Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Akihabara
Nice-looking little HTML5 <canvas> 2D game engine and toolkit written in JavaScript. More and more the apps are moving to the browser and out of the land of plugins and standalone RIA clients.
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Twombly
[Video no longer available]
As Seen on TV, a tribute to doing it wrong. I love this aspect of awful informercials, and in our household we’ve even coined a specific adjective to describe it: twombly. As in “No, no, don’t use your sewing machine on the curtains while they’re still hanging! You’re doin’ it all twombly!”
(Via Kottke)
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Softening the edges
The first such Disney film I ever saw was Snow White, which added considerably to my experience of wonderful fear and terror, even though its heroine was a doll. This, I have been told, was because it was made by German refugees who had a sense of the darkness of the old stories. The film Bambi diminished the sense of real forests and creatures I had found in the book. The unbearable thing was the filming of the Jungle Books. Disney cartoons use the proportions of human baby faces – those wide eyes, those chubby cheeks we respond to automatically. The black hunting panther, the terrible strong snake, the wolf pack and its howl, the cringing tiger became dolls and toys like Pooh, Piglet and Eeyore, and some crucial imaginative space was irretrievably lost.
From AS Byatt’s essay in the Guardian about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-glass, which offers some great insight into the difference between Lewis Carroll’s imagined spaces and narrative and those of other popular (later, 20th Century) fantasy stories for children.
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Evil Eye
Face tracking Evil Eye by Nirav Patel. Simple webcam + projector combo (+ frosted ceiling light globe) using OpenCV and PyGame.
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Guns That Look Like Toys
Baltimore Police Department: Guns That Look Like Toys. Not a lot of info on this one, and the police report is from a couple of years ago, but have the criminals finally figured out that the law requiring toy guns to be clearly painted in comical neon colors can work both ways? How come these all seem to have been painted by the same gun shop in Wisconsin?
On the flip side this reminds me of the Entertech uzi motorized water gun I had as a kid (check out this commercial – almost unthinkable now, but I remember having a lot of fun with it at the time). These were pretty much the last realistically-painted gun toys sold in large stores in America after legislation passed in many states in 1988 following multiple incidents of children being mistakenly shot and killed by the police. That cultural shift led into the Super Soaker generation, which is actually a pretty fascinating story in and of itself.
(Via Schneier on Security, who reports that there a posters warning about painted guns in the NYC subways currently)
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Awesome They’re Remaking Pee Wee’s Big Adventure
Awesome, they’re remaking Pee-wee’s Big Adventure?!
Oh, wait, it’s just some reheated Tom Cruise movie, nevermind.
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aibohphobia
The irrational fear of palindromes.
(Via Language Log)
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A Turing Machine Overview
A Turing Machine. Possibly the nicest assembly I’ve ever seen of 35mm film, servos, motors, and dry erase markers that’s actually capable of demonstrating the foundational theories of computing. A bit slow on the maths, but who’s complaining?
(Via Make)
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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?
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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.