photo: @SameerAlDoumy/AFP. caption: SYRIA – A gamer uses Pokemon Go
application on mobile to catch a Pokemon amidst rubble in Douma.
Embellishing hell on earth with the red circle and the blue bird reminds us that war is not just slideshow fodder, not just news artistry, not just token of futility or background noise. Given how the war in Syria and the craters, rubble and dust have been rendered practically or literally invisible in the overstimulated west, this novel and unique war photo is magnetic.
A team of designers has taken iconic images of major global cities and added a “rich graphic language and vibrant visual effects” to blend each one with elements of Japanese infrastructure and visual culture.
Presenting their work at the Venice Architecture Biennale, this strange art series from Daigo Ishii + Future-Scape Architects aims to question our ideas of locality and our sense of civic imagery and identity.
What happens, they ask, when a familiar underlying environment gets an overlay, sending mixed signals to observers? Is it the underlying shape and form of a place that make it what it is, or those other visual cues that lend familiarity?
The firm set their cities on cities including New York, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen and La Paz, each time pulling in distinctively Japanese elements, from neon signage to cherry trees.
In each case, the result is a surreal hybrid, playing off cues in source photographs shot in the United States, Argentina, Denmark, France, Bolivia and Italy, becoming something that is neither here nor there, original or artificial.
“The project seeks to present an amalgamation between traditional architectural studies and surprising artistic elements.” The display in Venice consists of “a video work shown on a large-scale monitor, with six surrounding boards displaying the final scenery of each city after ‘Tokyo-lization’ has taken place.”
Artist Jeremy Mann works in early in the day or evening, and it shows in the dark, smudged and ultimately riveting way in which he captures streetscapes of major cities from New York to San ...
Photographs of Japan from the Meiji and Taisho Periods (1868-1926) have captivated viewers around the world since they were first circulated. One photographer in particular captured Japanese life ...
Sufficiently advanced science has been said to look like magic, like this subterranean cycle storage system - except in this case images and videos give you a peak at the secret workings below ...
It's a bit of "common wisdom" on the internet that you hear people repeat all the time, even though it's hogwash: the idea that people act trollishly online because they're anonymous. So many people want to blame the anonymity and demand real name policies. Yet, as we've been pointing out for many years, plenty of people troll under their real names -- and tons of valuable content is posted by anonymous users (including right here at Techdirt).
Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals. This effect is reinforced if selective incentives are present and if aggressors are intrinsically motivated.
Now, this is just one report on one dataset, and there may be a variety of other factors at play. But it certainly matches with our own experience here as well. The idea that people only act like jackasses because they're anonymous just doesn't fit with the pattern we've seen in the over 1 million comments we have on this site. Yes, sometimes there are anonymous jerks, just like there are sometimes named jerks. But on the whole, anonymity doesn't seem to magically lead to worse comments.
Lucia H Chung’s instrument of choice is a no-input mixer. This process involves producing feedback that results from feeding a mixer back into itself, taking the non-silent aspects of the device and enlarging them until they become audible — not just audible but, in Chung’s hands, enveloping.
This track, “Inner Geography (Preview),” is a short excerpt from a forthcoming album on the Arell label, based in England. It’s a series of rich swells, each threatening to burst, swells that eventually give way to an antic ticking. The full release, under Chung’s en creux moniker, will be a single, 25-minute performance.
The swells have a shuddering, thunderous appearance on first listen, a sharp static trailed by a bell-like drone. Upon repeated listens, each swell reveals its distinct character: saw waves of varying shard-like shapes and sizes, white noise that pulses, and filigrees of harsh, darting sounds. Most notably there is Chung’s attention to attack and release, which lends drama to the sequence of isolated events.
Presumably the full release proceeds from where this track ends, and the swells are, collectively, themselves a subset of a larger, even more varied episodic sequence.
Album originally posted at arell.bandcamp.com. More from Chung at luciahchung.com. Together with her husband, Martin J Thompson, who mastered the recording, she runs the label SM-LL, which is based in London (sm-ll.com).
This visualization shows interactions between characters in the Star Trek Universe based on the episodes or movies you have selected.
Each circle represents a character, and links represent interactions between characters. The more interactions between two characters, the thicker the link between them; similarly, the more interactions linked to a particular character, the larger the circle representing that character.
