Thomas Edison’s Boxing Cats (1894), or Where the LOLCats All Began

in Film, Random, Technology | September 18th, 2012

I’m will­ing to bet a lot of some­one else’s mon­ey that there are thou­sands more lol­cat lovers than cat lovers in the world. Since I hap­pen to be unashamed­ly both, I was suck­ered by the lit­tle 1894 film above from Thomas Edison’s Black Maria stu­dios fea­tur­ing “Pro­fes­sor Welton’s Box­ing Cats.” Now, grant­ed, there is no dis­claimer telling us no ani­mals were harmed, but it looks to me like good clean cat-box­ing fun. As the Smith­son­ian page that post­ed this lit­tle gem declares, Edi­son is per­haps the “mogul who start­ed lol­cats.”

Edi­son is giv­en cred­it for invent­ing a lot of things, many of which he sim­ply appro­pri­at­ed, made his own, and mar­ket­ed heav­i­ly. In this way, he exem­pli­fies a par­tic­u­lar brand of Amer­i­can entre­pre­neur skilled not so much in mak­ing things as in patent­ing them. The so-called “Wiz­ard of Men­lo Park” patent­ed 1,093 inven­tions, among them his motion pic­ture cam­era, or “kine­to­graph.” But as the Library of Con­gress reports, it is like­ly that Edison’s awk­ward­ly-named assis­tant William Kennedy Lau­rie Dick­son did the actu­al work of turn­ing Edis­on’s con­cept (which he took from Ead­weard Muy­bridge) into a real­i­ty.

Com­plex­i­ties of due cred­it aside, we can at least thank Edi­son for man­ag­ing an effi­cient oper­a­tion and also, for bet­ter or worse, pio­neer­ing lit­i­ga­tion against his com­peti­tors (putting many of them out of busi­ness). His Black Maria Stu­dios amassed quite an archive of ear­ly “actu­al­i­ty” films and silent fic­tion­al films of the Nick­elodeon era, the most famous of which, The Great Train Rob­bery, you can watch below (with dubbed-in score).

The Library of Congress’s Edi­son page is an excel­lent resource for infor­ma­tion on the his­to­ry of film in gen­er­al and Edison’s con­tri­bu­tions in par­tic­u­lar, and it fea­tures dozens of his short films avail­able for down­load in Real­Me­dia, Quick Time, or as MPEGs.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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53 Years of Nuclear Testing in 14 Minutes: A Time Lapse Film by Japanese Artist Isao Hashimoto

in Art, History, Technology | September 17th, 2012

It’s strange what can make an impact. Some­times a mes­sage needs to be loud and over-the-top to come across, like punk rock or the films of Oliv­er Stone. In oth­er cas­es, cool and qui­et works much bet­ter.

Take the new time lapse map cre­at­ed by Japan­ese artist Isao Hashimo­to. It is beau­ti­ful in a sim­ple way and eerie as it doc­u­ments the 2,053 nuclear explo­sions that took place between 1945 and 1998.

It looks like a war room map of the world, black land­mass­es sur­round­ed by deep blue ocean. It starts out slow, in July of 1945, with a blue blip and an explo­sion sound in the Amer­i­can southwest—the Man­hat­tan Project’s “Trin­i­ty” test near Los Alam­os. Just one month lat­er come the explo­sions at Hiroshi­ma and Nagasa­ki.

From there the months click by—condensed down to seconds—on a dig­i­tal clock. Each nation that has explod­ed a nuclear bomb gets a blip and a flash­ing dot when they det­o­nate a weapon, with a run­ning tal­ly kept on the screen.

Eeri­est of all is that each nation gets its own elec­tron­ic sound pitch: low tones for the Unit­ed States, high­er for the Sovi­et Union—beeping to the metronome of the months tick­ing by.

What starts out slow picks up by 1960 or so, when all the cold neu­tral beeps and flash­es become over­whelm­ing.

If you’re like me, you had no idea just how many det­o­na­tions the Unit­ed States is respon­si­ble for (1,032—more than the rest of the coun­tries put togeth­er). The sequence ends with the Pak­istani nuclear tests of May 1998.

Hashimo­to worked for many years as a for­eign exchange deal­er but is now an art cura­tor. He says the piece express­es “the fear and fol­ly of nuclear weapons.”

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based free­lance writer. See more of her work at .

