Djotto

I'm looking for some science fiction publishers who publish in the New Weird and/or Slipstream styles. I know about Tachyon Publications... can you please point me toward others?

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I'm a big fan of guerilla gardening - neglected or abandoned urban spaces can be pretty bleak, it's neat when people take the time to brighten things up. Heavy Petal Gardening has an easy recipe for Seed bombs - make sure you use seeds that are native to your area. (I especially like the way these look - people will think there have been dung beetles around.)

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Jim sent me one of his Solar Theremin kits for this weeks build. My initial impressions of the kit are really good. It is very well documented and everything you need is included, except for the mint tin or case. In particular, I like the full color build instructions and schematics. I highly recommend building this kit.

You can purchase Jim's kit from the Clockwork Robot store.

The things you need:

• Solar Theremin Kit - available here
• Soldering Iron
• Rosin core solder
• Altoids tin or any other small tin

The things you don't need, but are great to have:

• Arms of Assistance - Make you own
• Helping hands for holding your parts
• Fume extractor - Make your own

What you get in the kit:

All you need is an empty candy tin. You can use any tin or case, but the instructions include templates for a typical "mint tin".

Step 1: Cut out the templates

The first step is to cut out the templates provided in the directions. I used the piece of cardboard that the solar panel was attached to for the Theremin's top. Also, the kit had a pre-made strip that will be used later to hold the circuit board up against the lip of the tin.

You can go ahead and tape the bottom template in the tin. This will stop any of the electrical components from shorting out if they happen to touch the tin. Next, add the long cardboard strip around the interior edge of the tin.

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John sez,

To celebrate the release of Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams, Night Shade Books has posted a self-contained excerpt from the book to their website and posted the complete text of Williams's Nebula Award-winning novella "The Green Leopard Plague." They've also got a short interview with him here.

Author S.M. Stirling sums up the book nicely: "Implied Spaces pioneers a new genre of SF--the 'Sword & Singularity' novel. Williams combines fantasy tropes believably with nanotech, bleeding-edge infotech speculation, classic smashing-planets space opera and intriguingly human, or possibly post-human characters along with a fast-moving plot and a quirky sense of humor in a mélange that's cosmological, theological, ontological, comic, and thoroughly entertaining."

Link (Thanks, John!)

Instructables member 'rbanks' has a great tutorial on making and printing your own woodblock prints. I have always wanted to do this, but sadly never have. If you are willing to put down the soldering iron for a minute, check out making your own woodblock prints.

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Theo Schlossnagle, author of Scalable Internet Architectures, gave a great explanation of how internet traffic spikes are shifting:

Lately, I see more sudden eyeballs and what used to be an established trend seems to fall into a more chaotic pattern that is the aggregate of different spike signatures around a smooth curve. This graph is from two consecutive days where we have a beautiful comparison of a relatively uneventful day followed by long-exposure spike (nytimes.com) compounded by a short-exposure spike (digg.com):

The disturbing part is that this occurs even on larger sites now due to the sheer magnitude of eyeballs looking at today's already popular sites. Long story short, this makes planning a real bitch.

[...]What isn't entirely obvious in the above graphs? These spikes happen inside 60 seconds. The idea of provisioning more servers (virtual or not) is unrealistic. Even in a cloud computing system, getting new system images up and integrated in 60 seconds is pushing the envelope and that would assume a zero second response time. This means it is about time to adjust what our systems architecture should support. The old rule of 70% utilization accommodating an unexpected 40% increase in traffic is unraveling. At least eight times in the past month, we've experienced from 100% to 1000% sudden increases in traffic across many of our clients.

[Link]

After nearly 9 years of seeding The Pirate Bay’s oldest working torrent is still very much alive. Interestingly, the torrent is not a Hollywood classic nor is it an evergreen music album.

Type “stupid animated gif“—or words to that effect—into your preferred search engine and you’ll be rewarded with an abundance of germane material.

Meanwhile a search on “animated gif of Stanley Kubrick rolling in his grave” fails to yield anything of significance.

Pity. I guess we’ll just have to imagine how the late perfectionist and celebrated director would have reacted to a gallery of his most iconic images, downloaded and doctored into infinitely looping, minimally animated snippets.

Perhaps I presume. Perhaps he’d be praying for someone to reanimate him, so he could haunt the realm of the late night chatrooms, his every observation and opinion punctuated with a languid Sue Lyons lifting her head in Lolita, or a diabolical Clockwork Orange toast.