Just select the episodes or movies and click, “Engage!” Bonus points for the nerdy theme. [Thanks, Brian]
The other night, I pretended I didn’t know who Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian Hegelian Marxist and cultural critic, was. I’ve done this before, but never to such triumphant effect. This Marxist bro I was talking to made a reference to Žižek that he obviously assumed I would get, and my heart sank. He was a nice guy, actually, but I saw the conversation stretching out in front of us, and I saw myself having to say things about Žižek and listen to him say things about Žižek, and I saw that I really did not want this to happen. “This is a bar,” I wanted to say, the same way that my grandmother might have said “This is achurch.” A bar is not the appropriate venue for a loud, show-offy conversation about The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology.
At first, I thought I might be able to get away with ignoring the reference. Not so. He made another one, and then another one, and then said, sort of desperately, “Žižek argues that…” I saw the gap, and I took it. I asked him who that was, and he assumed I hadn’t heard him over the music. “ŽIŽEK” he shouted. “SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK.” I told him I’d never heard of such a person, and his eyes widened. His attempts to explain were met with the same denials. Celebrity philosopher? Nope. Lacan? Nope. Hegel? Nope. I stopped short of saying I had never heard of Karl Marx, but only just. This guy couldn’t believe it. How could I have never heard of Žižek?
Research from Tom White features a Flickr photo album of neural network processed images of faces, arranged by similarity:
Sampling and interpolation of a neural network model to generate
localized manifolds of faces. The process is automated such that given
one seed face (at center of each grid), the entire grid of neighbors is
generated.
We’ve yet to read an interview with the person who styled Bill’s silver locks for last night’s DNC appearance, or even see a brief in Women’s Wear Daily or GQ crediting the designers who dressed him for the occasion. Did he buy his suit online, like Melania Trump’s Net-a-Porter-purchased Roksanda last week? Did he go to a store? Work directly with a designer? We just don’t know, which means it’s going to be really difficult for this particular navy suit to sell out, as so many of the dresses worn by Michelle Obama have over the past eight years. Was it Hickey Freeman? Hart Schaffner Marx? Again, we just don’t know.
Here’s what we do know: Clinton’s suit was navy blue, and he wore a tonal cobalt tie in a shade similar to the Christian Siriano dress Michelle Obama wore the night before. (Some noted then that the dress matched the stage’s background. Clinton’s tie did too!) The suit had three buttons, a notch lapel, and full-cut trousers that broke substantially over his shiny black dress shoes.
Water source, meeting place, architectural wonder: The ancient Indian stepwell – a man-made, subterranean well also known as ‘vav’ or ‘baori’ – has been capturing the imagination of pilgrims and travelers for centuries.
So here we are, the first of one hundred covers for the Bowie Book Club. I have no idea where this project is going to take me or what I'm going to learn on the way … so perhaps Dante's Inferno is as apt a starting point as any.
Most of this idea was rescued from a rejected design I worked on earlier this year – one of those simple concepts that has hung around on my desktop, looking for a home. Also at the back of my mind was a magazine article I wrote recently, looking at thematic links between Inferno, Frozen and The Thing. For some reason, there's a lot of Dante in my work at the moment.
Audio product from Voctro Labs provides a method of style transfer for sound, taken spoken lines and turns them into singing (note that the video below was released in January earlier this year):
“What if Michael Jackson could still record brand new songs? What if
non-singer celebrities could effortlessly record a song in any style?
What if we could have any legendary actors or celebrities say anything
without actually recording it?
WowTune VR’s world-class team of scientists and entrepreneurs has
developed a unique patented technology – based on sound processing and
machine learning – that makes “these miracles” and others possible.
Indeed, from just a few original voice samples, WowTune VR’s technology
can re-create the very singing or spoken voice of anyone. WowTune VR’s
core technology stems from years of R&D in singing and spoken voice
synthesizing – and is at the forefront of a still untapped market: VR’s
human voice.”
July 22nd, 2016: I'm at San Diego Comic Con today! If you wanna meet up and exchange ONLY THE HIGHEST OF FIVES, here's where and when we can make that happen!
