Interesting use of the LCD.
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Otomata
Created by Batuhan Bozkurt, Otomata is a cellular automata music sequencer.
The sequencer consists of a two dimensional grid. Each row and column correspond to a musical note, with the first row and first column representing the same note, the and so forth. By clicking on cell, the user places a cursor at that location which travels in one of the four directions. When the cursor hits the end of the row or column, the associated musical note plays, and the cursor reverses direction. Cursors can also change direction if they collide with each other.I made two songs Otomata. The above pictured song is boring but symmetric. I like a later song I made more because it features a reoccurring motif while the cellular automata “improvises” over the top.
Otomata reminds me two other projects. The grid of moving squares reminds me of a Monome. I love the abstractness of the Monome interface, but I have no way to really justify purchasing one of these, but they look awesome.
The other thing Otomata recalls is Stephan Wolfram’s A New Kind of Music. (This “new kind of music” is apparently crappy 1980s MIDI, but I digress.) As you might have guessed, Stevie set his cellular automata rules up trigger MIDI events, giving equally predictable atrocious results.
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Big Man Japan
Categories: animation / interactive / film
I recently watched “Big Man Japan“, the Japanese mockumentary about a Japanese superhero that grows to immense proportions when shocked with electricity. He’s the sixth generation Japanese Apache Chief. The film follows the the big man in his normal life. We see his crappy house. (He can’t hold a normal job, he’s always on call for a monster attack.) We see him deal with his estranged wife and his disinterested daughter. We watch him negotiate with his agent on corporate sponsorship deals; and catch reactions to his battles from person on the street interviews.
Throughout the entire film is the undercurrent of lost glory. The big man’s grandfather, “Number Four,” protected Japan during the 40s. There were shinto ceremonies prior embiggening, and much more pomp and circumstance, but now – like the current big man himself – they are in considerably less glorious.
The film starts out very slow, but once it picks up after the first fight, it starts to move at a nice pace, and gets progressively funnier. It’s netflix streamable, so there’s no reason why shouldn’t watch it now. DO IT NOW!
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Dennis the Menace
Categories: illustration
Dennis the Menace is 60 years old. Both of them. By a twist of fate, two men on opposite sides of the Atlantic both had an idea for a young boy named Dennis and his dog getting in trouble with adults.
I had no idea that there was a British Dennis the Menace until I read the BBC article.
Just looking at the characters, you get two very different impressions of the them. The American smiling while riding his dog Ruff. He looks happy. Sure, he’s “Dennis the Menace,” but you get the (correct) impression that while he may cause more than his fair share of problems, it’s because he’s too naive, ambitious, clumsy for his ideas. He doesn’t want to cause problems, they’re just unfortunate and unforeseen (to him) side effects.
The British Dennis is also smiling, as is his dog Gnasher, but it’s unsettling. He looks like the kind of kid that would torture rats with hacksaw, and pull the wings of flies, before he feeds them to his dog in preparation for a fight. It’s not just this picture, it’s almost all of them. Of course, there’s no episode where the British Dennis mortally wounds a stray cat with an M80, but even watching an episode of the recent cartoon, left me with the impression that Dennis would eventually graduate to yob, and then later to full fledged football hooligan.
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A Max Bialystock Production
Tags: a/b, benedictcumberbatch, dannyboyle, frankenstein, jonnyleemiller, mitchellandwebb, theater, videoExhibit A
Danny Boyle has decided that Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller will share the roles of Dr. Frankenstein and the monster, switching roles every night of the his stage production of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
Exhibit B
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It’s All Just Bytes
Categories: techIñigo Quilez has more code-fu than you. In the video above, he creates a an eyecandy demo using Photoshop.
It’s a simple idea. He simple creates a 9 by 9 image, and places carefully chosen pixel values to write the assembly. The “magic” is that he saves the file as raw data, and then renames it as a .com file for execution in a DOS shell. Since the file is read as a raw stream of bytes, using Photoshop in this way, isn’t any different from using a hex editor. In fact, back in The Day™ (i.e. 1992-1994) PC World would recommend using write.exe to edit different DLLs in Windows 3.1 in order to create custom menus in file manager and such. The only catch was to avoid memory alignment problems by keeping the edited string the same length as the original.
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Head-Coupled Perspective
Categories: techTags: augmentedreality, grenobleinformaticslab, jeremiefrancone, laurencenigay, tangiblecomputing, userinterfaces, video
Jeremie Francone and his advisor Laurence Nigay from the Engineering Human-Computer Interaction group at Grenoble Informatics Laboratory in Saint Martin d’Hères, France have created a demo that incorporates head tracking along with the gyroscope in the iPad and iPhone to implemented a 3D view without the annoying glasses.
Watching the video (attached below) shows that the effect is very impressive, especially with theholodeckesque background. While I’m sure this technology took quite a bit of work to develop, this is the type of thing that I’d hope would be converted into a simple widget for other visualization apps to take advantage of.
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“Add to Wishlist” Indeed
HMS Ark Royal – former flag ship of the Royal Navy, veteran of Bosnia and both Iraqs – is available for purchase. All offers considered! Bids and plans for the boat are required to be submitted in writing.
The last aircraft carrier that made big news when sold was the Varyag. Unfinished, and rusting for a few years, the Russians sold it to a Chinese real estate mogul who said he wanted to turn it into a casino in Macau. Instead, it got towed to Dalian, a new paint job, a new name, the Shi Lang.
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If Your Child Reads Only One Book…
Categories: otherThere are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.