Kevin Atkinson created a neat virtual ball pit application that works in real time:
I’ve been playing with real-time physics libraries for a while, both 3d and 2d, and I’ve been wanting to do something for a while, but I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to come up with anything that grabbed me. But a couple weeks ago I had a brainwave and wrote this in just a couple days.
For those interested in such things, I didn’t use Box2D, which seems the current champ in developer mindshare in this tiny niche. I started out using it, and it’s quite nice, but it just wasn’t fast enough when I used enough circles/pixels to generate an intelligible representation of the video stream (there’re about a 1000 used in the demo above). Luckily, I chanced across the chipmunk physics library which uses some kind of fancy-pants geometric hashing to speed up collision testing, and it works quite nicely in real-time with 1000 pixels/circles.
Based on the lyric (and alternate title) “Big Ideas: Don’t get any” I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there
For the past several years–and with seemingly limitless access–photographer Richard Ross has been making unsettling and thought-provoking pictures of architectural spaces that exert power over the individuals within them. From a Montessori preschool to churches, mosques and diverse civic spaces including a Swedish courtroom, the Iraqi National Assembly hall and the United Nations, the images in Architecture of Authority build to ever harsher manifestations of power: an interrogation room at Guantanamo, segregation cells at Abu Ghraib, and finally, a capital punishment death chamber.Though visually cool, this work deals with hot-button issues–from the surveillance that increasingly intrudes on post-9/11 life to the abuse of power and the erosion of individual liberty. The connections among the various architectures are striking, as Ross points out: “The Santa Barbara Mission confessional and the LAPD robbery homicide interrogation rooms are the same intimate proportions. Both are made to solicit a confession in exchange for some form of redemption.” Essay by Harper’s Magazine publisher, John R. MacArthur, also a columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail.
The 4 mechanical mirrors are made of various materials but share the same behavior and interaction; any person standing in front of one of these pieces is instantly reflected on its surface. The mechanical mirrors all have video cameras, motors and computers on board and produce a soothing sound as the viewer interacts with them.
About 7 years ago I was reading an article on Claude Shannon and came across one of the funniest ideas I had ever heard. Claude, you see, was one of these incredibly brilliant engineers with an obviously great sense of humor. As I understand it, he, along with Marvin Minsky came up with an idea they called the “Ultimate Machine”. Basically a plain box with a switch on the top. When you flip the switch, a hand comes out of the box and flips the switch off. Thats it.
Well, after reading the article, and laughing out loud, I decided that I HAD to build one of these boxes. So simple, and yet so funny.
The 21″ x 13″ print can be purchased at my new store! store.thebigpugh.com
This piece inspired the login illustration that vimeo commissioned from me for their redesign earlier this year; it is still in use throughout the site. The video is a condensed time lapse of screenshots over a several month period. Total physical drawing time is close to 40 hours and I’d add an equal amount of time for concept time and readying the print. A screenshot was taken every 5 seconds, which actually results in a full 18 minute video. I’ll upload that for posterity later.
My life has changed a lot since i started this, so I thought it appropriate to include my friends, family and loved ones since they all were on my mind throughout the creative process. Enjoy!
Any tall construction has to be engineered to with stand the forces of the wind. You can accomplish this in two ways - making something so heavy the wind could never push it over, or make your construction so sparse as to not give the wind hardly anything to push against. For the tower Gustave Eiffel - a master of iron bridges and probably the first serious student of aerodynamics - used an iron filigree such that the wind has almost no grip on it even though it is constructed of over 15,000 pieces. If melted down to the size of it’s base (about four acres) the molten iron would rise to a height of only about 2.3 inches.
Before the four buttresses met at the first platform 180 feet off the ground they had to be supported by large wooden trusses. If any of them was off by even a tenth of a degree it would mean inches of difference at the top. To solve this problem Eiffel put the temporary trusses on hydraulic jacks so the permanent sides could be adjusted slightly for the pieces that connected them.
To get the pieces up the tower a set of “creeping cranes” was employed using the future elevator rails as they were constructed. The cranes could construct about 30 feet above their position and then ascend to begin the process again.
Probably the first important work of Modernism, the tower had to give into a few Victorian aesthetics of the time. On the first platform gingerbread arches that were purely decorative were eventually removed. Also, below the first platform are arches meant to remind Persians of their bridges. These arches have no structural purpose thus some find they are a discredit to the structural simplicity - while others find them a pleasant compliment to the exterior curves. Either way the remain to this day.
Finished in 1889 (where it served at the entrance arch for Exposition Universelle) at a final height of 1,063 ft (at the antenna) it was not surpassed in height until New York City’s Chrysler Building was finished in 1930.