Hey, my new (NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING, WHAT WHAT) book Romeo and/or Juliet is on super sale on Amazon! Less than $12! WHAT A STEAL, YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY BUY IT RIGHT AWAY
Jain and his PhD student Sunpreet Arora couldn’t share details of the case with me, since it’s an ongoing investigation, but the gist is this: a man was murdered, and the police think there might be clues to who murdered him stored in his phone. But they can’t get access to the phone without his fingerprint or passcode. So instead of asking the company that made the phone to grant them access, they’re going another route: having the Jain lab create a 3D printed replica of the victim’s fingers. With them, they hope to unlock the phone.
Jones spent 25 years as a road comic before she became a star. Here she is in her New Yorker profile, talking about success:
“I’m glad this whole success thing is happening now,” she said. “I can’t even imagine a twenty-three-year-old Leslie in this position. They would have kicked me off the set after two days. I would have fucked half the dudes in the crew.” She sat up and wrapped a towel around her head. “I was a less confident person back then. And damn sure not as funny.”
The most fundamental blueprint of a building is its floor plan, which organizes the spaces to be occupied, creating a footprint to be extruded into three dimensions. In his ARCHIPLAN series, Federico Babina splits the difference, pulling elements up high enough to form mazes for exploration.
His set of 25 compositions includes works by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and other famous architects both past and present. In each case, a critical classic work is selected then, its plan extrapolated upward and its spaces filled in with roaming characters.
In some cases, the cutaways are particularly revealing – the work of Shigeru Ban, for instance, represents experimentation with various materials like paper and bamboo, reflected in the hollows in the sliced drawing.
Solids and voids are shown through shading, shadows and light. These visual distinctions highlight straight and curved surfaces, walls and columns, while also revealing something about the stylistic approach of each designer.
Other architects highlighted in the series include: Ando, Rossi, Niemeyer, Ando, Ito, Zumthor, Wright, Sanaa, Libeskind and Koolhaas, representing a range of Modernists, Postmodernists and Deconstructivists of the 20th Century.
Hubert Airy’s 1870 diagram of his migraine aura looks familiar to many migraineurs today.
The Royal Society
Hubert Airy first became aware of his affliction in the fall of 1854, when he noticed a small blind spot interfering with his ability to read. “At first it looked just like the spot which you see after having looked at the sun or some bright object,” he later wrote. But the blind spot was growing, its edges taking on a zigzag shape that reminded Airy of the bastions of a fortified medieval town. Only, they were gorgeously colored. And they were moving.
“All the interior of the fortification, so to speak, was boiling and rolling about in a most wonderful manner as if it was some thick liquid all alive,” Airy wrote. What happened next was less wonderful: a splitting headache, what we now call a migraine.
Hubert Airy’s drawing, shown here in its entirety, illustrates how his migraine aura grew over the course of about 20 minutes (click the image to expand).
The Royal Society
Airy was a student when he suffered his first migraine, but he later became a physician. His description of his aura—the hallucinatory symptoms that can precede a migraine—was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1870, along with a drawing that showed how the hallucination grew to take over much of his visual field. “It’s an iconic illustration,” says Frederick Lepore, an ophthalmological neurologist at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey. “It’s so precise, like a series of time-lapse photographs.”
Lepore showed Airy’s drawing to 100 of his migraine patients who experience a visual aura (only a minority do). Forty-eight of them recognized it instantly, he wrote in a historical note in the Journal of Neuro-Ophthalmology in 2014. He still shows the drawing to his patients today. “People are astonished,” he says. “They say, ‘Where did you get that?’”
What’s more remarkable, Lepore says, is that Airy’s drawing anticipates discoveries in neuroscience that were still decades in the future.
Airy correctly deduced that the source of his hallucinations was his brain, not his eyes. He wasn’t the first to do this, but it was still an open question at the time.
What’s most prescient about his drawing, though, is that it anticipates the discovery of an orderly map of the visual world in the primary visual cortex, a crucial brain region for processing what we see. When Airy published his paper, that discovery was still nearly half a century away.
This diagram by Gordon Holmes illustrates how different regions of the visual field (right) map onto different regions of the primary visual cortex (left).
The Royal Society
Most accounts credit the British neurologist Gordon Holmes with that later discovery. Holmes studied the visual deficits of hundreds of soldiers who’d suffered gunshot wounds to the back of the head in Word War I. “The British helmet was seated high on the head,” Lepore wrote, in a historical paper describing Holmes’s contributions. Unfortunately, this left the primary visual cortex largely unprotected, and provided Holmes many opportunities to study damage to this part of the brain.
