Archive for December, 2010
The Anti-Stress Pen – as good as a slinky?
Leave it to a university student to come up with a great stress reducer. Industrial Design PhD student Miguel Bruns Alonso from Delft University in the Netherlands has created the “anti-stress pen” which, he says, can identify a [...]
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Original post by Debra Atlas
No commentsExtraordinary Rendition: Assange & Extradition Chic
Now, this is what I call extraordinary rendition.
We’ve seen—and loved—Cablegate Comix, A Leaky World, and other examples of Wikileaks cultural hacks. Contrast those knowing efforts with this bizarre Newsweek slideshow, an un-ironic clusterfuck of crisscrossing, simulacrum-generating signifiers. We see Julian feeding the chickens, chucking organic firewood, and tucking into a scrumptious holiday feast at Ellingham Hall, whilst modeling a tasteful selection of tweeds and wellingtons—as Martha Stewart could have told him, wellies are great for hiding those unsightly electronic monitoring cuffs.
The caption for the above photo reads as follows: “After a long day of work on the farm, Assange kicks off his shoes and strikes a lordly pose. He’s due back in court on Jan. 11 for his pretrial hearing on extradition.” We suggest an alternative: Ceci n’est pas un zeitgeist!
Can you imagine a fashion-plate treatment of the plight of Bradley Manning? No. You. Can’t.
[via the indispensable Tim Maly]
Original post by Matthew Battles
No commentsLooking Up For the New Year
This photograph shows a Russian scientific-imperial entourage observing a solar eclipse on January 1, 1907, from Uzbekistan’s Tian-Shan mountains on the Golodnaia Steppe. It’s one of the incredible color photographs made by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer to the Czar, in the last years of the Russian Empire. Prokudin-Gorskii made his images by combining three black-and-white shots taken with red, green, and blue filters; the resulting transparencies were viewed in projection, using a “magic lantern” device that superimposed the color-filtered images on a screen. (This image is a digital color composite made for the Library of Congress by Blaise Agüera y Arcas in 2004.)
The party has gathered around a pair of telescopes to view the eclipse; they’re standing in front of a yurt, the classic portable dwelling of the Eurasian steppe. The colorful blanket draped on the yurt looks uncannily like a color-correction card. It doesn’t show up in Prokudin-Gorskii’s other photographs, though; I wonder if he placed it there to help color-correct an otherwise monochromatic scene; perhaps it was on hand to help discriminate the colors in solar flares made visible by the eclipse. Or perhaps the people of the Golodnaia steppe made blankets that happened to look like TV test patterns.
Regardless, the scene is a clash of contrasting nature and technology. The photographic process that recorded it was both a harbinger of twentieth-century imaging and a dead end—color photography would emerge not as an optical but a chemical process, itself now being superseded by digital means. The telescopes are a Galilean technology, improved but little changed since the seventeenth century. The yurt is a technology that stretches back to prehistory; for all its primitiveness, it seems beyond innovation and obsolescence in some intangible way.
Socially, too, the people in the photograph stood on the brink of change; the relations of feudal and imperial patronage that knit this scene together would soon be eclipsed by a transit of political innovation as dubious as it was deadly.
The eclipse Prokudin-Gorskii and colleagues had gathered to observe took place on the first day of the new year—reckoned in the Julian calendar, which was two weeks “behind” the Gregorian calendar observed in the West. Russia switched to the Gregorian calendar after the October revolution in 1917; one of the first sacrifices of the new Soviet people was a temporal one, sublimating two weeks of their lives into history for the sake of progress.
Of course, such niggling differences in calculation have no impact on orbital declination or lunar transits of the sun. From a sufficient distance—say, 31 million miles away—the Earth, its moon, and their orbital habits appear as quaint and timeless as yurts on the steppe.
Like the yurts, of course, these things too will one day be swept away. But on a more comprehensible time scale, we mark the passing of 2010, and wonder—humbly, hopefully, guardedly—what changes 2011 will bring.
Original post by Matthew Battles
No commentsSkype video calls use around 3.4MB per minute over 3G
We’ve kept you informed about Skype’s video calling on the iPhone this week, and there’s still more to know. Yes, it is available on the iPhone, and yes it works over 3G. The question, however, [...]
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Original post by Scott
No commentsMoto GP Helmet Sound System is an expensive iPod dock
While the phrase “there’s an app for that” gets tossed around a lot, I think there’s one that applies to iPods (iPhones, etc) even better. “There’s an accessory for that.” Seriously, I can’t think of [...]
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Original post by Scott
No commentsLumi Mask wakes you up with light
Sometimes I consider waking up to be the worst part of the day. It depends on how much sleep I’ve had, really. Regardless, that annoying buzzer on my alarm clock is enough to make anyone [...]
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Original post by Scott
No commentsKeyboard Key Magnets bring geekery to your fridge
We all love magnets for the fridge, each one has a story of its own, and shows a bit of a personÂ’s character. These fun Keyboard Key Magnets will help to remind you are the [...]
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Original post by Scott
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