The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries . All action takes place around NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries . Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers’ produced by fleeting electrons . Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world.
This Rube Goldberg machine makes sheer delight out of the process of mixing a Falling Water ( 30mls (1Oz) 42BELOW Feijoa Vodka, lemonade, long slice of seedless cucumber, ice)
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.
