think drivers go through this chokepoint? 

One hundred experience points to you if you answered one at a time.

One at a time! Through a half-duplex pipe following a first in first out discipline takes forever!

Yes, there is a stop sign. And people default to this mode because it appeals to our innate sense of fairness. What could be fairer than alternating one at a time?

The problem is it's stupid.

While waiting, stewing, growing angrier, I often think if people just knew a little queueing theory we could all be on our way a lot faster.

We can't make the pipe full duplex, so that's out. Let's assume there's no priority involved, vehicles are roughly the same size and take roughly the same time to transit the network. Then what do you do?

Why can't people figure out its faster to drive through in batches? If we went in groups of say, three, the throughput would be much higher. And when one side's queue depth grows larger because people are driving to or from work that side's batch size should increase. 

Since this condition will last a long time we have a possibility to learn because the same people take this road all the time. So what happens if you try to change the culture by showing people what a batch is by driving right behind someone as they take their turn?

You got it. Honking. There's a simple heuristic, a deeply held ethic against line cutting, so people honk, flip you off, and generally make heir displeasure known.

It's your classic battle of reason versus norms. The smart thing is the thing we can't do by our very natures. So we all just keep doing the dumb thing.

• On Reddit - where most people think I'm an idiot and this is a crappy post. 
• On HackerNews

This is cool: you use a Scratch-like interface to define what your Raspberry Pi is going to look like (packages, WiFi password, account passwords, etc.) and it burns a SD Card image for you.

This YouTube video does a very good job of showing you around. You can get the software here at PiBakery.

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For a visual of the growth Uber is experiencing take a look at the first few seconds of the above video. It will start in the right place. It's from an amazing talk given by Matt Ranney, Chief Systems Architect at Uber and Co-founder of Voxer: What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber to 1000 Services (slides).

It shows a ceaseless, rhythmic, undulating traffic grid of growth occurring in a few Chinese cities. This same pattern of explosive growth is happening in cities all over the world. In fact, Uber is now in 400 cities and 70 countries. They have over 6000 employees, 2000 of whom are engineers. Only a year and half a go there were just 200 engineers. Those engineers have produced over 1000 microservices which are stored in over 8000 git repositories.

That's crazy 10x growth in a crazy short period of time. Who has experienced that? Not many. And as you might expect that sort of unique, compressed, fast paced, high stakes experience has to teach you something new, something deeper than you understood before.

Matt is not new to this game. He was co-founder of Voxer, which experienced its own rapid growth, but this is different. You can tell while watching the video Matt is trying to come to terms with what they've accomplished.

Matt is a thoughtful guy and that comes through. In a recent interview he says:

And a lot of architecture talks at QCon and other events left me feeling inadequate; like other people- like Google for example - had it all figured out but not me.

This talk is Matt stepping outside of the maelstrom for a bit, trying to make sense of an experience, trying to figure it all out. And he succeeds. Wildly.

It's part wisdom talk and part confessional. "Lots of mistakes have been made along the way," Matt says, and those are where the lessons come from.

The scaffolding of the talk hangs on WIWIK (What I Wish I Had Known) device, which has become something of an Internet meme. It's advice he would give his naive, one and half year younger self, though of course, like all of us, he certainly would not listen.  

And he would not be alone. Lots of people have been critical of Uber (HackerNews, Reddit). After all, those numbers are really crazy. Two thousand engineers? Eight thousand repositories? One thousand services? Something must be seriously wrong, isn't it?

Maybe. Matt is surprisingly non-judgemental about the whole thing. His mode of inquiry is more questioning and searching than finding absolutes. He himself seems bemused over the number of repositories, but he gives the pros and cons of more repositories versus having fewer repositories, without saying which is better, because given Uber's circumstances: how do you define better?

Uber is engaged in a pitched world-wide battle to build a planetary scale system capable of capturing a winner-takes-all market. That's the business model. Be the last service standing. What does better mean in that context?  

Winner-takes-all means you have to grow fast. You could go slow and appear more ordered, but if you go too slow you’ll lose. So you balance on the edge of chaos and dip your toes, or perhaps your whole body, into chaos, because that’s how you’ll scale to become the dominant world wide service. This isn’t a slow growth path. This a knock the gate down and take everything strategy. Think you could do better? Really?

