Eric Whitacre is one of the most well known composers of our time, much of his work already standard repertoire (…)
Brigham Young University has one of the largest choral programs in the US with around 500 members. At the top of the program are the BYU singers, with only 40 voices (…)
(comic)
(video)
(animation)
This Christmas brings word of a virgin birth, not to mention baby Jesus. At Chester Zoo in England a female Komodo Dragon has laid two fertile eggs, despite never having mated.
I’ve been listening to John Cage, Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, David Maslanka and Phillip Glass in the same playlist — all free, and Counterstream hasn’t even officially launched yet. Keep your ears on this one.
“It’s like examining the sound wave of a symphony. It’s fantastically complicated, but if you look at a larger scale, there are some patterns—a periodic beat there, and repeated phrases. And you realize there might be levels higher up in the complexity that might be simple, that organize the entire piece. There’s something big out there that’s regulating the chemistry of life, and that’s where we’re headed.”
I’m sure its just biological instinct — being attracted to something that resembles the familiar cradle of Mother Earth — but Saturn’s Titan looks right fetching in the above shot released last week from the Cassini spacecraft, composite from several images taken during flybys on 9 and 25 October. This image spans the visual and infrared spectrum, so there’s more surface detail here than you’d see with your eyes at the distance simulated.
Titan is the most Earth-like body in our solar system as both occupy “sweet spots”, balancing mass and distance from the Sun. Titan’s geological features resemble ours with hills, valleys, river networks and mile-high mountain ranges, but its temperature is far colder, averaging on the surface about -290° F (94° K).
You can think of Titan as like the Earth in deep freeze.
Rosaly Lopes, JPL
But enough romanticizing …
LINK/IMAGE [composite w/ more info and higher resolutions]
ARTICLE ["Mile-High Mountains Found (...)"]
VIDEO [Huygens probe decent to Titan's surface]
mp3 5566 boyfriend56 mp3 565mp3 5606 worldsteps 5678 mp3woohoo mp3 5678sestacion mp3 5adiscography deftones 5cds unreleased mp3mp3 death 5finger punch Map
Robert Lang’s oragami crease patterns are works of art in themselves.
Another popular video making its way around the internet. Far be it for me to stand in the way. Jérôme is a French mime artist.
“We hope we will be able to convince other people besides us to present their original materials online as well.”
The Freesound Project — fairly well-known in the Creative Commons community — is a collaborative database of sounds contributed by users under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. Freesound deals only in sounds — for instance the most popular downloads at the moment include recordings of a heart beat and a thunder storm. They’re paired up with ccMixter, another Creative Commons audio site that focuses more on music samples and mixes.
A ways back Freesound put out an open invitation to a mass recording in Caixa Forum, Barcelona. It’s not clear how many people showed up but it sounds like a fairly large crowd, and they got some interesting recordings of things like mass kissing, mass orgasm-ing, and mass playing-with-cellphones. It’s a little creepy at first listening to a room full of sentient monkeys making a lot of seemingly intelligent noise, but it gets even better when these samples are remixed. A “Remix the People” contest was launched back in November — here’s a sample:
AUDIO [Remix the People, 1st entry]
The competition ends 31 December and word is spreading, so hopefully it will pick up; I’ll be following it to see what happens. Either way check out the results from the mass recording — all 450 MBs of it — at Freesound. More contest info and submissions in the forum:
AUDIO [mass recording results]
LINK/AUDIO [Freesound Forum, Remix the People thread]
australia wav mp3 advance fairpiche mp3 dolte aageaah tcha mp3mp3 aahista aahistaaai chand mp3aaika mp3 dajibamp3 se mujh aainasau mp3 ke aaine Map
The Beijing National Aquatics Centre (the “Water Cube”), will host the aquatic events at the 2008 Summer Olympics. Last week the facility opened to the media.
“How do you react when you encounter an early compositional gift so extraordinary that you can’t even begin to comprehend it?”
Andy Wilson’s work in human-computer interaction is the stuff dreams are made of.
(image, desktops)
“This ‘hotel’ proudly bills itself as ‘unfriendly, unheated, uncomfortable and open all year round’. But that’s the point.”
Think you have a brilliant idea about how sunlight relates to bear reproduction relates to milk prices? Me too. Put your data where your mouth is.
“For more than a decade, Gregory Colbert has traveled the world and collaborated with 40+ species to create “Ashes and Snow,” the ground-breaking exhibition of more than 100 photographs and three films (…) His remarkable sepia-toned images explore the relationship between people and animals, glimpsing a world in which humans live in profound harmony with the rest of the animal kingdom.”
I guess I don’t watch enough TV, but I had no idea Colbert was doing this animated series on his show. Four episodes so far.
Demetri Martin contributes to a cool ad campaign for Windows Vista. The best part is him talking on the main page, and the ‘webisodes’ are OK too. Only half-done, wraps up in January.
I’m knee-deep in semester finals so posting is light, and for many of you wearing these chains with me, browsing the internet is light as well. Here are some quotes I came across today; more at Digital Karma.
(video)
“Susan’s creative clouds begin to lift, and Arin’s dry spell has ended. Unfortunately, a new world of more complicated problems is discovered, and they are forced to deal with intimacy as they meld together and create a monster.”