Carving and turning, turning and carving - craft film

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/28970811 w=700&h=500]  

From The Scout: We visited Josh Vogel of Blackcreek Mercantile & Trading Co. in late 2010 and kick started this year with a feature on the wood sculptor based in Kingston, New York. Our experience with him was so profound that we knew we had to pay another visit. This time, to document his story as part of our series. The result is nothing like we've ever done. This film gives little background on who Josh Vogel is, read our feature for more details. Instead it explores the idea that turning wood is a reductive process that in essence is a step back in time. As the wood loses a layer, the years are taken away. This abstract idea is a constant that Josh is very aware whenever his chisel touches the bark and steady peels away the rings of time.

[bit wanky but it's the right sentiment and a nice film]

Tape Generations - beautiful, but unbelievably laborious

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/28826269 w=700&h=580] An amazing animation by Johan Rijpma, who likes to study "the unpredictable environment".

He says: "I worked on this project for about 6 months. I tried many different compositions and then made a selection. A single composition could take more than 12 hours to develop/breakdown (the spinning of the plate was done by hand, turning the plate about 0.4 degrees every 30 seconds, this meant I was standing in the wind and the rain for hours watching the tape "grow" and watching the sun come up/go down)"

I like the sound, too.

P.S. This is my favourite memo ever

[an oldie but goody from the excellent Letters of Note] Before we begin: the content of the following memo is absolutely filthy. If you're easily offended, please don't read it. Thanks.

South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut is a feature length movie based on the animated series, South Park. Prior to its release in 1999, the movie's creators -Matt Stone and Trey Parker - were asked repeatedly by the MPAA to alter the film in order for it to gain an R rating rather than an NC-17. Below is a memo sent by Stone to the MPAA, in response to such a request.

The first picture is of the whole memo. Below that is a close-up of the text.

Recommended Viewing: This Film Is Not Yet Rated.

 

Transcript

Here is our new cut of the South Park movie to submit to the MPAA. I wanted to tell you exactly what notes we did and did not address.

1. We left in both the "fisting" and the "rimjob" references in the counselor's office scene. We did cut the word "hole" from "asshole" as per our conversation.

2. We took out the entire "God has fucked me in the ass so many times..." It is gone.

3. Although it is not animated yet, we put a new storyboard in for clarification in the scene with Saddam Hussein's penis. The intent now is that you never see Saddam's real penis, he in fact is using dildos both times.

4. We have the shot animated that reveals the fact that Winona is not shooting ping-pong balls from her vagina. She is, in fact, hitting the balls with a ping-pong paddle.

5. We took out the only reference to "cum-sucking ass" in the film. It was in the counselor's office and we took it out.

6. We left in the scenes with Cartman's mom and the horse as per our conversation. This is the one joke we really want to fight for.

Call with any questions

Matt

P.S. This is my favorite memo ever.

Now hear this - Spiegel im Spiegel, by Arvo Pärt

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ6Mzvh3XCc&w=700] Spiegel im Spiegel was written by Arvo Pärt shortly before he left Estonia. He's one of the pioneers of a school of music known as holy minimalism.

Of his popularity, Steve Reich has written: "Even in Estonia, Arvo was getting the same feeling that we were all getting .... I love his music, and I love the fact that he is such a brave, talented man .... He's completely out of step with the zeitgeist and yet he's enormously popular, which is so inspiring. His music fulfills a deep human need that has nothing to do with fashion."

"Spiegel im Spiegel" in German literally can mean both "mirror in the mirror" as well as "mirrors in the mirror", referring to the infinity of images produced by parallel plane mirrors: the tonic triads are endlessly repeated with small variations as if reflected back and forth.

In 2011 the piece was the focus of a half hour BBC Radio 4 programme, Soul Music, which examined pieces of music "with a powerful emotional impact".

10 things everyone should know about time
“Time” is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. We’ve just completed an amazingly intense and rewarding multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time, and my brain is swimming with ideas and new questions. Rather than trying a summary (the talks will be online soon), here’s my stab at a top ten list partly inspired by our discussions: the things everyone should know about time. [Update: all of these are things I think are true, after quite a bit of deliberation. Not everyone agrees, although of course they should.]

