Danbusha

Design Crush

Indexed

The wine cave

Toothpaste for dinner

Let’s

Tattoo You

The boats on his shirt made him alert

Slow television is the uninterrupted broadcast of an ordinary event from start to finish. Early efforts included burning Yule logs on TV around Christmas and driver's views of complete British rail journeys (not to mention Andy Warhol and the pitch drop experiment), but Norwegian public television has revived the format in recent years. The first broadcast was of a 7-hour train trip from Bergen to Oslo, which was watched at some point by ~20% of Norway's population. You can watch the entire thing on YouTube:

Not content with that, in 2011 an entire ship voyage was broadcast for 134 continuous hours. The entire voyage is available for viewing, but you can watch a 37-minute time lapse of the whole thing if you can't spare the 5½ days:

As the show progressed and the ratings climbed (half of the Norwegian population tuned in at some point), the show became an interactive event, with people meeting the ship along to coast in order to appear as extras in the cast. Some even followed in smaller boats, filming as they went along in the ship's wake.

Other shows included 12 hours about firewood (including 8 uninterrupted hours of a burning fireplace), 18 hours of salmon swimming upstream (which some felt was too short), 100 hours of Magnus Carlsen playing chess, a 30-hour interview with a noted author, and several continuous hours of sweater production, from shearing to knitting.

Shows currently in the planning stages include A Day in the Life of a Snail and "a 24-hour-long program following construction workers building a digital-style clock out of wood, shuffling planks to match each passing minute". The slow TV concept might soon be coming to American TV as well.

P.S. Does this 10-hour video of Tyrion Lannister slapping Joffrey count as slow TV? Either way, it's great.

Researchers at Stanford have observed that foraging harvester ants act like TCP/IP packets, so much so that they're calling the ants' behavior "the anternet".

Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is an algorithm that manages data congestion on the Internet, and as such was integral in allowing the early web to scale up from a few dozen nodes to the billions in use today. Here's how it works: As a source, A, transfers a file to a destination, B, the file is broken into numbered packets. When B receives each packet, it sends an acknowledgment, or an ack, to A, that the packet arrived.

This feedback loop allows TCP to run congestion avoidance: If acks return at a slower rate than the data was sent out, that indicates that there is little bandwidth available, and the source throttles data transmission down accordingly. If acks return quickly, the source boosts its transmission speed. The process determines how much bandwidth is available and throttles data transmission accordingly.

It turns out that harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) behave nearly the same way when searching for food. Gordon has found that the rate at which harvester ants -- which forage for seeds as individuals -- leave the nest to search for food corresponds to food availability.

A forager won't return to the nest until it finds food. If seeds are plentiful, foragers return faster, and more ants leave the nest to forage. If, however, ants begin returning empty handed, the search is slowed, and perhaps called off.

(via wordspy)

Living inside a facade

Dead and Forgotten, Mister Finch

Just announced today, The Sand Storm is a short film directed by New York filmmaker Jason Wishnow that was shot completely under the radar in China, starring none other than dissident artist Ai Weiwei in his acting debut. How such an audacious and risky endeavor came into being is pretty mind-blowing given the heavy amount of surveillance surrounding the artist. The movie takes place in a dystopian future where Ai Weiwei plays the role of a smuggler in a world without water.

The existence of The Sand Storm was kept heavily under wraps while shooting in Beijing. Ai Weiwei has been closely watched by the government since his 2011 imprisonment and authorities still have yet to return his passport. While the short film has already been shot beginning to end, the filmmakers are raising a bit of money on Kickstarter to finish the movie and recoup some costs as crowdfunding beforehand was too risky. Had this been announced yesterday I would have assumed it was a hoax.

Staircase porn

Couple restores abandoned French Chateau, starts a blog

Star Wars Agitprop, Russell Walks

How To Negotiate With People Around The World

April Fool, We the Robots

1984

Fubiz posted about this beautiful sculpture made from “smart flowers” called Lotus Dome.

In the Sainte Marie Madeleine church located in Lille, the Dutch design studio Daan Roosegaarde made a light installation in the shape of a dome with hundreds of lotus metallic lights which respond to the movements of the human body. An interactive and organic sculpture is to discover.

Read more.

Big news in 3D printing and medical implants this week! Doctors have declared the first 3D printed skull replacement surgery they performed 3 months ago to be a success. From io9:

The surgery was performed in the University Medical Center at Utrecht University, after surgeons there began treating a patient with a condition that was causing a thickening of the skull to almost 3 times its normal thickness, putting pressure on the brain.

By replacing her skull with a 3D printed one — a process that took over 23 hours of surgery — they were able to alleviate that pressure and, three months after the surgery, the doctors report that the patient has already gone back to work.

Read more.

Oh, Sweden.

The V-Spot

One family’s photographs of shipwrecks - a thousand images spanning 130 years - at the Royal Museums Greenwich: The Gibson Archive

These lightweight, airy dresses look like they’re about to be adorned to a fancy gala or dinner party. But as irony would have it, they will never be worn. In fact, the dresses are actually made from Carrera Marble, the same material as the world’s most famous naked statue – Michelangelo’s David. Starting out as a solid mass of marble that can weigh several tons, they are chiseled and sculpted down by Alasdair Thomson, a sculptor living and working in Edinburgh, Scotland.

His latest work, “The Identity Collection,” (named as if it’s a fashion line) explores “the way fabric hangs and folds, and is attempting to capture that lightness and gracefulness in stone.” Effectively ceding control over his subjects, Alasdair asked his friends and family to donate garments, which he then impeccably recreated out of marble. You can see more of Alasdair’s work on his website or his Instagram account.

The House of Herringbones

How about never?

House of Plastic

punctuate it