from arcade-museum: “The monitor and control panel are mounted on a swivel base that is separate from the main cabinet. When holding the controls, the player swings the monitor left or right, or tilts it up or down (the screen scrolls in the same manner)."
Back in July we posted about the gorgeous layered glass sculptures of Sydney-based artist Ben Young. Young has since created several new sculptures, which, like much of his work, take their inspiration from the waves, oceans, and geography of his native New Zealand. His sculptures are available through Kirra Gallery in Melbourne. His latest work can also be viewed on his Facebook page.
The Department of Homeland Security is poised to ditch all records from a controversial network monitoring system called Einstein that are at least three years old, but not for security reasons.
"National Bar Association President Pamela J. Meanes expresses her sincere disappointment with the outcome of the Grand Jury’s decision but has made it abundantly clear that the National Bar Association stands firm and will be calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to pursue federal charges against officer Darren Wilson."
Here is the irony of St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s announcement Monday night that a grand jury had declined to indict officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown: The entire presentation implicitly conceded the need for a trial.
Eight years ago, Mr. Button was about to wash the glass when he noticed that leftover drops of Scotch had dried into a chalky but unexpectedly beautiful film. “When I lifted it up to the light, I noticed these really delicate, fine lines on the bottom,” he recalled, “and being a photographer for a number of years before this, I’m like, ‘Hmm, there’s something to this.'"
A sequel to Blade Runner has been in the works for a few years now, but it appears that Ridley Scott no longer plans to direct it. In comments to Variety, Scott is reported to have said that he will be producing, but not directing, the sequel to Blade Runner, unlike what's been planned up until now. The change of course is likely due to the full plate of films that Scott has been lining up. In addition to the Blade Runner sequel, he was also working on a Prometheus sequel and an adaptation of the novel The Martian.
Scott says that the new Blade Runner should start filming within the next year, according to Variety. He also gave some of the first details on what the movie will be about. Scott reportedly says that Harrison Ford has signed on to reprise his role from the original film, but Ford will apparently only factor into the end of the film. "Harrison is very much part of this one, but really it’s about finding him," Scott tells Variety. "He comes in in the third act." Scott also says that the script makes sense in the way that it relates to the original. He's previously called it "damn good." There's no word on who might replace him as director.
Scientists use a range of techniques—from satellite observations to drilling holes—to measure sea ice thickness. Usually, such efforts look down at the sea floor. But, by equipping an underwater drone with upward-looking sonar, researchers were able to create the first high-resolution 3D maps of Antarctic sea ice.
Jennifer Colliau at WIRED by Design, 2014. In partnership with Skywalker Sound, Marin County, CA. To learn more visit: live.wired.com Subscribe for more WIRED videos: http://wrd.cm/15fP7B7...
"out of the three or four thousand Chinese characters used in these volumes and scrolls, not a single one of them is a real Chinese character. They are made up of recognizable radicals and typical atomic components of Chinese characters, but Xu laboured to ensure that while they all retain the unmistakable look of Chinese script, they are all, so to speak, nonsense. They do not exist in any dictionary, and do not mean anything. Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers alike approach the books with the same sense of wonder at their beauty, and the same sense of incomprehension at their content. It’s a piece of art whose meaning is to be found in its meaninglessness."
Tian Shu is comprised of a display of books spread in a large rectangle across the ground, above which voluptuous scrolls unroll in long, pregnant arcs. The books—four hundred of them—are handmade with reverential adherence to the standards of traditional Ming dynasty fonts, bookbinding, typesetting and stringing techniques.
To make them, Xu painstakingly carved Chinese characters into square woodblocks, in just the way his ancient printing predecessors would have done, had them typeset and printed, and the printed pages mounted and bound into books and scrolls.
Yet, there’s the astonishing, Borgesian catch: out of the three or four thousand Chinese characters used in these volumes and scrolls, not a single one of them is a real Chinese character. They are made up of recognizable radicals and typical atomic components of Chinese characters, but Xu laboured to ensure that while they all retain the unmistakable look of Chinese script, they are all, so to speak, nonsense. They do not exist in any dictionary, and do not mean anything. Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers alike approach the books with the same sense of wonder at their beauty, and the same sense of incomprehension at their content. It’s a piece of art whose meaning is to be found in its meaninglessness. (via)
Whitaker's book has been widely criticized for idealizing Cosby, until recently one of the country's most beloved entertainers, although some critics praised it upon release. Amazon.com included "Cosby" among its best books of September and top 100 biographies and memoirs of 2014. The book includes blurbs from David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld and Mary Tyler Moore.
"If I was America's 'sweetheart' — turning the world on with a smile — then Bill Cosby was and still is our 'best man,'" Moore wrote.
"A revealing, honest look at my favorite comedian," reads a blurb from Billy Crystal.
Michele Carragher, the head embroider on Game of Thrones, made this awesome tutorial to show how she created the dragonscale fabric that appears on several of Daenarys’ costumes in S3 and S4.