Admittedly, the longer one watches George C Scott’s General Turgidson working over a mouthful of gum, or Jack Nicholson acting four kinds of crazy, the more tempting it is to put together a cinemagraph of one’s own. That’s the high flying term assigned to the form by artist Kevin Burg and photographer Jamie Beck who allegedly invented (and later trademarked) it while covering New York Fashion Week. To quote supermodel Coco Rocha, as they do on their website, “it’s more than a photo but not quite a video.”

Be forewarned that it’s not a project for the Photoshop newbie. Maybe the instructional video below just makes it seem so.  (Though if you’re looking for an instructional video on how not to make an instructional video, this is very instructional indeed. If not, stick with a more straight forward, non-film-based how to. Stanley Kubrick, this guy ain’t.)

Related Content:

The Cinemagraph: A Haunting Photo/Video Hybrid

Signature Shots from the Films of Stanley Kubrick: One-Point Perspective

Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Stanley Kubrick Never Made

Ayun Halliday recommends Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” in its original form.

A Gallery of Stanley Kubrick Cinemagraphs: Iconic Moments Briefly Animated is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

If you call yourself a gamer, odds are fairly good you've played through one or both of Valve's acclaimed Portal games. If so, perhaps — in between solving those mind-twisting puzzles — you've wondered what life would be like working inside Aperture Laboratories. A new Portal 2-inspired web series from Wayside Creations aims to satiate your curiosity.

Aperture R&D goes inside the cold, unwelcoming halls of the research facility, following a pair of scientists as they strive to earn the distinction of Lab Team of the Month. Even losing an esteemed colleague to a turret laser doesn't dissuade our protagonists from pursuing the prize. Episode one contains some nice references and callbacks to Valve's inventive series, and the acting...

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fapoleon-bonerparte:

Detail of the gold embroidery on one of Napoleon’s uniforms.

Not really a Picture of a Crush but can we please appreciate Napoleon’s fashion sense

If ever there was a heartwarming (or stomach-turning, depending on your affinity for amphibians) story to kick off your weekend, it is this one. Mike Archer, a scientist at the University of New South Wales, is on the cusp of successfully cloning an extinct species of frog called Rheobatrachus, better known as the gastric-brooding frog. The frog, which went from initial discovery in 1972 to its eventual extinction in 1983, is famous for the unique way it gives birth. As discovered by Mike Tyler of the University of Adelaide, the mother literally swallows its own eggs and then stops producing stomach acid so they can hatch in her belly, live as tadpoles, and six weeks later are "born" as the mother frog vomits them up.

So far, using...

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There has been a flurry of interest in the ELP laser turntable recently. This $15,000 device plays vinyl using a laser. It's been on the market for a number of years, so I'm not sure why it's suddenly generating attention. As far as I'm concerned, it has a fatal flaw: laser technology requires an astoundingly clean record, because there's no mechanical stylus to snowplow dust out of the way. This means that every fleck of dirt and hair is reproduced in pristine stereo -- not exactly a pleasurable experience.

There are some fantastic traditional turntables available for a fraction of the price. The Italian-made Bluenote Bellagio (above) is a stylish example of a top-of-the-line Reference turntable. The platter is suspended on hardened stainless steel springs, and rumble is an impressive -83 dB; approaching silence. Besides, it looks amazing. The price? A mere $5,995.

Bluenote Bellagio Reference Turntable

Artist/clockmaker Roger Wood isn't afraid to experiment. That much is obvious from a quick glance at his marvelous clock designs. He lives and works out of an old munitions factory in central Toronto, surrounded by an incredible collection of clock parts and mechanical odds-and-ends. Honestly, his studio looks like something out of a movie (I've included some photos after the jump). Each fully functional timepiece incorporates a unique assortment of retro brik-a-brak and surreal design. Prices range from a few hundred dollars through a few thousand.

The Art Gallery of Ontario eloquently summed up his work: “These are no ordinary clocks. Toronto artist Roger Wood imbues each piece with an alluring whimsical quality that will fill a room with charm and intrigue. No two clocks are alike and each one features Mr. Wood’s own unique signature: a feather.”