1. Time exists. Might as well get this common question out of the way. Of course time exists — otherwise how would we set our alarm clocks? Time organizes the universe into an ordered series of moments, and thank goodness; what a mess it would be if reality were complete different from moment to moment. The real question is whether or not time is fundamental, or perhaps emergent. We used to think that “temperature” was a basic category of nature, but now we know it emerges from the motion of atoms. When it comes to whether time is fundamental, the answer is: nobody knows. My bet is “yes,” but we’ll need to understand quantum gravity much better before we can say for sure.

2. The past and future are equally real. This isn’t completely accepted, but it should be. Intuitively we think that the “now” is real, while the past is fixed and in the books, and the future hasn’t yet occurred. But physics teaches us something remarkable: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. This is hard to see in our everyday lives, since we’re nowhere close to knowing everything about the universe at any moment, nor will we ever be — but the equations don’t lie. As Einstein put it, “It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.”

3. Everyone experiences time differently. This is true at the level of both physics and biology. Within physics, we used to have Sir Isaac Newton’s view of time, which was universal and shared by everyone. But then Einstein came along and explained that how much time elapses for a person depends on how they travel through space (especially near the speed of light) as well as the gravitational field (especially if its near a black hole). From a biological or psychological perspective, the time measured by atomic clocks isn’t as important as the time measured by our internal rhythms and the accumulation of memories. That happens differently depending on who we are and what we are experiencing; there’s a real sense in which time moves more quickly when we’re older.

4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (Via conference participant David Eagleman.)

5. Your memory isn’t as good as you think. When you remember an event in the past, your brain uses a very similar technique to imagining the future. The process is less like “replaying a video” than “putting on a play from a script.” If the script is wrong for whatever reason, you can have a false memory that is just as vivid as a true one. Eyewitness testimony, it turns out, is one of the least reliable forms of evidence allowed into courtrooms. (Via conference participants Kathleen McDermott and Henry Roediger.)

6. Consciousness depends on manipulating time. Many cognitive abilities are important for consciousness, and we don’t yet have a complete picture. But it’s clear that the ability to manipulate time and possibility is a crucial feature. In contrast to aquatic life, land-based animals, whose vision-based sensory field extends for hundreds of meters, have time to contemplate a variety of actions and pick the best one. The origin of grammar allowed us to talk about such hypothetical futures with each other. Consciousness wouldn’t be possible without the ability to imagine other times. (Via conference participant Malcolm MacIver.)

7. Disorder increases as time passes. At the heart of every difference between the past and future — memory, aging, causality, free will — is the fact that the universe is evolving from order to disorder. Entropy is increasing, as we physicists say. There are more ways to be disorderly (high entropy) than orderly (low entropy), so the increase of entropy seems natural. But to explain the lower entropy of past times we need to go all the way back to the Big Bang. We still haven’t answered the hard questions: why was entropy low near the Big Bang, and how does increasing entropy account for memory and causality and all the rest? (We heard great talks by David Albert and David Wallace, among others.)

8. Complexity comes and goes. Other than creationists, most people have no trouble appreciating the difference between “orderly” (low entropy) and “complex.” Entropy increases, but complexity is ephemeral; it increases and decreases in complex ways, unsurprisingly enough. Part of the “job” of complex structures is to increase entropy, e.g. in the origin of life. But we’re far from having a complete understanding of this crucial phenomenon. (Talks by Mike Russell, Richard Lenski, Raissa D’Souza.)

9. Aging can be reversed. We all grow old, part of the general trend toward growing disorder. But it’s only the universe as a whole that must increase in entropy, not every individual piece of it. (Otherwise it would be impossible to build a refrigerator.) Reversing the arrow of time for living organisms is a technological challenge, not a physical impossibility. And we’re making progress on a few fronts: stem cells, yeast, and even (with caveats) mice and human muscle tissue. As one biologist told me: “You and I won’t live forever. But as for our grandkids, I’m not placing any bets.”

10. A lifespan is a billion heartbeats. Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, it’s a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.” At least, until we master #9 and become immortal. (Amazing talk by Geoffrey West.)

Via: Discover Magazine.

