Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Uncanny Vallery in Richardson Texas
From the Visual Science blog, Life and Love in the Uncanny Valley:
David Hanson’s robots are by now somewhat familiar faces, including his Einstein robot currently being used as a research tool at Javier Movellan’s Machine Perception Lab at UCSD, and the punk rock conversationalist Joey Chaos. A less familiar face is that of Bina Rothblatt, the blonde at the end of the table in the above photograph. Bina is a robot commissioned by Sirius Satellite Radio inventor Martine Rothblatt to look like her beloved wife.
Hanson Robotics is in a house in the neighborhood where I grew up in Richardson, Texas. They’re doing some interesting work in robot aesthetics and materials, crafting convincing android-type replicants in a studio environment that’s busy around the clock. Flickr user steevithak has a nice photo set up of some of the robots they were tinkering with in 2009.
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Medical Paradolia
A handful of medical paradolia on NCBI ROFL: Bad news: you have a tumor. Good news: it’s really cute!
UPDATE: I learn via Back of the Cereal Box that there’s a cancer-causing genetic mutation known in scientific circles as Sonic hedgehog!
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Lego Augmented Reality
[Video no longer available]
LEGO DIGITAL BOX – augmented reality kiosk system
Excellent use of AR for marketing: an in-store display that’s actually fun to play with, and it makes you pick up the box in order to see it come alive. Nice.
(Via Make)
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N.W.A. Posse Cover
Whatever Happened to N.W.A.’s Posse? LA Weekly tracks down all of the guys featured on the cover of N.W.A.’s lesser known first album, perhaps the first photo of gangsta rap. A handful of them were only there to give rides to their friends. For the others, though, this album launched careers that would redefine the 1990’s music landscape (see if you can spot Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, MC Ren…). Here’s one incredible bit of trivia:
When N.W.A signed with Priority, the group was only the label’s second signed act. The other was the California Raisins. That’s right: The first noncompilation album released by Priority was The California Raisins Sing the Hit Songs. The second was Straight Outta Compton.
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Potemkin Army
The Discover blog reports on a Potemkin army:
Russian balloon maker Rusbal is working on an order from the country’s defense ministry to supply full-scale inflatable military models. The realistic-looking hardware is used in battlefield positions and to protect Russian strategic installations from surveillance satellites, distracting snoops and protecting real combat units from strikes. They can look like real vehicles in the radar, thermal, and near infra-red bands, so they’d even look right through night-vision goggles.
And now from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act V Scene IV — you know, the cool part where the incoming army disguises itself as the Birnam forest):
MALCOLM
Let every soldier hew him down a bough
And bear’t before him: thereby shall we shadow
The numbers of our host and make discovery
Err in report of us.Nothing much new, then. Simple visual misdirection is the magician’s greatest asset.
See also:
- Edison’s Warriors, a great article in Cabinet about the U.S. 3132nd Signal Service Company in WWII, a sonic deception team that created strategic disruption using wire and tape recordings with acoustical engineering help from Bell Labs
- Operation Bertram
- The Ghost Army
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Allen Ginsberg: Ballad of the Skeletons
Ballad of the Skeletons. So good. Allen Ginsberg backed by Paul McCartney and Lenny Kaye on guitar and Philip Glass on keyboard, video by Gus Van Sant. This is the considerably shorter radio edit version of the full 7 minute recording that was one of my favorite CD’s when it was released back in 1996.
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Mon Oncle
Les lignes géométriques ne rendent pas les gens aimables [geometrical lines do not produce likeable people].
Filmmaker Jacques Tati on Villa Arpel, the comically painful modern house depicted in his satire Mon Oncle. You can watch a nice video of the house being reconstructed piece by piece for the recent Tati exposition at the Cinémathèque Française.
(Quote found on Wikipedia)
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Shockwave
We’ve all been exposed to a glut of volcano videos lately, but this one has something I’ve never seen before. If you watch a few seconds in you can see the first of a series of visible shock waves rippling through the cloud of ash. Yikes.
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parchment
Parchment is a JavaScript-powered Z-machine interpreter. Translation: you can now play your Zork and your Leather Goddesses of Phobos (or more modern pieces of interactive fiction) without leaving the comfort of your web browser.
(Via O’Reilly Radar)
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An ecological study of glee in small groups of preschool children
A phenomenon called group glee was studied in videotapes of 596 formal lessons in a preschool. This was characterized by joyful screaming, laughing, and intense physical acts which occurred in simultaneous bursts or which spread in a contagious fashion from one child to another.
Science!
See also:
- Radiolab’s 2008 episode on Laughter
- The 1962 Tanganyika ‘laughter epidemic’
- The Giggle Loop
(Via NCBI ROFL, which I guess is appropriately named in this case)