Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
-
The Textbook Myth
The Texas Tribune posted a great article last week following up on the Texas SBoE brouhaha, outlining why ideologically-fueled edits to textbooks rarely have much effect on the actual curricula taught in schools and why Texas no longer “wags the textbook industry tail”. The concluding paragraph is a bit depressing, though:
But that’s the thing: Most history textbooks are not written by historians — self-respecting or otherwise. Foner’s book, a cohesive narrative researched and written by one scholar, is the exception. Most elementary and secondary texts are written by committees of a dozen or more writers, hired hands who don’t own their work and can’t object to any changes multiple publishing house editors make to appease whichever politicians or bureaucrats control the millions being spent. They are cooked quickly and to order, pressed together from hundreds of standards that reflect, in many ways, the lowest common denominator of thousands of opinions. They are, in short, the chicken nuggets of the literary world.
Can we get Jamie Oliver to tackle this educational malnourishment, too?
-
Whenever Humans Design and Make a Useful Thing
Whenever humans design and make a useful thing they invariably expend a good deal of unnecessary and easily avoidable work on it which contributes nothing to its usefulness. Look, for instance, at the ceiling. It is flat. It would have been easier not to have made it flat. Its being flat does not make you any warmer or the room about you any quieter, nor yet does it make the house any cheaper; far from it. Since there is a snobbism in these things flattening a ceiling is called workmanship, or mere craftsmanship; while painting gods on it or putting knobs on it is called art or design. But all these activities: ‘workmanship,’ ‘design for appearance,’ ‘decoration,’ ‘ornament,’ ‘applied art,’ ‘embellishment,’ or what you will are part of the same pattern of behavior which all men at all times and places have followed: doing useless work on useful things. If we did not behave after this pattern our life would indeed by poor, nasty and brutish. Furniture designer and theorist David Pye, from The Nature of Aesthetics and Design. Quoted in Julie Lasky’s excellent post on Design Observer, Superbeauty.
-
Early Experimental Computer Animation Modeling a Cat’s Gait
[Video no longer available]
Early experimental computer animation through mathematical modeling of a cat’s gait. Evidently, equations were written to model the basic skeleton form of the cat and its walk, and the computer was used to generate a shadow-like projection printed frame by frame onto paper using ASCII-like characters (this animation was done in 1968 on a Soviet BESM-4 mainframe, so I’m not sure what character set they’re actually using here). The result could then be filmed, inverted, and manually cleaned up. Not exactly something that would really take the animation world by storm, but it’s an interesting usage of mainframes for art.
See also: more detailed info about the animation including links to the fulltext paper (in Russian – Google Translate does a pretty good job)
(Via Make)
-
A Gomez by Any Other Name
Back of the Cereal Box takes a very brief look into why the patriarch of the Addams Family is named “Gomez” (spoiler: it was either that or “Repelli”, Charles Addams’ two top picks, and the cartoonist let John Astin decide). For the record, I like that he has a relatively normal name – it helps offset the other family members’ odd / jokey names.
Something I’d always wondered about: Why do all of the members of the Addams family have names that are sinister in one way or another except Gomez? Dark associations of Morticia, Fester, Cousin Itt, Thing and Lurch’s names are obvious. Wednesday gets her name from the line in the “Monday’s Child” poem — “Wednesday’s child is full of woe” — and Pugsley’s seems like a play on pugnacious or something thereabouts. But why should Gomez get a fairly normal name? A surname for a first name is hardly sinister.
-
Boards Interactive Magazine Walkthrough
Boards Interactive Magazine – Walkthrough from Theo Watson on Vimeo.
For the March 2010 issue of Boards Magazine, Emily Gobeille and I worked with Nexus Productions to develop an interactive cover experience called Rise and Fall. Here is a little preview of the experience.
You can download the software and the cover from: http://boardsmag.com/RiseAndFall
Update: Found out you can buy a copy of the magzine for $7 by emailing – BoardsCustomerCare@boardsmag.com . You can also download the cover as a pdf from the link above.
The project uses the Ferns library for tracking ( http://cvlab.epfl.ch/software/ferns/index.php ) and the whole project is open source released under the GPL v2.0 . Grab the source code here: http://boardsmag.com/RiseAndFall
Credits:
Digital Directors:
Emily Gobeille – http://zanyparade.com
Theo Watson – http://theowatson.comProduced by:
Nexus Productions – http://www.nexusproductions.comSound Design:
MOST Original Soundtracks – http://www.m-ost.nlSoftware:
Made with openFrameworks – http://openframeworks.cc
Using the Ferns library for tracking – http://cvlab.epfl.ch/software/ferns/index.phpBoards Interactive Magazine – Walkthrough. Gorgeous interactive promo piece: you hold up a copy of the magazine (or a reasonable facsimile…) in front of your webcam, and the app responds to and tracks its orientation, letting you navigate through an playful graphic design landscape. I saw a small live demo at SXSWi, and the audience was definitely delighted. Built with openFrameworks and the Ferns object detection library, the app is entirely open sourced, too!
-
User guided audio selection (.mov)
Research video demonstrating an ability to automatically select individual elements of a recorded song (like the vocal track, guitar solo, ringing cellphone, etc) by singing, whistling, or even Beavis & Butthead style grunting in imitation. Not 100% perfect, but it’s very clever. (I wish the video was embeddable…)
Here’s a link to the original paper (PDF) presented to at the 2009 ACM User Interface Software and Technology symposium.
-
Drawing Hands
Animator Patrick Smith offers advice over on Scribble Junkies about drawing hands, an area of life drawing I still struggle with. He rails against both Preston Blair and Burne Hogarth’s popular treatises, and I’d have to agree with him there (I think the Hogarth “dynamic” books stunted my artistic abilities and understanding of anatomy by a few years, personally…).
One of the responses in the comments section rings true: “The drawings of hands you admire were probably drawn by people who looked at hands, not drawings of drawings of hands.”
-
On the Longevity of Sam & Max
Yeah, it’s great. A lot of that is the fans that have kept it alive. When people discovered it, they would be such rabid fans of it they would feel like they were the ones that got it. It was a little too obscure for their friends, maybe, but they were the ones that were getting it. A thing about the old comics I always heard was that people would lend them to their friends and never get them back. It was always this process where you’d be trying to turn someone onto it, which I thought was great. So there was a long stretch where I didn’t do anything with Sam & Max and there were fan sites that were keeping them active, so I attribute that [to the fact] they’re still around.
The Onion A.V. Club catches up with and gets a good interview from my favorite cartoonist Steve Purcell to ask him about Monkey Island, Sinistar, and the new season of Telltale’s adaptation of his creation.
Fun fact: one of the first websites I created way back in 1994 was a Sam & Max fan site with a handful of scans from the comics and related ephemera, so I guess I was one of those fans!
-
Solaris
Solaris (1972). Something of a lyrical Russian follow-up to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a story of personal grief and longing set aboard a space station hovering over an abyssal alien ocean. Great use of understated sets and on-Earth scenery with allusions to the style of the Old Masters. Between Solaris, Alphaville, and Children of Men, I’m discovering that my favorite cinematic dystopian futures are the ones that make little or no effort to appear futuristic.
-
Neil Degrasse Tyson Gets Hate Mail from Kids About
Neil Degrasse Tyson gets hate mail from kids about Pluto. The shift in tone from letter to letter is great, as kids begin to accept that “thats science”.
(Via Coudal Partners)