Nice song: Real Late, by Liam Finn

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOE_22bgneI&w=700] Liam Mullane Finn (born 24 September 1983 in Melbourne, Australia) is a New Zealand musician and songwriter. Born in Australia, he moved to New Zealand as a child. He is the son of pop musician Neil Finn (of Split Enz and Crowded House).

Soap bubbles, an electro magnet and ferrous liquid - three of my favourite things
dysonology-title.png

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/28304264 w=700&h=450]

 

"I combined everyday soap bubbles with exotic ferrofluid liquid to create an eerie tale using macro lenses and time lapse techniques," says artist Kim Pimmel. "Black ferrofluid and dye race through bubble structures, drawn through by the invisible forces of capillary action and magnetism." The tecchy bit, for the film geeks, are: Time-lapse sequences: Nikon D90, Nikkor 60mm macro lens and custom built intervalometer. Motion-control: Arduino driven scanner platform and mirror rigs. Score: Ableton Live.

Click here to see Compressed 01, a sexy little number by Pimmel in which ferrous printer toner particles floating on the surface of water are attracted by a magnet and align to the invisible magnetic field around them.

Best jokes in the Edinburgh festival

1. Nick Helm – “I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” 2. Tim Vine – “Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels.”

3. Hannibal Buress – “People say ‘I'm taking it one day at a time.’ You know what? So is everybody. That's how time works.”

4. Tim Key – “Drive Thru McDonalds was more expensive than I thought ... once you've hired the car ...”

5. Matt Kirshen – “I was playing chess with my friend and he said, 'Let's make this interesting'. So we stopped playing chess.”

6. Sarah Millican – “My mother told me, you don’t have to put anything in your mouth you don’t want to. Then she made me eat broccoli, which felt like double standards.”

7. Alan Sharp – “I was in a band which we called The Prevention, because we hoped people would say we were better than The Cure.”

8. Mark Watson – “Someone asked me recently – what would I rather give up, food or sex. Neither! I’m not falling for that one again, wife.”

9. Andrew Lawrence – “I admire these phone hackers. I think they have a lot of patience. I can’t even be bothered to check my OWN voicemails.”

10. DeAnne Smith – “My friend died doing what he loved ... Heroin.”

The best of the worst 1. Tim Vine – “Uncle Ben has died. No more Mr Rice Guy.”

2. Josh Howie – I've got nothing against the Chinese. Don't get me Wong.

3. Mark Olver – “During my first murder I was like a dyslexic having my back teeth removed ... losing my morals.”

Oh...and the best of 2010 1. Tim Vine "I've just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I'll tell you what, never again."

2. David Gibson "I'm currently dating a couple of anorexics. Two birds, one stone."

3. Emo Philips "I picked up a hitch hiker. You've got to when you hit them."

4. Jack Whitehall "I bought one of those anti-bullying wristbands when they first came out. I say 'bought', I actually stole it off a short, fat ginger kid."

5. Gary Delaney "As a kid I was made to walk the plank. We couldn't afford a dog."

6. John Bishop "Being an England supporter is like being the over-optimistic parents of the fat kid on sports day."

7. Bo Burnham "What do you call a kid with no arms and an eyepatch? Names."

8. Gary Delaney "Dave drowned. So at the funeral we got him a wreath in the shape of a lifebelt. Well, it's what he would have wanted."

9. Robert White "For Vanessa Feltz, life is like a box of chocolates: Empty."

10. Gareth Richards "Wooden spoons are great. You can either use them to prepare food. Or, if you can't be bothered with that, just write a number on one and walk into a pub…"

Politeness, by A. A. Milne

If people ask me,I always tell them: "Quite well, thank you, I'm very glad to say." If people ask me, I always answer, "Quite well, thank you, how are you to-day?" I always answer, I always tell them, If they ask me Politely..... BUT SOMETIMES

I wish

That they wouldn't.

 

How to chop an onion, with breaks

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/22709715 w=700&h=500] So THIS is what old skate video makers do now...

It's nicely done, just a bit, well, could do with a bit more direction I guess - kind of form over function. I'd quite like to do one on how to make a cup of tea. Maybe how to dunk a biscuit, soundtrack by Ninjatunes.