Alas, it’s happening! This Sunday is the last chance to see this little gem in Primose Hill.
Roll up your pants and down mountainous Primrose Hill because, dear interweb browser, The Museum of Everything is closing its mighty portals.
Please, we urge you, don’t be the only schmuck in your support group to miss the spectacle Time Out crowned Best of 2009, which Art Forum described as the best on view anywhere and which even our parents have told their friends the Bradys about.
iLingual is a recent app produced by the Lean Mean Fighting Machine for the Emirates airlines. The app is smart, simple, useful and entertaining all in one and that is something rare to come by. It works by taking a shot of your mouth and then implanting it onto your phone for it to speak for you in other languages. Sounds crazy? Check it out below. So far it comes in English, French and German and I’ll definitely try it out this weekend.
I’ve experimented with many a language-teaching apps that offers services from vocabulary and grammar exercises to complex dictionaries and audio support. If you can’t be bothered with any of that and want a quick fix that might get some smiles, you might want to check this one out.
Have you seen this? A FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. By Alex Roman. Very pretty indeed.
I higly recommend you read the recent article from FT called ‘Moscow’s stray dogs‘. It not only contains an in-depth study of their habits, behaviours and hierarchy systems, but also explains some of the somewhat baffling sympathy these creatures have managed to evoke in the locals. Below you can find some of the interesting snippets, but for more depth, please read the entire article at FT.
Where did these animals come from? It’s a question Andrei Poyarkov, 56, a biologist specialising in wolves, has dedicated himself to answering. His research focuses on how different environments affect dogs’ behaviour and social organisation. About 30 years ago, he began studying Moscow’s stray dogs. Poyarkov contends that their appearance and behaviour have changed over the decades as they have continuously adapted to the changing face of Russia’s capital. Virtually all the city’s strays were born that way: dumping a pet dog on the streets of Moscow amounts to a near-certain death sentence. Poyarkov reckons fewer than 3 per cent survive.
The metro dog also has uncannily good instincts about people, happily greeting kindly passers by, but slinking down the furthest escalator to avoid the intolerant older women who oversee the metro’s electronic turnstiles.
They also acted differently. Every so often, you would see one waiting on a metro platform. When the train pulled up, the dog would step in, scramble up to lie on a seat or sit on the floor if the carriage was crowded, and then exit a few stops later. There is even a website dedicated to the metro stray (www.metrodog.ru) on which passengers post photos and video clips taken with their mobile phones, documenting the savviest of the pack using the public transport system like any other Muscovite.
The dogs divide into four types, he says, which are determined by their character, how they forage for food, their level of socialisation to people and the ecological niche they inhabit.
Neuronov says there are some 500 strays that live in the metro stations, especially during the colder months, but only about 20 have learned how to ride the trains. This happened gradually, first as a way to broaden their territory. Later, it became a way of life. “Why should they go by foot if they can move around by public transport?” he asks.
Blu Dot decided to create an experiment for its new chair and see how people would interact with it if they just found it in the streets of NYC. The resulting video tries to analyse what good design is and what that means to users. The chairs are abandoned in NYC streets and then tracked as their journeys unfold. Very nice.
These amazing embryonic animal photographs of dolphins, sharks, dogs, penguins, cats and elephants are from a new National Geographic documentary called “Extraordinary Animals in the Womb”. The show’s producer, Peter Chinn, used a combination of three-dimensional ultrasound scans, computer graphics and tiny cameras to capture the process from conception to birth
You can see more of these pics & the source right here.
I’ve been giving Amazon praise for years now, but it has now managed to develop a glitch in its profile. Being the world’s biggest book seller, it provides some of the best customer support and a good choice of well-priced books in English, but as it turns out, it doesn’t have as much understanding of the customer or the reading culture as it should when it comes down to the Kindle.
If the Kindle is to resemble the reading experience, which overall it does pretty well, one should be able to lend/borrow books from other people. It’s enough that one can’t pass them on to those without a Kindle or with any other e-reader, but there is no reason why users should not be able to at least lend/borrow books from other Kindle users if not pass the books on entirely.
This must be a bingo situation for publishers and Amazon as far as the money goes – not allowing people to share content will force them to either:
1. get around it somehow by stripping the DRM and risk Amazon erasing content and share the content
2. keep buying regular books
3. get different e-readers that have that option (e.g. the Nook)
4. keep on paying out every single time they want to read a book on Kindle and not share the content later
I recently read a fantastic book on my Kindle called ‘The End of Mr. Y’ by Scarlett Thomas, but now every time I recommend it to someone that someone inevitably asks if s/he could borrow it from me and I end up telling myself that I should just stick with the good old second-hand books so I can share the love rather than hamster books on my Kindle.
I’m like a kid in a candy store today. Scanning through my usual go-to sites is turning up a treasure trove of new work from some of my favourite directors from right before the holidays.
I first discovered director and animator Eb Hu with his breathtaking “Josie’s Lalaland.” Quite simply, it’s one of the most simple, sincere, and exquisite works of art I’ve ever seen.
Like “Josie’s Lalaland”, “Lucky” is noble and compassionate. Hu is not afraid to confront our fears, demons, and ugliest deeds, but does so in such a delicate but impacting way. Clean lines, emotive visuals, sharp edges, and everything in perfect balance to let the emotion of what we’re seeing take focus. It’s the vigour of his subtle touch that strikes me. His work compels us, in dignified and glorious tones, to remember that all life is to be cherished, and, without scolding, reminds us that it is our own lives that are without value if we allow ourselves to forget this.
This is so neat – One Frame of Fame is possibly the first self-replicating music video that updates itself every hour with new participants. How does it work? It invites users to strike a pose dictated by the site and then plonk, the recording goes off to them and gets included in the video soon afterwards.
The video is not only really well made, but also gives a great sense of how super-connected, highly sociable and interactive we are across our Interwebs if only tingled with a little bit of fun.