Microservices are a perfect fit for what Uber is trying to accomplish. Plug your ears, but it's a Conway's Law thing, you get so many services because that's the only way so many people can be hired and become productive.

There's no technical reason for so many services. There's no technical reason for so many repositories. This is all about people. mranney sums it up nicely:

Scaling the traffic is not the issue. Scaling the team and the product feature release rate is the primary driver.

A consistent theme of the talk is this or that is great, but there are tradeoffs, often surprising tradeoffs that you really only experience at scale. Which leads to two of the biggest ideas I took from the talk:

• Microservices are a way of replacing human communication with API coordination. Rather than people talking and dealing with team politics it's easier for teams to simply write new code. It reminds me of a book I read long ago, don't remember the name, where people lived inside a Dyson Sphere and because there was so much space and so much free energy available within the sphere that when any group had a conflict with another group they could just splinter off and settle into a new part of the sphere. Is this better? I don't know, but it does let a lot of work get done in parallel while avoiding lots of people overhead. 
• Pure carrots, no sticks. This is a deep point about the role of command and control is such a large diverse group. You'll be tempted to mandate policy. Thou shalt log this way, for example. If you don't there will be consequences. That's the stick. Matt says don't do that. Use carrots instead. Any time the sticks come out it's bad. So no mandates. The way you want to handle it is provide tools that are so obvious and easy to use that people wouldn’t do it any other way.

This is one of those talks you have to really watch to understand because a lot is being communicated along dimensions other than text. Though of course I still encourage you to read my gloss of the talk :-)

Stats (April 2016)

GIF via Sploid

Artist John V. Muntean (previously) constructs bulky objects that spin on a single axis that when paired with a light source reveal a multitude of projected shadow images. Two of his latest creations were built with tens of thousands of LEGOs, each with three separate images contained within a single sculpture. Watch the videos below to see how the work. (via Sploid)

According to a new University of Arizona study, instant ramen is the most valuable currency at one US prison. For example, a two .59 packets of ramen could be traded for one $10 sweatshirt while one ramen packet was worth "five tailor-made cigarettes." Why did the noodles overtake cigarettes as the most valuable currency? Because the cafeteria food is terrible and it's getting worse. Sociologist Michael Gibson-Light calls it "punitive frugality." From The Guardian:

The study paints a bleak picture of the state of food available at the prison. Gibson-Light found that black-market food became more valuable after control over food preparation switched from one private firm to another in the early 2000s.

“That change was part of a cost-cutting measure,” Gibson-Light said. “With that change that resulted in a reduction in the quantity of the food the inmates were receiving.”

Inmates at the prison Gibson-Light studied went from receiving three hot meals a day to two hot meals and one cold lunch during the week, and only two meals for the whole day on the weekend...

“[Money] doesn’t change unless there’s some drastic change to the value in people using it,” he said. The shift from tobacco to ramen highlights how dire the nutritional standards at prisons has become, he added.

OpenSignal (mentioned previously) crowdsources cellular coverage and speed maps directly from individual network users. They recently released the August 2016 update to their State of Mobile Networks USA Report, which was based on 2.8 billion measurements collected by 120,000 OpenSignal users. The results may surprise you.

Verizon is still first, but T-Mobile is now a close second in terms of LTE Network availability. Note the definition of availability is based on the percentage of time that users get a LTE signal; it is not directly based on geographical coverage.

T-Mobile is now first (again, the difference is small) in average LTE network speed.

Coverage is still location specific. At the bottom of the report, they list which networks have the best coverage in your metro area. For example, Verizon is tops availability for Boston and New York City, Verizon and T-Mobile are tied for top in Los Angeles and Seattle, and AT&T and Verizon are tied for tops in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Using their crowdsourced maps, you can even drill down to your home, school, workplace, or commute route. It’s free to see their coverage maps online, but you should consider downloading their free smartphone apps (Android / iOS) so that you can also contribute anonymous information and improve the data quality for everyone. The app will even direct you if you want to walk towards a better signal.

