Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance — Godfrey Reggio directed the 1982 film, and Philip Glass composed the music. Later, Reggio said that the film is wide open to interpretation, that “the viewer can take for herself what the film means.” “For some people it’s an environmental film, for some people it’s an ode to technology, for some people it’s a piece of shit, for other people it moves them deeply.” And for Wyatt Hodgson, it’s a film worth watching in a compressed, five-minute format, maybe because (as one viewer suggested) it highlights “one of the main dimensions of the film: the breakneck speed of our (crazy) world.”
Hodgson’s version strips out Glass’ original soundtrack, replacing it with music by the Art of Noise. But some crafty individual found a way to reproduce Glass’ composition at 1552% speed. You can listen below.
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It starts with Leonardo da Vinci’s famous sketches of flying machines, then moves to the first hot air balloon launched by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, the gliders created by Sir George Cayley (1804), and the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. These great moments and others all get covered in this Animated History of Aviation, an elegant little film produced by Utah Valley University, a college with a large aviation program of its own. We’ll add it to our collection of Great Science Videos.
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On February 18, 1994, Charles Bukowski had a fax machine installed in his home and immediately sent his first Fax poem to his publisher:
oh, forgive me For Whom the Bell Tolls,
oh, forgive me Man who walked on water,
oh, forgive me little old woman who lived in a shoe,
oh, forgive me the mountain that roared at midnight,
oh, forgive me the dumb sounds of night and day and death,
oh, forgive me the death of the last beautiful panther,
oh, forgive me all the sunken ships and defeated armies,
this is my first FAX POEM.
It’s too late:
I have been
smitten.
Alas this was also Bukowski’s last poem. Just 18 days after Bukowski embraced technology, the poet (once famously called the “laureate of American lowlife” by Pico Iyer) died of leukemia in California. He was 73 years old. According to John Martin at Black Sparrow Press, the Fax poem has never been published or collected in a book. Booktryst has a whole lot more on the story, and we have the singer/songwriter Tom Waits reading Charles Bukowski’s poem, The Laughing Heart. You can also listen to three other Bukowski poems (in audio) here on YouTube:
Before Jim Henson joined Sesame Street in 1969, the great puppeteer took on various projects during the 60s, sometimes creating experimental films (for example, the Oscar-nominated short Time Piece), other times producing primers on puppet making, and then pursuing the occasional commercial project — like the one just uncovered by AT&T.
Back in 1963, Henson was asked to create a short film for a Bell Data Communications Seminar held in Chicago. The conference organizers sent a three-page memo to Henson outlining the main themes of the conference — one being the strange and sometimes fraught relationship between man and machine. Henson’s film only runs three minutes, but it gets the message across … and then some.
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Some of the big websites are going black today to protest SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, that has been winding its way through Congress. We’re going to handle things in our own way — by illuminating the matter with a little intelligent media.
Backed by the Motion Picture Association of America, SOPA is designed to debilitate and effectively shut down foreign-based websites that sell pirated movies, music and other goods. That all sounds fine on the face of things. But the legislation, if enacted, would carry with it a series of unexpected consequences that could change the internet as we know it. Among other things, the law could be used to shut down American sites that unwittingly host or link to illegal content — and without giving the sites due process, a real day in court. Big sites like YouTube and Twitter could fall under pressure, and so could countless small sites. Needless to say, that could have a serious chilling effect on the openness of the web and free speech.
To give a quick example: It could conceivably be the case that Stanford might object to my featuring their video above, file a claim, and shut the site down without giving me notice and an opportunity to remove the material (as exists under current law). It’s not likely. But it is possible, and the risk increases with every post we write. If this law passes, the amount of material we could truly safely cover would become ludicrously small, so much so that it wouldn’t be worth running the site and using the web as an educational medium.
The Obama administration has come out against SOPA and PIPA, sidelining the legislation for now. But you can almost guarantee that revisions will be made, and the bills will return soon. So, while other sites go black, we’re going to do what we do best. We’re featuring video of an event held in December by the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (SCIS). What’s Wrong with SOPA brings together a series of informed opponents to SOPA, including Stanford law professors and business leaders within Silicon Valley. (Find their bios below the jump.) Some of the most incisive comments are made by Fred von Lohmann, a Google lawyer, starting at the 19:10 mark.
Note: If you’re looking to understand the debate from the perspective of copyright holders, then we’d recommend you spend time watching, Follow the Money: Who Profits from Piracy?, a video that tracks the theft of one movie, making it a microcosm of a larger problem.
Think of it as the ultimate slow-motion movie camera. Researchers at M.I.T. have developed an imaging system so fast it can trace the motion of pulses of light as they travel through liquids and solids. To put it into perspective, writes John Markoff in The New York Times, “If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years.”
We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize the propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionths of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second. Direct recording of reflected or scattered light at such a frame rate with sufficient brightness is nearly impossible. We use an indirect ‘stroboscopic’ method that records millions of repeated measurements by careful scanning in time and viewpoints. Then we rearrange the data to create a ‘movie’ of a nanosecond long event.
You can learn more by watching the video above by Melanie Gonick of the M.I.T. News Office, or by visiting the project website.
French photographer Tanguy Louvigny created this time-lapse film of bucolic Normandy and Brittany using High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging techniques.
From forest floor to setting sun, Louvigny’s shots render fine detail across an extremely wide range of luminosity. To achieve this he used the auto-bracketing feature of his Canon EOS 400D and 60D cameras to create three different exposures for each frame in the film. (At 30 frames per second, that’s 90 exposures for each second of screen time.) Louvigny then merged each set of three exposures into one image using Photomatrix Pro 4.0 software, selectively tone mapping each sequence to hold detail in some areas while allowing others to go dark.
To create the moving-camera effects, Louvigny designed and built his own robotic three-axis motion system using Tetrix motors and a LEGO Mindstorms control system, which he programmed in ROBOTC language. This allowed him to automate the tortoise-like dolly, pan and tilt movements. Louvigny edited the digital film in Adobe Premiere and After Effects software. To top it off he composed his own music on a Roland MC-808 groovebox. For more information, go to the photographer’s website and Vimeo page.
The Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, is a remarkable structure. Designed by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos of the Dutch firm UN Studio, the building received rave reviews when it opened in May of 2006. Influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York, the building was described as “jet-age baroque” by The Guardian architecture critic Jonathan Glancey. “It twists and turns with breathtaking complexity,” Glancey wrote in 2006, “clever as a conjuring trick.”
The architects needed a bit of magic to bring the museum’s open plan into compliance with fire codes. Like in the Guggenheim, the interior is one continuously unfolding space that spirals around a central atrium. As a consequence there could be no fire doors to contain smoke if a blaze broke out in one section of the building. To solve the problem, UN Studio hired the engineering firm Imtech to design a system that would draw smoke away from all areas of the museum, allowing people to escape.
The result is the world’s largest man-made air vortex, a 112-foot-high tornado that automatically activates in the event of a fire, drawing smoke into the center of the atrium and moving it upward through an axial fan in the ceiling. An array of 144 outlets in the surrounding walls emit powerful jets of air to generate a central region of low pressure, just like in a real tornado. Imtech engineers perfected the design using computational fluid dynamic (CDF) simulations and laboratory models. The firm has created similar systems for airports in several German cities, including Düsseldorf and Hamburg. You can watch the tornado at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in action above.
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