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Entries for February 2021
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The Projection Booth
Projection is a short film by Joseph Holmes of clips from 50 different films that take place in movie theater projection rooms. This supercut was made to accompany Holmes’ series The Booth, a collection of photos from 2012 that document the disappearing/changing movie theater projection rooms.
The UX On This Small Child Is Terrible. “This Small Child won’t open its mouth for a toothbrush, but won’t close it during my cousin’s wedding ceremony. It’s as if this Small Child was not designed with accessibility in mind.”
Andy Works is making aesthetically bold iOS apps that prioritize “play, aesthetics, and quality-of-life over efficiencies”. So far they’re doing simple apps: timer, calculator, weather.
The Competitive Quartet
Salut Salon is a German musical quartet that plays classical music with a “passionate virtuosity, instrumental acrobatics, charm and a great sense of fun”. For a little taste of their vibe, check out this video of the four of them playing Vivaldi’s Summer with a mock competitive spirit that escalates with increasingly outlandish & impressive performances. This article calls Salut Salon “the Harlem Globetrotters of piano quartets” and that’s pretty accurate. (via @M10MacTen)
A Seven-Volume Book Series of the Complete Works of Hilma af Klint
Abstract art pioneer Hilma af Klint created hundreds of artworks during her lifetime, and a new seven-volume book series is celebrating that work in a big way: Hilma AF Klint: The Complete Catalogue Raisonné: Volumes I-VII. The complete set is available for preorder and ships in November, but you can get the first three volumes right now. (via colossal)
Type in Motion - The SF Symphony’s Dynamic New Look
Design studio Collins has created a new brand identity for the San Francisco Symphony that uses type in a playful, almost musical way. This brief video demonstration is worth 1000 words:
Even better, you can experiment with your own type and music with the Symphosizer web toy. I made this (to the beat of Daft Punk):
(via @dkhamsing)
Hiking Is an Ideal Structure for Friendship. “The whole activity of walking in the woods is very conducive to having a conversation.”
The Earliest Globe to Show the Americas May Have Been Made by Leonardo da Vinci in 1504
The Ostrich Egg Globe, made in/around 1504, is the earliest-known European globe to depict the Americas. And there’s evidence that it was made by Leonardo da Vinci. Open Culture has the story:
Missinne, a real estate developer, collector, and globe expert originally from Belgium, discovered the globe in 2012 at the London Map Fair. It was purchased “from a dealer who said it had been part of an important European collection for decades,” and its buyer and owner remain anonymous. After the globe appeared, Missinne “consulted more than 100 scholars and experts in his year-long analysis,” putting “about five years of research into one year,” says Sander, calling the research “an incredible detective story.”
Missinne’s investigation seems to substantiate his claims that the globe was made by Leonardo or his workshop. The evidence, some of which you can find on the Cambridge Scholars Publishing site, includes a 1503 preparatory map in da Vinci’s papers; the presence of arsenic, which only Leonardo was known to use at the time in copper to keep it from losing its lustre; “The use of chiaroscuro, pentienti, triangular shapes, the mathematics of the scale reflecting Leonardo’s written dimension of planet earth”; and a 1504 letter from Leonardo himself stating, “my world globe I want returned back from my friend Giovanni Benci.”
As with all things newly attributed to Leonardo in recent decades, there’s disagreement about this claim. You can read about the evidence collected by Stefaan Missinne, the discoverer of the globe and primary champion of its Leonardo connection, and decide for yourself. My brief, amateur take: if the first point in your analysis of a connection between this globe and Leonardo da Vinci is based on Salvator Mundi, which itself has disputed authorship and all but disappeared after its 2017 purchase, you’ve chosen a tough path towards persuasion.
Missed this when it came out last summer. “The first hopeful book about climate change, The Future Earth shows readers how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades.”
Grade-school math homework asks if a presumed semi-circle has two right angles or not. The answer is not that straightforward.
The Secret Message Encoded in the Parachute of the Mars Perseverance Rover
NASA engineers encoded a secret message in the parachute the Perseverance rover used to slow its descent to the surface of Mars. Tanya Fish provided a handy guide to decoding it on Twitter and as a PDF available on GitHub.
Clever “Climate Crisis” Typeface Has Several Weights Based on Arctic Sea Ice Extent
Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat has released a free typeface called Climate Crisis that can help designers and the media visualize the urgency of the climate crisis.
The font is intended to be used by anyone who wishes to visualize the urgency of climate change. Especially the media can use it to enhance its climate-related storytelling through illustrations and dramatizations. Newspaper Helsingin Sanomat is at the moment using the font to draw attention to its climate-related stories.