Bottom line. LTE is now the most important form of cellular data. T-Mobile has invested a lot of money into 4G LTE coverage, while Sprint has less complete and slower 4G LTE coverage. While Verizon still has the best geographical coverage, depending on your location the T-Mobile network may offer equally good LTE coverage and speed. This is good to know since T-Mobile is always offering some sort of promotion, while the MVNOs that use their network like Ting and Republic Wireless are the cheapest options.

OpenSignal LTE Network Comparison: T-Mobile vs. Verizon from My Money Blog.

© MyMoneyBlog.com, 2016.

Xcode – If you work with an image that is white on transparent background, Xcode automatically adds grey background for contrast.

/via londeix

OSX El Capitan – Terminal password prompt now blinks a key icon when expecting input instead of an empty space.

GitHub – Paste an image into an issue or PR text area and it will upload it and format the markdown for you.

A self-taught sculptor, Romain Langlois studied medical books and anatomical charts to understand the human body, building his first sculptures using only plaster and clay. Seeking a more permanent material, Langlois turned to bronze, a metal he now incorporates into works that are inspired by nature rather than man. His pieces visually pull apart the natural objects that surround us—building works that appear as bisected rocks, boulders, and tree trunks. These sculptures showcase glistening bronze protruding from their insides, unleashing the perceived inner energy of each object.

Langlois is based in La Côte Martin, France. You can see more of his sculptures on Artistics or on his website. (via Juxtapoz)

Blending her original photography with hand-drawn illustrations in Photoshop, animator Yoyo the Ricecorpse creates quirky ghost-like characters that live in a world where anime meets Roger Rabbit. Each animation is limited to a single animated GIF that sees her doughy characters living in teapots or lounging around urban backdrops in photos taken from Yoyo’s travels to Tokyo. The illustrator says she’s inspired by animator Hayao Miyazaki, manga artist Eiichiro Oda, and writer Roald Dahl, something apparent in her attention to detail and her ability to suggest a larger narrative with just a few frames of animation.

Recently out of school, Yoyo now works full-time as an illustrator and animator in London and has transformed many of her characters into an assortment of shirts, pins, buttons and other objects available in her Etsy shop (we’re particularly fond of the Sausage Bunny). She also tells Colossal that she’s working on an animated music video that should be out soon. You can follow more of her work on Instagram and Behance.

With an animated take on the commute map, Mark Evans shows where people commute to work.

The resulting animations are somewhat hypnotic (even my dog seemed to go into a trance watching them leading to minutes of human amusement) but also provide a visual way of quickly seeing the distribution of workers into a given city. The points are sized based on the number of commuters, so a large dot indicates a higher relative number of commuters moving from the same tract to the same tract. The dots are also color coded to see which counties are most represented in the commuter sample.

Just select a county to see. [Thanks, @Mikey_Two]

Tags: commute

All images © Anna Heinrich & Leon Palmer

Collaborative duo Anna Heinrich and Leon Palmer were so impressed by the view overlooking the rolling hills of Hadleigh Country Park in Essex, England that they decided to capture it in perpetuity. Instead of simply taking a photograph, Heinrich & Palmer decided to submerge a camera obscura into the ground, imbedding an 11.5-foot Weholite pipe into the side of a hill to be easily accessible by the nearby bike path.

“The Reveal” was created to fit four to five people, and the 260 mm lens of the camera is fixed within the door, which needs to be closed tight in order for the “live” image to appear bright. Once you are securely inside, the bright scenery from outdoors comes in, snapping into focus on the back wall. Because of its location against the vast southern skies, Heinrich & Palmer explain that the landscape seems to fall away in the distance, and the passing ships give the image the quality of a moving oil painting.

The two installation artists met while studying fine art in Cardiff in the late 80s and have now been collaborators for over 20 years. Their work focuses mostly on the large scale, including films, installations, photography, and light boxes. You can see more of the artists’ work on their website.

Using motion capture methods, Tobias Gremmler collected movement data for two kung fu masters. Then he visualized the results with various interpretations, such as particles, fabric, and scaffolding. Pretty:

[via Colossal]

Tags: martial arts, motion capture