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

63 Haunt­ing Videos of U.S. Nuclear Tests Now Declas­si­fied and Put Online

Kurt Von­negut Gives a Ser­mon on the Fool­ish­ness of Nuclear Arms: It’s Time­ly Again (Cathe­dral of St. John the Divine, 1982)

Haunt­ing Unedit­ed Footage of the Bomb­ing of Nagasa­ki (1945)

How a Clean, Tidy Home Can Help You Sur­vive the Atom­ic Bomb: A Cold War Film from 1954

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Heat Mapping the Rise of Bruce Springsteen: How the Boss Went Viral in a Pre-Internet Era

in Google, Music, Technology | September 17th, 2012

A friend of mine and for­mer musi­cal col­lab­o­ra­tor was mar­ried this past week­end in Asbury Park, New Jer­sey, where Spring­steen got his start with his first album in 1973. This was deliberate—she’s  a die-hard Jer­sey girl and the biggest Spring­steen fan I’ve ever met. But while Spring­steen is firm­ly root­ed in his work­ing-class New Jer­sey, he is also a poet of Amer­i­cana writ large (Nebras­ka is my favorite record), and his songs are as much cel­e­bra­tions of his home state as they are eulo­gies of it, or rous­ing calls to hit the road and leave the Jerz behind. All that’s to say, Spring­steen is some­thing of a rock-and-roll geo­g­ra­ph­er, so he’s the per­fect sub­ject for the Map­brief project above which charts his career from folk trou­ba­dour to are­na-rock hit­mak­er and back again–from 1973 to the present–by show­ing the impact of each album’s tour on a map of the U.S. Here are some things to keep in mind as you watch the visu­al­iza­tion above:

    • each red dot is a per­for­mance (data cour­tesy of the Killing Floor data­base).
    • the inten­si­ty or “heat” gen­er­at­ed is a func­tion of the loca­tion of a show, the size of the venue, and inverse­ly cor­re­lat­ed with the over­all pop­u­la­tion with­in 40km of the con­cert loca­tion. So for instance, a sin­gle are­na show in New York City will gen­er­ate less heat than a sin­gle are­na show in Oma­ha, NE.
    • there is a taper­ing effect applied so return­ing to a par­tic­u­lar area with­in a few months will reflect a cumu­la­tive heat effect (**Click here for inter­ac­tive map ver­sion).

Using the geographer’s method­ol­o­gy of read­ing expan­sion dif­fu­sion and hier­ar­chi­cal dif­fu­sion, cre­ator Bri­an Tim­o­ny draws some inter­est­ing con­clu­sions about the nature of “going viral” in a pre-inter­net age, and about the con­tin­u­ing impor­tance of place, despite its osten­si­ble era­sure by the Inter­net. Tim­o­ny writes, “the Jer­sey Shore pro­vid­ed a unique, acces­si­ble sym­bol­ic res­o­nance to audi­ences that res­onates as a Place.  (In stark con­trast to the way a mil­lion bands from Brook­lyn today fail to con­vince the rest of us of the intrin­sic awe­some­ness of…Brooklyn.)”

It’s worth noth­ing that almost none of those “Brook­lyn” bands actu­al­ly come from Brook­lyn and can claim it in the way Spring­steen claims the Jer­sey Shore. That kind of anchor has always seemed to give him license to explore musi­cal forms and metaphors from the South and Mid­west in authen­tic and per­son­al ways. A coun­terex­am­ple, of course, is Bob Dylan, who seems to come from nowhere at all, but the wan­der­ing mys­tic min­strel also fig­ures into Timony’s scheme. He con­cludes by not­ing that the abil­i­ty of Spring­steen, Dylan, and Leonard Cohen to still com­mand the stage and defy the cult of youth in pop cul­ture exem­pli­fies “the wise-man/shaman/en­ter­tain­er who is best equipped to chan­nel both what the audi­ence wants to hear and what it needs to hear.” Not a strict­ly “geo­graph­i­cal” point, but it’s a hard one to argue with all the same.

via Metafil­ter

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bruce Spring­steen Sin­gin’ in the Rain in Italy, and How He Cre­ates Pow­er­ful Imag­i­nary Worlds

Bruce Springsteen’s Per­son­al Jour­ney Through Rock ‘n’ Roll (Slight­ly NSFW But Sim­ply Great)