The typeface has seven weights corresponding to data & projections of the minimum extent of the Arctic sea ice from 1979 to 2050. As you can see in the graphic above, the type gets thinner and thinner as the years pass. (via print)
Really interesting piece about the history of Black Americans’ participation in beer brewing and consumption. “Beer, as it appears in American pop culture, is hilariously white.”
The Typewriter
A few days ago, I featured Ariel Avissar’s compilation of giant moons from movies and over the weekend, he sent me his most recent supercut: The Typewriter. This brisk & artfully concocted 2-minute video features dozens of typewriters being used in TV & movies, including The Shining, Mad Men, Adaptation, Barton Fink, Citizen Kane, All the President’s Men, and even Stephen J. Cannell (80s kids know).
A new FDA analysis indicates that “the one-shot coronavirus vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson provides strong protection against severe disease and death from Covid-19”. More good vaccine news.
Need to generate some blobs? Use this little web tool.
Your Kids Aren’t Too Old for Picture Books, and Neither Are You. “With remarkable economy, they excel at the twin arts of visual and textual storytelling.”
Flim, an Intelligent Movie Screenshot Search Engine
Flim is a movie search engine currently in beta that returns screenshots from movies based on keywords like “clock” or “tree”. Like so:
You can filter results by things like genre, year, and film ratio. You can search by color and within movies, e.g. “tuxedo” in Titanic:
I would love for the screenshot detail pages to include timecodes — it would make this an amazing tool for creating supercuts, film analysis videos, and other sorts of media. Imagine how much easier Christian Marclay’s job would have been with “clock” and “watch” searches on Flim. (via waxy)
Radiohead. Ballet. Together at Last.
A pair of dancers from the Polish National Ballet perform a dance to Reckoner by Radiohead, choreographed by Robert Bondara. This is from a longer performance featuring a number of Radiohead songs. The whole performance briefly popped up online over the weekend but is gone now. The video above is the only clip I could find on YouTube — hopefully the whole thing will be available again at some point.
Self-Medicating Media: Relax in Online Ambiance Rooms
From the NY Times on The Soothing, Digital Rooms of YouTube, a genre of video that pairs animated scenery with ambient soundscapes:
The genre is a close cousin of A.S.M.R. (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos, which are meant to evoke the pleasant brain-tingling sensation that some people experience when they hear sounds like hair brushing, nail tapping and soft whispers.
But ambience videos are differentiated, their creators say, by their purpose — not necessarily to give the tingles, but to relax and soothe a viewer by means of an immersive experience.
These videos all have names like Underwater Study Room, Cozy Cabin in the mountains, Jazz Bar in Paris, and Forest Sounds. They’re related to slow TV and other meditative videos I’ve posted over the years (e.g. the idling Arctic icebreaker & Tibetan singing bowl music. In the article, Helle Breth Klausen calls this genre “self-medicating media”.
Onboard Camera Views from Perseverance Rover’s Descent & Touchdown on Mars
Just a few days after the Perseverance rover successfully touched down on Mars, NASA has released onboard video from the descent and landing from multiple perspectives. I watched this with my kids last night and all three of us had our mouths hanging open.
The real footage in this video was captured by several cameras that are part of the rover’s entry, descent, and landing suite. The views include a camera looking down from the spacecraft’s descent stage (a kind of rocket-powered jet pack that helps fly the rover to its landing site), a camera on the rover looking up at the descent stage, a camera on the top of the aeroshell (a capsule protecting the rover) looking up at that parachute, and a camera on the bottom of the rover looking down at the Martian surface.
After watching it again just now, I am struck by two things:
- Sometime in my lifetime, live broadcasts from Mars will likely become commonplace. There will be dozens or hundreds of Mars webcams you can pull up on whatever the 2052 internet equivalent is. It will be amazing how boring it all is. (Or perhaps it’ll be boring how amazing it all is.)
- That humans landed on the Moon in 1969 was an incredible feat, but a close second is that the first steps were broadcast live from the Moon’s surface to everywhere on the Earth. Unbelievable.
Can’t wait to see more from Perseverance once the science program gets cranking.
Draw an Iceberg and See How It Will Float
Glaciologist Megan Thompson-Munson recently posted an “unofficial but passionate petition” for scientists and science publications to start drawing icebergs correctly.
While it’s true that only ~10% floats above the surface of the water, the “classic” orientation is unstable and would actually not be found in nature. An elongated iceberg would not float on its head, but instead on its side.
Inspired by her plea, Joshua Tauberer made a cool little iceberg simulator called Iceberger — you can quickly draw an iceberg and see how it will float. Here are a couple of weird ones I drew:
I would love to see a gently gamified version of this where you compete to draw the slowest-orienting icebergs or icebergs closest to their stable orientation. Would be similar to some of the puzzles in Brain It On!
