Ryan Woodward has worked on the art direction of many big name Hollywood films – Ironman 2, Spiderman 2 & 3, The Iron Giant, the list goes on. But he had an idea for a short animated film, a love story expressed through dance, and it led to a fruitful collaboration with dance choreographer Kori Wakamatsu. This short, behind-the-scenes film documents their artistic collaboration, revealing everything that went into making Thought of You, the 2D animated film featured above.
Beatles Box Sale: Just a heads up. We noticed that Amazon.com has deeply discounted the remastered Beatles Box Sets. The Stereo Box Set now goes for $126.32 for 14 discs, and the Mono Box Set runs $129.99 for 12 discs. Respectively, that’s 51% and 57% off list price, and it’s right in time for the holiday season…
This morning, Google officially opened up the new Google eBookstore, which gives consumers access to three million ebooks, including many free classics. Taking a page out of Amazon’s playbook, Google now lets you purchase books at competitive ebook prices and read them across multiple platforms – meaning you can start reading a novel on your computer’s web browser, then seamlessly switch to the iPad, Kindle, or smartphone. And the content will stay in sync, all in the cloud. (Get instructions and apps here.) Another plus: you’re not forced to buy books from just Google. The new bookstore is open to independent booksellers and retail partners, which gives these smaller players a chance to play (and perhaps even thrive) in the ebook market. You can get more information on the new bookstore on the Google Books blog, and don’t miss our Free eBooks collection, which comes packed with many classics.
Note: the Google eBookstore is currently limited to the US market.
Last year, Dave Brubeck’s jazz standard, Take Five, turned 50 years old. (Watch his 1961 performance above.) And, today, the artist celebrates his 90th birthday. Throughout his 80s, Brubeck continued to perform across the US (we have him playing Take Five at the Montreal Jazz Festival just last year) and onward he plans to go — although his touring was recently halted by pacemaker surgery. To commemorate his birthday, Turner Classic Movies will premiere tonight In His Own Sweet Way, a documentary revisiting Brubeck’s life and music. And NPR’s Fresh Air has re-aired a 1999 interview where (in addition to his music) Brubeck talks about his early days on a California cattle ranch, and his first love: rodeo roping. The conversation runs 34 minutes. You can listen right here.
Hans Rosling, a professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, focuses on ‘dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world’ (as his TED bio well notes). And he has established a reputation for presenting data in extremely imaginative ways. Just watch the video above, an outtake from the BBC show “The Joy of Stats”). In four minutes, Rosling visually traces the health of 200 countries over 200 years, using 120,000 data points, and we end up with a little reason for optimism. Great stuff… Thanks to @Sheerly for flagging this.
Computer scientists at UNC-Chapel Hill and colleagues at the Swiss university, ETH-Zurich, have created an algorithm that searches through millions of photos on Flickr, then uses them to build a 3D model of landmarks and geographical locations. Case in point, the video above. According to The Daily Tar Heel, “researchers demonstrated the technique by using 3 million images of Rome to reconstruct the city’s primary landmarks. A single PC processed the images in less than 24 hours. Landmarks in Berlin were reconstructed in the same manner.” Not bad for a day’s work…
Trying to make heads or tails of WikiLeaks, which just released 250,000 US diplomatic cables this week? Then you may want to spend some time with one article and one video. First, The New Yorker published this summer an extensive profile of Julian Assange, the driving force behind WikiLeaks. A key passage explaining Assange’s world view appears below, and you can get the full profile right here. Next up, we have Chris Anderson, the head of TED, in conversation Assange. The interview, running 20 minutes, tells you essentially “Why the World Needs WikiLeaks.” And then why not add to the list Forbes’ lengthy interview with Assange, published earlier this week. (Thanks Avi for that.)
He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.
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