Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Harmony
Nifty HTML5 <canvas> procedural/generative drawing demo (similar to drawing in real time with Processing or The Scribbler)
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Observation of an Antimatter Hypernucleus
Nuclear collisions recreate conditions in the universe microsecondsafter the Big Bang. […] We report the observation of antihypertritons — comprised of an antiproton, antineutron, and antilambda hyperon — produced by colliding gold nuclei at high energy. The production and properties of antinuclei, and nuclei containing strange quarks, have implications spanning nuclear/particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology.
My layman’s understanding of this is that it’s a significant find, if verified. Basically they’ve created a particle that is neither matter nor antimatter, but lies just off the plane of strangeness (“strange” as in the quark), and might be the kind of thing only found at the cores of collapsed stars. The Register’s easy-to-read writeup has a good suggestion that this “negative strangeness” they talk about should be dubbed “hyper-boringness”.
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Laser Mapped Caves
La Subterranea, a research project laser-mapping out 2km worth of the caves and tunnels running beneath Guanajuato, Mexico.
(Via Make)
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Mind Control Pinball
Researchers from the Berlin Brain-Computer Interface project demonstrate their research into mind-control pinball, which is an important field of study if ever there was one. BUT HOW DO YOU NUDGE?
Also, the Addams Family table is a great choice for such a project (Fester would approve), but how cool would it have been if they’d hooked him up to the one-of-a-kind Sega/Stern museum table The Brain?
(Via Make)
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Rapid Prototyping with Ceramics
If you’re the sort of lab that’s engineering a method of printing ceramic materials using rapid prototyping machines, I suppose it’d make sense that you’d already have made some real-life polygonal Utah teapots! I never thought about it before, but for the 3D graphics humor value I really, really want one of these now. You can read about the Utanalog project and see finished photos (and a video explaining the whole thing) over on the Unfold blog.
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Hirokazu Kore-edas ワンダフルライフ Wandâfuru Raifu (Afterlife)
From Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ワンダフルライフ (Wandâfuru raifu), released in the U.S. in 1998 as Afterlife. This is likely my favorite movie of all time. Dig up a copy at your neighborhood indie video store when you get a chance, it’s good. It’s a simple, quiet parable about life, death, loss, memory, love, and cinema, somewhere between Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine.
After whining for years about someone borrowing my out-of-print DVD copy without returning it, I finally looked around and discovered the vastly superior Japanese NTSC Region 2 copy of the movie. ¥3,990 later, I’m now able to enjoy it again as I saw it at the theater in anamorphic widescreen, optional subtitles, and none of the horrible digital low-pass smoothing that someone thought would “fix” the grainy 16mm film’s appearance. Time for a movie screening, I think…
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Notorious
Hitchcock’s Notorious. Ingrid Bergman hired to spy on former Nazis in Rio largely on the grounds of her notable promiscuity, with nuclear age intrigue so current for 1945 that the FBI had Hitchcock under surveillance. Tense stuff once the plot gets rolling, and a great unraveling ending.
Also worth watching for its top-notch use of rear projection special effects: if you think that modern movies and tv shows use a surprising amount of green screen for inserting fake backgrounds, it’s worth remembering that it’s an old idea. All of the foreground action for Notorious was filmed on set in California, with background footage shot by a 2nd production crew in Rio and Miami, beautifully worked in behind the actors so that it’s really hard to tell sometimes.
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Makes Me Feel Like Were All Just Wired Up Like a
Makes me feel like we’re all just wired up like a 66 punchdown block. Hopefully with a bit neater cabling.
(From the Otis Archives Flickr stream of Walter Reed’s medical museum)
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Breakdowns of 1936 — Warner Brothers Bloopers
Breakdowns of 1936, Warner Bros’ annual in-house blooper reel (surprisingly uncensored). At least now I know what the most common swear was in 1936!
(Via Coudal Partners)
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Phantasmagoria
It’s interesting to look back at the hype and spectacle of the early CD-ROM games (with novelties like Myst flying off the shelf the medium was hailed as the savior of declining video game sales) as a parallel to the hype and spectacle of the real 18th Century phantasmagoria and magic lantern parlor theater. From classic gaming site GOG.com’s short editorial piece commemorating their recent addition of Roberta William’s popular 1995 FMV horror game Phantasmagoria:
In the mid-1700s, long before horror pioneers like Alfred Hitchcock, films such as Dracula and Frankenstein, and even cinema itself, the predecessor to horror cinema was born in a tiny coffee shop in Leipzig, Germany. The proprietor of the shop, Johann Schropfer, welcomed patrons with a warm beverage and an invitation to shoot the breeze and some stick in his adjoining billiards room. But the extra attraction of running a table after a long workday didn’t do much to boost Schropfer’s steadily declining patronage. In an effort to drum up business, Schropfer cast out pool tables and converted the billiards parlor into a séance chamber. […]
By the late 1760s, Schropfer’s once-deserted shop had evolved into a hotspot where patrons gasped in awe at ghostly images projected onto smoke, chilling music, ambient sounds, and burning incenses whose aromas were evocative of malevolent forces. The masterful performance put on by Schropfer proved so lucrative that the coffee-shop-owner-turned-showman took his show on the road throughout Europe until 1774, at which time Schropfer, perhaps haunted by the specters he alleged to call forth from the afterlife, took his own life.