Ms. Carragher says that the dragonscale fabric was created because “In season 3 the Costume Designer Michele Clapton wanted a Dragonscale like textured embroidery that starts to emerge on three of Daenery’s costumes, which becomes heavier and more pronounced, growing and evolving as the season progresses” (Carragher).
In stages 9-11 of the tutorial we see how the textile evolves from lightly to heavily embellished. This progression is meant to illustrate Daenarys’ personal growth and the growth of her dragons (source).
This isn’t because Burger King is nicer in Denmark. It’s the law, and the US is actually the only so-called “developed” country that doesn’t mandate jobs provide a minimum amount of paid vacation, sick leave, or both.
kinda debunks that claim that they can’t afford to pay their workers those sort of wages and still make a profit
LOS ANGELES—Martin Riese doesn’t drink US tap water. “I mean, I use it to brush my teeth,” he says. “Have you smelled it?” But he can rattle off many European locales where he enjoys the tap water. His favorite is Flensburg, Germany. (Riese is German.) For a quaffable tap water outside Europe, he recommends Clearbrook, British Columbia in Canada.
Riese is the general manager at Ray’s & Stark Bar, a restaurant at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He’s also the “water sommelier”—the only one in America, he says.
Ray’s & Stark has a 44 page sewn-bound water menu, designed by Riese. With one bottle per spread, an index, and an introduction, there are 20 with waters from as near as Beverly Hills (his own brand, 90H20), and as far as Fiji and Norway.
Each page gives a qualitative and quantitative description of the water. A source description like “nestled among beech wood and chestnut forests on the slopes of Mount Gazzaro,” for Acqua Panna, is followed up with data about it’s sodium, magnesium, and calcium content, as well as the total amount of dissolved solids in the water.
Those solids are important for health, according to Riese, especially when you’re trying to stay hydrated. Vichy Catalan, a $12 bottle on the menu, has more electrolytes than Gatorade according to Riese. The most expensive water on the menu is the $20 Berg (that’s for a 750 ml bottle), made of water harvested from icebergs.
The water on Ray’s & Stark’s menu costs $12.64 per liter on average.
Riese said he became fascinated with water when he was a boy traveling with his parents and tasting the differences between local waters. Eventually, he received a certification from the German Mineral Water Trade Association and came to the US on an O-1 visa—a permit given to “individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement.”
Americans are seemingly becoming more fascinated too. US water imports grew 10% in value from 2008 to 2013, and are up 9.9% year-on-year through September of 2014. The top suppliers are France, Italy, and Fiji. Indeed, 42% of Fiji’s exports to the US is water, more than any other good, according to data from the US Census Bureau.
He doesn’t drink coffee, but Riese can tell you which water to use to make a cup, “you want to balance the bitterness, so you’re looking for a mineral water with very low mineral levels, and no carbonation whatsoever.” To make pasta or dough fluffier, he recommends carbonated water. “When I make pasta, I use Gerolsteiner.”
Back to that menu. It’s utility becomes immediately apparent upon trying two waters, side by side: one was mineraly and crisp, the other smooth and soft. When giving a tasting to Conan O’Brien in September, the late-night talk show host spit out one of the waters he didn’t like.
A different utility was apparent to Ray’s & Starks too when Riese introduced the menu in 2003: Water sales jumped 500%.
To gaze upon the sky and watch majestic birds cut through the wind is both a humbling and a frustrating experience. Humbling because it makes our species realize that we were put on this earth to stand on two heavy pillars locked forever to the dirt, and frustrating because we want what we can’t have and will do everything in our power to obtain it.
For decades, the jetpack has been one of the iconic symbols of the future that was always just around the corner. Now, finally, it is on the way to becoming a real, commercial thing—though probably not for you.
The Verge published what is probably the definitive history of humanity’s long-running obsession with jetpacks three years ago. But here are a few highlights:
Buck Rogers introduced Americans to the idea of a man with a rocket strapped to his back in the 1920s with comic books. It took a few decades of creative massaging for Buck to morph into a literal “Rocket Man” named Jeff King—star of the 12-part series “King of the Rocket Men”.
The 1960s were when America’s armed forces, both the Navy and the Army, actually started playing with the idea of propelling troops across the battlefield, but it wasn’t until 1965 when the famous British spy James Bond put the hilariously impractical contraption on the silver screen.
NASA made scientific use of the rocket backpack in the 1980s in several space missions. And the Simpsons made fun of it in the 90s, only for Isabel Lozano to became the first woman to fly with a jetpack one decade later.
Which finally brings us to the Martin Aircraft Company, based in New Zealand. Its founder, Glenn Martin, is a tinker-in-the-garage inventor who has been prototyping jetpacks for over two decades. (His wife Vanessa was its plucky first test pilot.) Its latest model, scheduled to go on sale in 2016, is for the military and emergency services. It should—on paper—be able to fly for half an hour at a speed of 46 miles (74 km) per hour over a distance of 20 miles, all for the low, low price of about US$200,000.
