Hylozoic Ground: art installation made of gossamer computers is like a huge lung

Hylozoic Ground: art installation made of gossamer computers is like a huge lung:

Hylozoic Ground, a Canadian art installation that was exhibited at the Venice Biennale, sounds like a really lovely, immersive environment. One warning: if you're the sort of person who's allergic to obscure, overwrought "artist's statements," the site may frustrate you -- it took me about 50 clicks before I found a screen that actually stated, in simple text, what the installation was. Which is a pity, because it's pretty cool and I can't think of a single reason not to tell people about it. For your convenience, I've pasted it here for you:

Tens of thousands of lightweight digitally-fabricated components are fitted with microprocessors and proximity sensors that react to human presence. This responsive environment functions like a giant lung that breathes in and out around its occupants. Arrays of touch sensors and shape-memory alloy actuators (a type of non-motorized kinetic mechanism) create waves of empathic motion, luring visitors into the eerie shimmering depths of a mythical landscape, a fragile forest of light.

Hylozoic Ground

(Thanks, Dad!)

5 Amazing Water Droplet Animal ‘Sculptures’

5 Amazing Water Droplet Animal ‘Sculptures’:

Ridiculousness Alert! German Artist and Photographer Markus Reugels — who you may recall from his insane water droplet photographs — just unveiled his latest creation, a “Water Droplet Zoo,” meaning, he spent thousands of hours photographing colored water droplets to come up with ones that abstractly resembled animals.

Make sense? Doesn’t matter, because it’s cramazing — here’s 5 of the photos on display (Click For Full Size):

1.

2.

3.

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5.

#4 might be a liiiiiittle on the abstract side, but whatever, still awesome. Let he who has not spent thousands of hours photographing water droplets cast the first ‘what animal is that?’ stone.

Now THAT'S a great band name!

I hereby claim "Tsar Bomba" as MY idea for a band name:

"Tsar Bomba is the Western name for the RDS-220, the largest, most powerful weapon ever detonated. The bomb was tested on October 30, 1961, in an archipelago in the Arctic Sea. Developed by the Soviet Union, the bomb had a yield of about 50 megatons. Its detonation released energy equivalent to approximately 1% of the power output of the Sun for 39 nanoseconds of its detonation. The device was scaled down from its original design of 100 megatons to reduce the resulting nuclear fallout. The Tsar Bomba qualifies as the single most powerful device ever utilized throughout the history of humanity."

Neurosis setlist from 11/4/07

Neurosis played the Logan Square Auditorium on 11/4/07.

Setlist:
Given To The Rising
Hidden Faces
Season In The Sky
Fear And Sickness
To The Wind
Distill
Water Is Not Enough
Burn
The Doorway

MORE OF THIS PLEASE

Daily Kos: Pelosi

work-life balance

The Cult of Mac Blog

The Cult of Mac Blog: "'Among his other activities, Woz collects phone numbers, and his longtime goal has been to acquire a number with seven matching digits... after more months of scheming and waiting, he had it: 888-8888. This was his new cell-phone number, and his greatest philonumerical triumph.

The number proved unusable. It received more than a hundred wrong numbers a day. Given that the number is virtually impossible to misdial, this traffic was baffling. More strange still, there was never anybody talking on the other end of the line. Just silence. Or, not silence really, but dead air, sometimes with the sound of a television in the background, or somebody talking softly in English or Spanish, or bizarre gurgling noises. Woz listened intently.

Then, one day, with the phone pressed to his ear, Woz heard a woman say, at a distance, 'Hey, what are you doing with that?' The receiver was snatched up and slammed down.

Suddenly, it all made sense: the hundreds of calls, the dead air, the gurgling sounds. Babies. They were picking up the receiver and pressing a button at the bottom of the handset. Again and again. It made a noise: 'Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep.'

The children of America were making their first prank call.

And the person who answered the phone was Woz.'"