NASA has finally started releasing photos and video from their STEREO satellites– a pair of satellites that orbit our Sun slightly ahead of and behind the Earth, giving us a binocular 3D view of the star’s surface.
The only problem with NASA’s press site is that they only provide red-cyan anaglyph images, which can only be appreciated with colored 3D glasses. I didn’t have a pair handy, so I split the red and cyan layers into this crosseyed stereo view. Enjoy!
The Heather Gold Show was a total blast– great host, fun guests, warm audience! Too bad Enzo scampered out before we could get him in this picture.
Update: Heather has put up the audio podcast, as well as some discussion and links on her blog. Feel free to join the conversation!
I’ll be making an appearance on the Heather Gold Show next Friday, April 13th, to talk about synesthesia and perception. Also attending will be my dear friend Colleen Silva, whose synesthesia is completely unique. Should be a very interesting show. If you’re in San Francisco, swing on by and check us out! (Details after the jump…)
More billboard remixing by Jason Eppink: The Pixelator. I love the tongue-in-cheek description of the project. It’s like an inside-out version of “The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal”:
Pixelator is an unauthorized on-going video art performance collaboration with the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, Clear Channel Communications, and its selected artists.
(via Wooster Collective)
Politicians spin. It’s a fact of life. But nobody spins quite like the Bush administration. I’ve gotten used to the feeling that whenever I hear Bush or one of his cronies speak, I’m going to hear nothing but lies and manipulative language. I’ve listened to George “Don’t Think of an Elephant” Lakoff, and dug his ideas. I’ve heard Frank “Words that Work” Luntz speak on the radio, and wanted to spit in his face. I feel like I understand what spin is, and can tell when I’m hearing it. My spin-dar is pretty sensitive at this point.
It’s one thing to know you’re hearing spin. Knowing how to counter it is a whole different story. A fellow named Jeffrey Feldman has written a terrific article that unpacks those adjectives, so to speak. It’s an incisive analysis of Bush’s recent press conference about the US Attorney firing scandal. Feldman identifies the five deliberately misleading buzzwords that were the real purpose of the press conference, and provides accurate alternatives for journalists to use when covering the story. The attorneys didn’t resign, they were fired. Gonzales didn’t give an incomplete explanation, he lied.
This analysis is timely. We need one of these for every statement this administration makes. And mainstream media need to start showing a bit more skepticism towards the choice of words they get fed in these press conferences. Do not repeat his words, folks!
Bush Used Press Conference to Force PR Buzzwords into the Debate
Yay! One of my favorite artists from the comics world has started animating! You probably know Chris Ware from such works as The Acme Novelty Library
(via BoingBoing.)
Update: See also this earlier collaboration between Chris Ware and Ira Glass: Lost Buildings. (Thanks to Nancy for the link!)
Ugh. My computer died on Friday. Guess how I spent my weekend?
I’ve got a few posts in the mental hopper waiting for a chance to be dumped out here… stay tuned.
Our pals at Aardman are up to their old tricks again! They’ve launched this series of bite-sized claymation shorts called Purple and Brown. Before I say anything about it, just watch some of them! Here’s one:
These shorts are everything I love about animation: they’re short, simple, funny, clever, and brilliantly animated. But there’s something more going on here. Something really subversive…
Welcome MeFites and Diggers! Since you folks are here looking for homework, I thought I’d dig up some other old ones I did for Prof. Banchoff’s calculus class. This one isn’t quite as involved as that other polynomial, but it was still fun to draw:
Detail. Click for the full page.
This is a visualization of some level surfaces of the equation G(x,y,z) = (4-x^2-y^2-z^2)*((x-c)^2+y^2). Another way to think of it is as the product of two distance fields, one from a sphere, and the other from a line, where the line’s distance from the center of the sphere is given by c. I don’t have an exact date for this, but it would have been sometime in the fall of 1988.
One thing I can tell you about giant robots: you don’t want to be under them when they start coughing and hacking. The industrial demolition ones are especially bad. They’re sold as “self-maintaining”, which just means they get totally neglected by their owners, and wander around town looking for scraps. I think this one had some type of warehouse for lunch. There were paint cans stuck in its teeth, and it looked kind of ill. I don’t think asbestos agrees with their digestion.