Update: See also Iceberger Remixed, an iceberg simulator with additional features.
Simone Ellin tracked down the now-adult kids who bullied her in school. “Being able to zoom out and get some perspective after all of these years underscored that we can never really know what’s going on in other people’s lives.”
On the toll of lockdown when you live alone. “Long-term social isolation is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. What has the last year meant for those who don’t share their homes?”
Finding All the Source Images for the Sgt. Pepper’s Album Cover
The iconic album cover for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a collage of images of dozens of people — mostly famous, mostly men — arranged as though they’re standing in a group behind the band. A list of the people depicted on the cover (including Marilyn Monroe, Edgar Allan Poe, Karl Marx, Shirley Temple, and Fred Astaire) can be found on Wikipedia but Chris Shaw went a step further and tracked down the exact source images for each one of people & objects shown.
The collage was designed by Peter Blake and his wife Jann Haworth, and the cut-outs were assembled in Michael Cooper’s London photographic studio. Michael and his team toiled hard to construct the ‘cast of extras’, using a mix of photos sourced from the BBC Hulton Picture Library, images from private collections, waxworks and personal artifacts, including a gnome owned by Ringo Starr.
You so rarely get to see the raw materials used for design objects, so this is a real treat. (via waxy)
This is not your usual architectural criticism. “This is a love story. And, like every love story, it’s also a death story.”
Daft Punk Have Broken Up
Musical duo Daft Punk have called it quits after 28 years. They said goodbye with the video embedded above. This is so far from the worst thing that has happened in the past year but I am unexpectedly emotional about this. I still remember quite vividly hearing their music for the first time and I was hoping for more to come. So much of what they’ve created continues to resonate with me and, gosh, I can’t believe it’s over. Thank you, gentlemen.
Over 500,000 Americans have now died from Covid-19. “More Americans have perished from Covid-19 than on the battlefields of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined.”
The Otherworldly Sounds of the Long String Instrument
Here are a pair of videos of Ellen Fullman playing the Long String Instrument, an musical instrument with up to 100-foot-long strings that Fullman has developed over the past 35+ years.
These ghostly, ethereal sounds are made by Fullman rubbing the strings with rosin-coated fingers; you can read more about her process in The Guardian:
Its sound recalls Indian raga, with harmonies sliding over one another. Fullman says playing it “can be an ecstatic feeling, a floating sensation. Music is bigger than me: there are pitch relationships, shapes of notes beautiful beyond the level of human expression. I like that feeling of being a conduit. I don’t like egotistical thrashing. I like trying to give a gift.”
The strings are connected to wooden resonators that act like the body of a guitar to amplify the sound. To bring it out further, Fullman rubs her fingers with rosin, the same substance used on bows. In effect, she turns herself into a human bow. The strings are 2cm apart and she can have up to 28 on each of the two sides of the instrument: “The number is only limited by the length of my arms: 60cm.”
Best little detail about Fullman from that piece: she was “born in Memphis and kissed by Elvis as a baby”.
Aside from the videos, you can find music she’s created with the Long String Instrument on Spotify and other streaming services. I would love to see her perform in person sometime, when such things are permitted again. (via @tedgioia)
For his latest recipe, Kenji López-Alt hacks scrambled eggs. “The melted butter forms a rich sauce, and a cornstarch slurry keeps the eggs creamy.”
Ian McKellan Recites the “Duck Tales” Theme Song
Hunter Davis does an amazing impression of Ian McKellen and used it to recite the lyrics to the Duck Tales theme song as if he were Gandalf.
Somehow I have never seen this video before (it’s from 2009!) and it made me laugh so hard my stomach hurt. I watched it three times in the row but had to stop to post this. See also If Ian McKellen performed “Baby Got Back”, which is really good as well but doesn’t contain the phrase “it’s a duck blur” so 2nd place. (via laura olin)
What Our Food Reporters and Editors Make When They’re Too Tired to Cook. These overachieving folks have a funny definition of “too tired to cook”. Risotto?? Where’s the Campbell’s soup, 9 pieces of string cheese, or popcorn + wine?
String Quartet Performs Billie Eilish’s bad guy
Over the past two decades, musical group Vitamin String Quartet has covered the songs of dozens of musical artists and groups, from Jimi Hendrix to PJ Harvey to Eminem. In the video embedded above, they cover bad guy by Billie Eilish, apparently one of several covers that appears in Bridgerton (haven’t seen it). The group’s music has also appeared in Westworld, most notably Radiohead’s Motion Picture Soundtrack. And, I just this second made this connection: VSQ also did the Strung Out on OK Computer album, a longtime staple of my music for working.
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