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Pi in the Sky: The World’s Largest Ephemeral Art Installation over Beautiful San Francisco

in Art, Technology | September 13th, 2012

Yes­ter­day, on my way to lunch, I looked up and saw it — the world’s largest ephemer­al art instal­la­tion called “Pi in the Sky.” The instal­la­tion fea­tured planes fly­ing through the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area skies, using dot matrix print­er tech­nol­o­gy to write out the first 1,000 dig­its of the num­ber Pi. Pre­sent­ed as part of the 2012 ZERO1 Bien­ni­al, a fes­ti­val cel­e­brat­ing art and tech­nol­o­gy in Sil­i­con Val­ley, the Pi project was the brain­child of ISHKY, an eclec­tic col­lab­o­ra­tion of artists, pro­gram­mers and sci­en­tists look­ing to explore “the bound­aries of scale, pub­lic space, imper­ma­nence, and the rela­tion­ship between Earth and the phys­i­cal uni­verse.” You can learn more about the ini­tia­tive by watch­ing a video (below) from ISHKY’s Kick­starter cam­paign:

And here you can watch the art instal­la­tion in real­time, as we saw it yes­ter­day:

via Giz­mo­do

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What Do Satellites Have in Common with Falling Cats? Attitude Control

in Physics, Science, Technology | August 27th, 2012

Have you ever won­dered how the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope and oth­er satel­lites can be point­ed in any direc­tion at the will of sci­en­tists on the ground? Giv­en the ener­gy con­straints for satel­lites designed to stay in space for years, the tech­ni­cal chal­lenges are immense.

In this video from the “Smarter Every Day” YouTube series we learn a lit­tle about two clever meth­ods sci­en­tists use to con­trol the atti­tude, or ori­en­ta­tion, of satel­lites with very lit­tle ener­gy. The first method exploits the pow­er of the Earth­’s mag­net­ic field by using elec­tric cur­rent to selec­tive­ly acti­vate elec­tro­mag­nets and nudge the satel­lite in a desired direc­tion, rather like the nee­dle of a com­pass. The sec­ond and, in some ways, more fas­ci­nat­ing method takes its inspi­ra­tion from the amaz­ing­ly agile cat. It has long been known that cats can fall from any ini­tial ori­en­ta­tion and almost always land on their feet. They can reori­ent them­selves 180 degrees with­out vio­lat­ing the con­ser­va­tion of angu­lar momen­tum. They do it by adjust­ing their shape and thus rear­rang­ing the mass, and chang­ing the moment of iner­tia, with­in their bod­ies. Sci­en­tists employ a sim­i­lar tac­tic using mov­ing parts with­in satel­lites.

The host of the “Smarter Every Day” videos goes only by the name of “Des­tin,” and is report­ed­ly a mis­sile engi­neer at the U.S. Army’s Red­stone Arse­nal, near Huntsville Alaba­ma. Some view­ers will, like us, find the tone and sen­si­bil­i­ty of this video juve­nile and annoy­ing, with its overuse of the words “cool” and “awe­some” and with the gra­tu­itous cat-drop­ping scenes (note to future YouTube auteurs: con­sid­er using stock footage) but the sci­ence itself is, with­out a doubt, fas­ci­nat­ing.

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India’s Answer to M.I.T. Presents 268 Free Online Courses (in English)

in Online Courses, Technology | August 22nd, 2012

Dur­ing the 1940s, when India won its inde­pen­dence from Britain, the lead­ers of the new­ly-formed nation began imag­in­ing the Indi­an Insti­tutes of Tech­nol­o­gy, oth­er­wise known as the IITs. Much like MIT in the US, these schools would cul­ti­vate some of the world’s top sci­en­tists and engi­neers. And they’d make tech­nol­o­gy key to the future of Indi­a’s eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment.

Today, the IITs stand atop the Indi­an edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem and, like their peer insti­tu­tions in the US, they’re mak­ing a point of putting free cours­es on the web. Rather qui­et­ly, they’ve amassed some 268 cours­es, giv­ing any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion access to 10,000+ video lec­tures. As you might expect, the course line­up skews heav­i­ly toward sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, the stuff that con­tributes to Indi­a’s indus­tri­al base — Intro­duc­tion to Basic Elec­tron­ics, High Per­for­mance Com­put­er Archi­tec­ture, Space Flight Mechan­ics, Steel Mak­ing, and all of the rest. But they’ve also added a few con­tem­pla­tive cours­es to the mix, cours­es like Con­tem­po­rary Lit­er­a­ture, Quan­tum Physics, the His­to­ry of Eco­nom­ic The­o­ry, and Game The­o­ry and Eco­nom­ics.