Martin intends to raise up to A$25 million (US$21.5 million) when it lists on the Australian stock exchange in December. It’ll need that money to fulfill a recent contract—size not mentioned—with a US company, Avwatch, to develop technology for various the US government agencies.
The company says it “is targeting a sales price of under US$150,000 for the recreational version of the aircraft but this may take some years to achieve.” Oh well. After all the time we’ve been waiting, a few more years probably won’t make a difference.
The Magnifying Spoon is a limited edition utensil from Object Solutions that replaces the bowl of a spoon with a magnifying glass so users can better detect unwanted materials in their meal and eat around them accordingly.
On approval of a certain area, use the very same implement to scoop up a healthy mouthful.
It’s November and aspiring writers are plugging away at their novels for National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, an annual event that encourages people to churn out a 50,000-word book on deadline. But a hundred or so people are taking a very different approach to the challenge, writing computer programs that will write their texts for them. It’s called NaNoGenMo, for National Novel Generation Month, and the results are a strange, often funny look at what automatic text generation can do.
The developer and artist Darius Kazemi started NaNoGenMo last year, when he tweeted out an off-the-cuff idea.
"I got a ton of people responding saying ‘Oh my god, I’d totally do that,’" Kazemi says. The next day, he opened up a repository on Github where people could post their projects.
Nick Montfort’s World Clock was the breakout hit of last year. A poet and professor of digital media at MIT, Montfort used 165 lines of Python code to arrange a new sequence of characters, locations, and actions for each minute in a day. He gave readings, and the book was later printed by the Harvard Book Store’s press. Still, Kazemi says reading an entire generated novel is more a feat of endurance than a testament to the quality of the story, which tends to be choppy, flat, or incoherent by the standards of human writing.
"Even Nick expects you to maybe read a chapter of it or flip to a random page," Kazemi says.
Pride and Prejudice, but with dialogue taken from Twitter
Narrative is one of the great challenges of artificial intelligence. Companies and researchers are working to create programs that can generate intelligible narratives, but most of them are restricted to short snippets of text. The company Narrative Science, for example, makes programs that take data from sporting events or financial reports, highlight the most significant information, and arrange it using templates pre-written by humans. It’s not the loveliest prose, but it’s fairly accurate and very fast.
NanNoGenMo, Kazemi says, "is more about doing something that is entertaining to yourself and possibly to other people."
For last year’s NaNoGenMo Kazemi generated "Teens Wander Around a House." He made a bunch of artificial intelligence agents and had them meander through a house at random, his program narrating their actions. When two characters ended up in a room together, he pulled dialogue from Twitter. One tweet could be a question — "What’s for dinner tomorrow?" — and the next, a statement that also contained the word "dinner" — "Dinner is my favorite meal of the day," for example. "The result was a conversation that sort of stayed on topic but didn’t make much sense," he says.
This year he’s designing a program that interprets an online step-by-step guide to novel writing extremely literally. "It starts with ‘establish a day-to-day routine’ then ‘show the characters’ wants and dreams’ then ‘give them a call to action,’ all that stuff," Kazemi says. "It reads like crap but it actually does have a forward sense of narrative.
"The comics that come out give me chills sometimes"
Another participant, Michelle Fullwood, made Twide and Twejudice: Pride and Prejudice but with each word of dialogue substituted for a word used in a similar context on Twitter. The result is delightfully absurd, a normal-seeming Austen novel where characters break out in almost-intelligible gobbledegook. For instance, here is Mr. Bennett telling Mrs. Bennett that plenty more wealthy young men will move to town for their daughters to marry.
"But I hope you willl get ovaaa it, whereby live to see manyy young snowmobilers ofthe four karat a yearrr comeeee into tje neighbourhood."
Liza Daly made her own version of the Voynich Manuscript, a 15th century codex written in an unknown script and illustrated with elaborate and perplexing diagrams. Daly wrote a program that took words from the codex, randomized them, and placed them on a page along with old alchemical and botanical images from the Internet Archive. The result is quite beautiful, and no more or less bewildering than the source codex.
Then there’s Greg Borenstein’s Generated Detective, a noir comic. Borenstein’s program searches old detective novels on Project Gutenberg for sentences that include a series of words.
He then searches Flickr for each sentence plucked by the program, runs the resulting image through a manga app, and ends up with an eerily inscrutable noir story. Borenstein does the Flickr search himself, but he’s working on automating the whole process, as well as incorporating image recognition so that the program can add dialogue bubbles.
"The comics that come out give me chills sometimes," Kazemi says. "It’s a very disjointed, dream-like narrative, like most NaNoGenMo narratives."
Ultimately, Kazemi says, the point is to have fun, to flex your coding muscles a bit, and maybe leave thinking about text a little differently. He points to the strange cadence of Definition Book a program that parenthetically defines a word from an initial eight-word sentence, and defines a word from that definition, and so on, recursively for 50,000 words. The first half of the book is all the beginning of sentences and the second half is the end. "I’ve never thought about a text that way," Kazemi says. "It sort of turned on a lightbulb in my head."