By carefully mapping the soldiers’ blind spots and the locations of their wounds, Holmes discovered that damage to the most posterior part of visual cortex (that is, the part farthest back in the head) resulted in blindness at the center of the visual field, whereas wounds located closer to the front of the visual cortex resulted in blindness off to the side. Everything the eyes see maps neatly onto the visual cortex.
Holmes also discovered—and this is the part that relates to Airy’s drawing—that the visual map is magnified at its center. If the visual cortex is a road atlas, the part that represents the center of the visual field is like one of those inset city maps that show a smaller area in lots more detail.
This meshes nicely with Airy’s observation that the zigzags around his blind spot were packed tightly together in the center of his visual field and grew wider in the periphery. “Airy’s drawing fits beautifully with our modern conception of how the visual cortex is organized,” Lepore says.
Hubert Airy’s father, George, also saw zigzag hallucinations, but they didn’t precede a headache for the elder Airy.
The Royal Society
There’s still much we don’t know about migraines and migraine auras. One hypothesis is that a sort of electrical wave sweeps across the visual cortex, causing hallucinations that spread across the corresponding parts of the visual field. In a loosely descriptive way, Airy’s time series drawings—showing an ever expanding shape—jibe with this too.
Even less is known about the neural mechanisms that might produce the vivid colors Airy drew and described. There are areas of the visual cortex, including one called V4, that contain neurons that respond to specific colors, as well as other neurons that respond to lines of specific orientations. Perhaps an electrical wave passing through such areas could produce colored zigzags, Lepore says. But no one really knows.
Airy wasn’t the first to draw his migraine aura. In fact, his father, George, who happened to be the Royal Astronomer, had published a sketch of his own zigzag hallucinations five years earlier (see above). A German neurologist published a fairly crude, looping sketch back in 1845. And others did so afterwards. The drawings made by the French neurologist Joseph Babinski (see below) are especially colorful, if lacking in detail.
But Hubert Airy’s drawing has stood the test of time better than most. His paper in the Philosophical Transactions, published at age 31, was his only contribution to the field. It’s written in the somewhat pompous, somewhat conversational style of a 19th-century polymath relating his observations to other learned men. One lengthy section recounts the observations of a Swiss doctor in the original French. Naturally, the readers of such a prestigious journal could translate for themselves.
That Airy got so much right at a time when so little was known about the brain is a testament to his powers of observation, Lepore says. He documented what he saw meticulously, even though it was visible to himself alone.
This detail from Joseph Babinksi’s 1890 drawing of his migraine aura shows a zigzag pattern not unlike the one Hubert Airy saw.
Donald J. Trump, a son of the late Fred and Mary Trump, and Michael “Mike” Pence, a son of of Edward and Nancy Pence, were married July 19 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. Reverend Sean Hannity performed the ceremony.
Mr. Trump, 70, is a reality television personality. He previously managed a failed airline, a failed for-profit education company, a failed professional football team, and a failed brand of steaks. He was recently nominated by the Republican Party as its presidential candidate. Mr. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and received an Honorary Doctor of Business from Liberty University, which teaches young Earth creationism as an explanation for the appearance of life on Earth.
Mr. Pence is the governor of Indiana.
The couple met during the Republican presidential primaries. “I wasn’t sure at first if he was the right one for me,” Mr. Pence explained. “He gave off an orange glow and had very small hands. His calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. struck me as offensive and unconstitutional. But he won me over with his denigration of women and Mexicans.”
Mr. Trump stated that he felt the same attraction. “I’m a huge Mike Penz fan!!” he tweeted.
The romance blossomed after Mr. Pence said that he found himself constantly following Mr. Trump on Twitter. “I tried conversion therapy, but I couldn’t get him out of my mind!” said Mr. Pence. Mr. Pence realized he was ready for a deeper commitment after Mr. Trump accused an American judge of being biased against him because of the judge’s ethnicity.
Two of Mr. Trump’s previous marriages ended in divorce. Mr. Pence has not yet decided whether he will be keeping his name or his position in favor of the Trans Pacific Partnership.
