Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
-
Pallophotophone
The world’s only working (modern) Pallophotophone plays 80-year-old NBC radio broadcasts:
The pallophotophone was an early audio recorder created by GE researcher Charles Hoxie in 1922. Rather than using magnetic wire or lacquer disks, the device captured audio waveforms on sprocketless 35 mm film as a series of 12 parallel tracks reflected from a vibrating mirror. It was used to record some of the world’s oldest surviving radio broadcasts on Schenectady, New York radio station WGY between 1929 and 1931.
As a forgotten optical medium, I guess its more modern analog would be laserfilm discs. Sort of working along the right path, but just not practical compared to other media coming out at the time. There’s more about the rediscovered pallphotophone recordings on the GE Reports blog.
(Via Coudal)
-
Structured Light
Real-time 3D capture at 60fps using a cheap webcam and simple projected pattern of light points. The structured-light code is open source, looks like a pretty cool project.
(Via Make)
-
Open Data Literacy
It is worth remembering: We didn’t build libraries for an already literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have a data or public policy literate citizenry, we build them so that citizens may become literate in data, visualization, coding and public policy.
David Eaves argues that the best way to foster a data-literate society is to open the floodgates on open data, creating niches for discussion and analysis to engage the citizenry in much the same semi-guided way that public libraries provided in the 19th Century.
(Via Radar)
-
James Joyce Synthetic Cell
To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.
The above quote from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was inscribed as a watermark into the DNA of the much-discussed synthetic cell created a couple of months back by Craig Venter’s team. From The Loom:
The scientists who produced the new synthetic cell copied the genome of a microbe, letter for letter, and then inserted the synthetic version into a host cell. To determine that their experiment worked, they needed a way to tell the genomes of their synthetic cells from the natural genomes that were their model. So they inserted “watermarks” into the artificial genome. These sequences of DNA (which spelled out the work of Joyce and others through the genetic code) sit in non-coding regions of the microbe’s DNA. As a result, these watermarks cannot disrupt any essential protein-coding genes or stretches of DNA that are vital for switching genes on and off.
-
God-Particle-Sounds
Music of the Large Hadron Collider. From Discover:
Lily Asquith, a physicist searching for the Higgs boson–the elementary particle believed to give everything in the universe mass–is using more than her eyes. With artists and other physicists, she started the LHCsound project to hear subatomic particles.
I’m rarely convinced that audio visualization (what’s the better term for this field?) makes patterns in data easier to find, but it sure can sound interesting.
-
Abner Mercury Memory
From a recently declassified history (PDF) detailing the NSA’s computing equipment up to 1964, comes a description of their house-sized computer ABNER’s mercury-powered memory banks:
A succession of pulses (signal or no-signal) travels through an acoustic medium, say mercury, from one end to the other of a “delay line.” […] At the input end of the line is a crystal that converts an electrical pulse to a mechanical wave which travels through the mercury to the other end, where another crystal reconverts it to an electrical signal. The series of electrical signals is recirculated back to input, after passing through detector, amplifier, and driver circuits to restore the shape and strength of the pulses. Also, in the part of the cycle external to the delay line are input and output circuits and “clock” pulses for synchronization. In mercury, the pulses travel at the speed of sound, which is much slower than the speed of electrical signals, and thus the delay in going from one end of the line to the other constitutes a form of storage. […] In ABNER, the mercury tank was a glass tube about two feet long; the delay time was 384 microseconds, or eight words of 48 bits at one-megacycle-per-second rate. Thus the 1,024 words were contained in two cabinets holding 64 mercury delay lines each.
ABNER was named after comic strip character Li’l Abner, reportedly because it was a big, hulking machine that “didn’t know anything”.
(Via Bruce Schneier)
-
Bit Trip Runner
BIT.TRIP.RUNNER, one of the best games I’ve played this summer. A hypnotically synaesthetic music platformer, something like an inspired cross between Vib-Ribbon and Michel Gondry’s Star Guitar video. Well worth the few bucks if you’ve got a Wii.
(Seen above is a run of level 1-11 by YouTube user NintenDaan1, the level that I’m currently stuck playing over and over again trying to get all of the bonus gold…)
-
Michaelangelo Sistine Brain
From Concealed Neuroanatomy in Michelangelo’s Separation of Light From Darkness in the Sistine Chapel in the May, 2010, issue of Neurosurgery:
In the winter of 1511, Michelangelo entered the final stages of the Sistine Chapel project and painted 4 frescoes along the longitudinal apex of the vault, which completed a series of 9 central panels depicting scenes from the Book of Genesis. It is reported that Michelangelo concealed an image of the brain in the first of these last 4 panels, namely, the Creation of Adam. Here we present evidence that he concealed another neuronanatomic structure in the final panel of this series, the Separation of Light From Darkness, specifically a ventral view of the brainstem.
Could be pareidolia, but given Michelangelo’s breakthroughs in anatomical rendering and that God is depicted here with a rather non-standard bearded neck, who knows?
(Via NYTimes.com)
-
Everything Right Is Wrong Again Flexi-Disc
One great use of YouTube: watching long out-of-print vinyl flexidiscs warble out alternate takes on songs that I’ve been listening to for 20 years. This one is an early disc from They Might Be Giants, with a non-album version of “Everything Right is Wrong Again”.
-
The ‘Learning Knights’ of Bell Telephone
FIFTY-SIX years ago today, a Bell System manager sent postcards to 16 of the most capable and promising young executives at the company. What was written on the postcards was surprising, especially coming from a corporate ladder-climber at a time when the nation was just beginning to lurch out of a recession: “Happy Bloom’s Day.”
And so began a novel executive education program at Bell that brought a rapid-pace liberal arts education to many of their top engineers who previously had rarely cracked open a novel. They read heavier texts than the average grad student, attended cultural events, heard dozens of lectures from luminaries in the field, perused works as diverse as the Bhagavad-Gita and Babbitt, and the capstone was tackling the most challenging novel of the day, Ulysses. It was a success, and early reports indicated that it changed the workers’ lives. So how’d that turn out?
The institute was judged a success by Morris S. Viteles, one of the pioneers of industrial psychology, who evaluated its graduates. But Bell gradually withdrew its support after yet another positive assessment found that while executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities. By 1960, the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives was finished.
Oh.