You can start rum­mag­ing through the com­plete list of IIT cours­es on YouTube here, or you can access them via this IIT web­site, which gives you the abil­i­ty to down­load videos straight to your com­put­er. Nat­u­ral­ly we’ve added many essen­tial IIT cours­es to our list of Free Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties — Har­vard, Yale, Stan­ford, MIT, UC Berke­ley, Oxford, the list goes on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yale Intro­duces Anoth­er Sev­en Free Online Cours­es, Bring­ing Total to 42

Har­vard Presents Free Cours­es with the Open Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive

MIT Intro­duces Com­plete Cours­es to Open­Course­Ware Project

 

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One Trillion Frames Per Second: The Science of Capturing Light in Motion

in Photography, Technology, TED Talks | August 17th, 2012

Ramesh Raskar joined the MIT Media Lab in 2008, where he heads up the Lab’s Cam­era Cul­ture research group. For some time, the researcher has drawn inspi­ra­tion from anoth­er MIT pro­fes­sor, Harold Edger­ton, a pio­neer of stop-action pho­tog­ra­phy, who famous­ly pho­tographed a bul­let mov­ing through an apple in 1964. Decades lat­er, Raskar and his MIT crew have tak­en pho­tog­ra­phy to a new lev­el, cre­at­ing imag­ing hard­ware and soft­ware that can cap­ture light as it moves. They can visu­al­ize pic­tures as if they were record­ed at a rate of one tril­lion frames per sec­ond. His cut­ting edge work in fem­to-pho­tog­ra­phy is all on dis­play above.

If you want to get deep­er into Raskar’s world, you can check out his free MIT course, Com­pu­ta­tion­al Cam­era and Pho­tog­ra­phy, which is locat­ed in the Com­put­er Science/Artificial Intel­li­gence sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es.

via Roger Ebert

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Kids (and Less Savvy Marketers) Imagine the Internet in 1995

in Business, Technology | August 17th, 2012

In 1995, a group of 5th grade kids in Hele­na, Mon­tana got togeth­er and made a PSA for the Inter­net (above). And, man, were they hip, with their tech­no music and their “by the time I’m in col­lege, the inter­net will be your tele­phone, tele­vi­sion, and work­place.” In the annals of overblown pre­dic­tions and tech­no­log­i­cal hubris, mid-nineties inter­net-fever will go down as the ulti­mate excep­tion. These kids even antic­i­pat­ed the cute cat mania that would infect the inter­net for­ev­er. Of course, none of them could have fore­seen the Twit­ter rev­o­lu­tion, the Face­book decline, rub­bable gifs, or spher­i­cal panoram­ic views of Mars, but that’s just quib­bling.

It real­ly is aston­ish­ing to look back a mere sev­en­teen years at what a prim­i­tive tech­nol­o­gy the inter­net was. Of course it wasn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly evi­dent at the time that the online world would indeed become our “tele­phone, tele­vi­sion, and work­place,” and some naysay­ers, like astronomer and hack­er-catch­er Clif­ford Stoll, called BS on the hype. In a 1995 Newsweek arti­cle titled “The Inter­net? Bah!,” Stoll wrote:

The truth is no online data­base will replace your dai­ly news­pa­per, no CD-ROM can take the place of a com­pe­tent teacher and no com­put­er net­work will change the way gov­ern­ment works.

In 2010, Stoll was forced to retract, com­ment­ing on Boing Boing cov­er­age of his sour­puss skep­ti­cism with:

“Of my many mis­takes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as pub­lic as my 1995 howler.

But who could blame him? This was the age of such clunky Web ser­vices as AOL, which promis­es much in a 95 ad below, but ulti­mate­ly deliv­ered lit­tle.

Not all web adver­tis­ing in 1995 looks so dat­ed and sil­ly. AOL’s com­peti­tor Prodi­gy, which fared even worse, cer­tain­ly had a bet­ter ad agency. Their 95 ad below, fea­tur­ing Bar­ry White, is a romp.

All of this reflec­tion war­rants more wis­dom from a chas­tened Clif­ford Stoll, who in a 2006 TED talk says: “If you real­ly want to know about the future, don’t ask a tech­nol­o­gist, a sci­en­tist, a physi­cist. No! Don’t ask some­body who’s writ­ing code. No, if you want to know what society’s going to be like in 20 years, ask a kinder­garten teacher.”

via Pre­fix

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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