Category: Playful or Cool

Cheddarvision.tv

Watch cheddar age at Cheddarvision.tv. You may not think this would be exciting, but apparently 1,391,872 people have viewed this page (as of today). The success of this webcam focused on a West Country cheddar that is being aged is partly due to stories like this one that appeared in today’s Globe and Mail, Cheesy programming? You bet (Philip Jackman, June 1, 2007). You can also see a time-lapse of the first three months of the aging on YouTube – Cheddarvision.tv. What an interesting example of viral marketing with humour.

Thanks to Alex for this.

bastwood.com: Aphex Face and transcoding

Image of Aphex Demonbastwood.com has a good page on images found in sound starting with the demon face in Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker”. It turns out the demon is really an inverted version of the Twin himself. The site goes on to discuss how to find such images and how to create sound from images using common software.

There are some uses for image/video sonnification tools other than putting surprises in tunes. See the The vOICE synthetic vision software site which sells systems for the visually impaired.

Thanks to Alex for the link.

Hairy Messaging

Screen ShotHairy Mail is a the most unusual messaging environment I’ve encountered. Your write a message and it spreads Sodium Hydroxide (found in hair removal and cigarettes) over a hairy back in the shape of your message. If you press OK it removes the hair from the back.

So, what’s the point? Well it’s part of a site thetruth.com which promotes an anti-smoking message. The point is that Sodium Hydroxide is found in cigarettes, which can’t be good. The Hairy-Mail Flash toy sends your message as an e-mail.

UK Entrances to Hell

Image of Entrance to Hell
The catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell is a collection of images of strange dark entrances (usually boarded up.) There is now a Flickr group too. Remember the safety rules:

Rule 1: It may be an obvious thing to say but NEVER try to go inside an entrance to Hell.
Rule 2: Always approach an entrance on your stomach.
Rule 3: Don’t shout at the devil (not even with good news).
Rule 4: Wear rubber gloves for 3 or 4 days after your visit.

This site came up when I googled “go to hell”.

Academic conference to study James Bond

An Academic conference to study James Bond – just what we need to unpack this problematic emblem of masculinity. According to the UPI Newstrack,

Alain Brassart, from France’s University of Lille, said he will explain at the conference, scheduled for later this month, how “the archaic virility of Bond, a personality at once reactionary and rebellious, courteous and misogynist, was able to seduce audiences in the 1960s and today.”

Thanks to Joanne for this after I told her I was buying the boxes of Bond movies in order to study how to do presentations properly … you know … the bad guys always reveal their evil plot in a magnificent presentation well beyond PowerPoint.

Haefner: Kite Aerial Photography

Kite Photo RigKite Aerial Photography is a photography site by by Scott Haefner that includes 360 degree panoramas taken from kites. Haefner is a professional photographer and site designer whose site also describes the equipment needed to kite aerial photography. The site itself, along with its companion on his Ground-based Photography, is an example of a well designed photo site. Thanks to Shawn for this.

DadaDodo: Exterminate All Rational Thought

DadaDodo is a text generator or “travesty generator” like Dissociated Press. The code is available and unlike programs that randomly cut up text it “it scans bodies of text, and builds a probability tree expressing how frequently word B tends to occur after word A, and various other statistics; then it generates sentences based on those probabilities.” DadaDodo is described by its creator Jamie Zawinski thus:

DadaDodo is a program that analyses texts for word probabilities, and then generates random sentences based on that. Sometimes these sentences are nonsense; but sometimes they cut right through to the heart of the matter, and reveal hidden meanings.

Zawinski’s page has a “cut up” look with downloadable code and interesting links, many of which are no longer active, alas. The effect of DadaDodo are hard to interpret without knowing what the corpus is that it starts with. I am tempted to create a TAPoRware version so that it can be used on existing web pages.

Communications From Elsewhere »

Communications From Elsewhere is a journal (not blog!) by Josh Larios with some interesting text generators including a Postmodernism Generator which randomly generates “completely meaningless” essays using a modified version of The Dada Engine written by Andrew C. Bulhak.

For more on The Dada Engine see the technical report from Monash University, On the simulation of postmodernism and mental debility using recursive transition networks. The Abstract reads:

Recursive transition networks are an abstraction related to context-free grammars and finite-state automata. It is possible, to generate random, meaningless and yet realistic-looking text in genres defined using recursive transition networks, often with quite amusing results. One genre in which this has been accomplished is that of academic papers on postmodernism.

Josh has collected and connected different “Text Generators” to his journal, including an Adolescent Poetry Corner and a Time Cube screed generator. (For an explanation of Gene Ray’s Time Cube theory see DmitryBrant.com ¬ª On Time Cube. The Time Cube site is another story.)