(Insert quarter into your computer to enlarge the image above. If not thrilled and delighted beyond words, your quarter will be returned.)
After the MPAA orders its minions in the Justice Dept. to shut down Boing Boing, I will continue to earn a living with the sensational new Television Bank. (Via The Big Blog of Kids' Comics, thanks Ruben!)
Our friends at Adafruit Industries just announced FLORA, a new wearable electronics development platform.
For the last few years Ladyada has been thinking about everything she wanted in a wearable electronics platform for Adafruit’s community of makers, hackers, crafters, artists, designers and engineers. After months of planning, designing and working with partners around the world for the best materials and accessories, we can share what we’re up to. The hardware is now in the hands of our staff and testers!
Announcing the FLORA, Adafruit’s wearable electronics platform and accessories
This 2009 image captures the scene on a foggy night in Odessa, Ukraine, when a digital billboard crashed and displayed a floating error warning in the night sky.
Windows Error Box Floating in the Air (5 pics)
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
This magnificent thing is Agustina Woodgate's "No Rain No Rainbows," a rug made from skinned teddybears. There are many more. They are equally wondrous.
augustina woodgate, an artist originally from buenos aires and now based in miami, has created 'skin rugs', a collection of hand-sewn rugs
made from the skin of donated stuffed animals. the body of each carpet is modeled after that of an authentic bear skin rug but where
the series deviates from the standard form is in each tapestry having been formed from the fur several plush animal toys rather than that of a live animal.
woodgate sews each of the toys together in order to create giant floor-coverings with a varied color palate and semi-symmetrical patterning. her collection
evokes a spiritual or nostalgic reaction in the viewer as they contemplate their childhood, when the textures of the artist's tapestry series were representative
of comfort and security.
'no rain no rainbows' by agustina woodgate, 2011
(via Neatorama)
This music -- which sounds like a moody piano soundtrack for a existentialist movie about a rainy day -- is made by slicing a tree in cross-section, sticking it on a turntable, and dropping a tone-arm with a PlayStation Eye Camera in the head, and processing its output through Ableton Live. It's called Years, and it was created by Bartholomäus Traubeck.
...And what's amazing is the process. Joe Sabia shares this YouTube video featuring Chilean artist Fabian Gaete Maureira of arte100cia (Arte Sciencia, or "Art Science") that's making the internet rounds today. Via Reddit, here's the artist's blog, and his Flickr stream with finished works. Dude is like Bob Ross on crack. The one below looks like it could be a cover for a horse_ebook!
Sebastian Schmieg of the Netherlands created this video by feeding a transparent image to Google Image Search and asking it to find similar images, and then taking the top result and feeding it back into the similarity algorithm, 2951 times. It's a wonderful look at an evolutionary process.
Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG, #1
(via Kottke)
These 1860s vintage photos of children posing with their toys (from the collection of Musee McCord Museum) hints at a mid-19th century in which children were a lot more serious about everything.
I reflected today on the fact that my four-year-old makes a "click" sound when she's playing with a toy camera because that's the MP3 that my phone plays when I take her picture. A number of people pointed out that this is an example of a skeuomorph, "a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original." The Wikipedia entry on the subject's fascinating in the extreme:
* Decorative stone features of Greek temples such as mutules, guttae, and modillions that are derived from true structural/functional features of the early wooden temples
*
Ornamental pylons framing modern bridges, such as the twin 89 metre pylons at each end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. They do not support anything, and are there only to frame the structure itself and make it look more like a traditional bridge.
*
An early pottery butter churn, at the Jaffa Museum, shaped rather like an American football, imitating the shape of its predecessors, which were made of hide.
*
Injection-molded plastic sandals that replicate woven strips of leather
*
Artificial film grain added to digitally-shot movies to give a softer, more expensive effect and the expected "shimmer" of the grain pattern between successive frames
*
Various spoke patterns in automobile hubcaps and wheels leftover from carriage wheel construction
(Image: Chevy Volt Skeuomorph, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from tylerbell's photostream)
