Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Little Nemo Turns 100
The principal factor in my success has been an absolute desire to draw constantly. I never decided to be an artist. Simply, I could not stop myself from drawing. I drew for my own pleasure. I never wanted to know whether or not someone liked my drawings. I drew on walls, the school blackboard, old bits of paper, the walls of barns. Today I’m still as fond of drawing as when I was a kid — and that’s a long time ago… The incomparable Winsor McCay, quoted in a Los Angeles Times blog post that points out that this is the 100th anniversary of McCay’s short film Little Nemo. If you’ve never seen his animated shorts — they’re among the first examples of the medium, and yet still technically brilliant — you should hit up the YouTube and get started with Nemo…
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A Boy Named Jean
Shel Silverstein looking characteristically intimidating on his 1969 country album, Boy Named Sue and His Other Country Songs (yes, yes, he wrote that song, but did you know that it was originally inspired by Shel’s friend saddled with a girly name, Jean Shepherd?)
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Forget the Firetruck: Future Firefighters May Use Ghostbusters-Like Electric Backpacks
From Discover:
This futuristic method is based on a centuries-old observation that electric fields can do funny things (videos) to flames, making them sputter and even snuffing them out.
The researchers’ early-stage prototype consists of a 600-watt amplifier hooked up to a electric beam-shooting wand, according to their presentation at the American Chemical Society meeting earlier this week. In tests, they were able to quickly zap out flames over a foot high.
I look forward to the day when I can dial 911 and get the ArcAttack guys over to put out the blaze!
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Videogames Are Liquid Architecture
If architecture is frozen music, then a videogame is liquid architecture. Journalist and critic Steven Poole, author of Trigger Happy, quoted in an counter-point article by Michael Mirasol posted on Roger Ebert’s blog, Why video games are indeed Art.
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Poka-yoke
Poka-yoke (ポカヨケ) is a Japanese term that means “fail-safing” or “mistake-proofing”. A poka-yoke is any mechanism in a lean manufacturing process that helps an equipment operator avoid (yokeru) mistakes (poka). Its purpose is to eliminate product defects by preventing, correcting, or drawing attention to human errors as they occur.
Not just handy for manufacturing processes, this idea applies very easily to any kind of designed object. How can we make what we design not only easy to use, but as difficult as possible to mis-use? (It’s worth noting that this principle was originally described as baka-yoke, i.e. idiot-proof, unfairly placing the blame on the user instead of the design)
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Pee Wee on the Gong Show
[Video no longer available]
More from the “things I did not know” file: Paul Rubens’s first widely-seen appearances, years before he hit it big as Pee-Wee Herman, were on the Gong Show.
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Its the Dialogue of the Pieces
It’s the dialogue of the pieces, not the pieces themselves, that creates aesthetic success. From number 51 in 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick. I heard this quote this past week as part of the “Music of Interaction Design” panel at SxSWi presented by Cennydd Bowles and James Box. Here’s a short PBS NewsHour writeup about the panel with a video interview of the two designers.
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Donald Duck Discovered Methylene
Actually, he does. Donald Duck accidentally (and somewhat accurately) described the chemical compound methylene nearly two decades before real-world scientists:
In 1963, the Disney Studio learned just how wide and faithful a readership [Carl] Barks had. A letter arrived from Joseph B. Lambert of the California Institute of Technology, pointing out a curious reference in “The Spin States of Carbenes,” a technical article soon to be published by P.P. Gaspar and G.S. Hammond (in Carbene Chemistry, edited by Wolfgang Kirmse, New York: Academic Press, 1964). “Despite the recent extensive interest in methylene chemistry,” read the article’s last paragraph, “much additional study is required…. Among experiments which have not, to our knowledge, been carried out as yet is one of a most intriguing nature suggested in the literature of no less than 19 years ago (91).” Footnote 91, in turn, directed readers to issue 44 of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. … A year later, the Studio received a letter from Richard Greenwald, a scientist at Harvard. “Recent developments in chemistry have focused much attention to species of this sort,” Greenwald commented. “Without getting technical let me say that carbenes can be made but not isolated; i.e. they cannot be put into a jar and kept on a shell. They can, however, be made to react with other substances. Donald was using carbene in just such a manner, many years before ‘real chemists’ thought to do so.”
(Via Cracked’s 5 Amazing Things Invented by Donald Duck [Seriously])
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Optical tweezers and laser tractor beams
Mind-boggling stuff like this is why I keep reading science journals. We can already use photons to push and pinch things with their tiny mass (amazing enough), but new research is underway in how to pull with photons:
Light is pushy. The physical pressure of photons is what allows for solar sail space missions that ride on sunlight, and what allows for dreams of lasers that will push those sails even faster. And light can trap objects, too: Optical tweezers can hold tiny objects in place. Pulling an object with light, however, is another matter. … Jun Chen’s research team says that the key is to use not a regular laser beam, but instead what’s called a Bessel beam. Viewed head-on, a Bessel beam looks like one intense point surrounded by concentric circles—what you might see when you toss a stone into a lake.
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IBM 2250 Graphics Display
The IBM 2250 graphics display, introduced in 1964. 1024×1024 squares of vector-based line art beamed at you at 40Hz, with a handy light pen cursor. Much more handy than those older displays that just exposed a sheet of photographic film for later processing!
(Via Columbia University, via Ars Technica’s recent quick primer on computer display history)