Looking down from the north loft of Wood's studio/home:

The artist's workbench:

A view from the west loft. This is a serious operation:

Klockwerks: Unique Timepieces Designed By Roger Wood (via Treehugger)

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Wow, this could grow into something quite awesome. Pachube is -

a web service that enables people to tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices and spaces around the world, facilitating interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual. The idea is to make it relatively simple to "plug" together interactive projects and buildings around the world, as well as to create embeddable graphs of sensor feeds.

Only eighteen feeds conected at the time of this post - but the datastreams are already quite interesting - from a Japanese living room to a swing in Sweden. Head over to the site to learn how to connect your own sensor/stream - Pachube Thanks, Chuckster!

Update: Interested Londoners can learn more about Pachube -

Extended Environments/Arduino/Networked sensors workshop

Using Arduino and Pachube, Usman will lead a 2-day workshop, June 21 & 22, at Arup's headquarters in London, kindly hosted by Tinker.it! The Extended Environments workshop will form a basic introduction to networked sensors, making particular use of Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML) and Pachube. Please join us if you would like to learn more about using Arduino to connect together remote environments across a network, share sensor data, or create interactive environments using Pachube, but you will need to register by June 15th!

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We've mentioned making plastic with milk before; Coffeebot has a great Instructable on the subject.

The plastic is moldable, and has a consistency of soggy cheese (I certainly hope I never encounter cheese that's anything like this!). When all is said and done, it should take you about 10-15 minutes to make the plastic (less if you make a small amount), 10 minutes of cleanup, plus 2+ days to allow the plastic to dry. As always, your milage may vary.

Casein is the main protein in milk, and it's commonly used in adhesives and paints. And knitting needles! (I don't think my cat could resist those.) It was the main ingredient in an early plastic called galalith - it was mixed with formaldehyde, nasty stuff.

Homemade plastic

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This table is made through rapid prototyping (3D printing) of branches that become increasingly more dense at the top to form a planar surface. It was developed by Platform Wertel Oberfell and Matthias Bär. Via Core 77.

Related:

• Rapid prototyped brain lamp

• Avatar... in real life (3D printing)

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In this follow up to the very popular first part of the Gmail Client Side Architecture series we will be looking at how Google handles the file upload process during mail composition in GMail. Ajax is everywhere, and most of the big and well known websites and services out there are moving towards being Ajax enabled to improve usability and create a richer experience for their users. Ajax also makes some things possible within the browser that could previously not even be imagined by users or developers. So in this new Ajaxified web, is there still a place for the old pre Web 2.0 iframe style Ajax mimicking?

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In this the final of the three part series on GMail's client side architecture we will be taking a look at implementing a GMial like chat window such as you will find inside the GMail web interface. This is a basic overview and implementation

The Fatherland of Apples Orion Magazine chronicles "[t]he origins of a favorite fruit and the race to save its native habitat." More about the origins of the apple and wild apples by Michael Pollan, Jake Fleming (PowerPoint), William J. Bramlage (PDF), Linda McCandless (with the germplasm repository catalog here (PDF)) and Barrie Edward Juniper (Google Books preview).

Colors have many names. The online color thesaurus will recognize 20,000 of them (and let you see which is most popular). You can also browse a page of colors and associated names (yes, "goose turd" and "dead Spaniard" were once common color names). Of course, the most popular color names probably come from our childhoods.
For those looking for more colors, some cities are also associated with colors, as the beautiful pictures will attest. And each religion has its own color scheme (Shinto, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity). Meanwhile, MoMA looks at the evolution of color in modern art.

Alvenh sent in this site on how to make your own hardcover book. This isn't a project you can make in an hour, but in the end you should have a nice book that will last for generations. Just make sure you use archival paper and glue!

Using materials from local dollars stores and leftovers from art projects, I was able to make a hardcover book that was both attractive in appearance and functional in organizing loose sheets of paper. The techniques described here can be used bind a variety of printed material.

Read more on How to Make a Hardcover Book

Related:

DIY Bookbinding

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Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. Example. (via)

Here is another nice analog clock that one of our readers sent in. [Thanks Fluffy] The website documents the entire build, including the difficulties of finding old meters and working with a Bakelite.

Last March I was bored and decided to build a clock using analog meters. My idea was to use three analog meters with scales that went from 1-12, 0-59, and 0-59 and indicated hours, minutes, and seconds respectively. Although it'd look analog I planned to use a microcontroller to do the heavy lifting.

Read more about making an Analog Chronometer

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Here's something I did in biology class in high school: grow bioluminescent bacteria! Instructables user ScaryBunnyMan shows you how.

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