TECH - interview with Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More

link to the real audio clip

link to Radio Times home page

WHYY's Marty Moss-Coane from Radio Times recently interviewed Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Chris is the current Editor-in-Chief of the tech-centric Wired magazine. I caught the podcast of her show this afternoon while installing some house stuffs and was immediately distracted by what Chris had to say. He does an excellent job of putting the Long Tail into layman's terms. If your interested in the possible direction of popular consumption, this would be worth a listen for you.

DESCRIPTION: How the internet is shaking up the traditional supply and demand model for business. We'll talk with CHRIS ANDERSON, author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Anderson says, the internet is allowing less popular products to have longer shelf lives, creating a new class of retail niche markets.

CULTURE - SPACE WALKING FOR EVERYONE! if everyone is filthy rich.

Space walking for the rich masses.

I'm glad to see that space tourism is finally here. I'm not happy about the price tag. 35 million dollars will buy you a space walk, in space. 20 million for a week on the international space station and an extra 15 million for you to venture out into space in a suit. But take heart simple commoner, Virgin Galactic's $225 million spaceport in southern New Mexico will be taking people into space later this decade for a mere US$200,000.

illustration by roryobrien.org

CULTURE - fun new family friendly blog

LUKIRA.com

LUKIRA describe themselves as "A home of superawesomeness. A practical pop culture guide for kids with really, really cool parents." and I would have to agree. This site manages to find great snippets of inteweb that's fun for the whole family. From obscure cartoons from the sixties to the modern kitsch of the Fish N' Flush Toilet Tank Aquarium Kit, this site seems to be off to a great start.

TECH - Automatically remove unwanted people from your photos

Tourist Remover.

Tourist Remover is a web service that will automatically remove people (or any non-stationary object) from your vacation shots. The caveat? You need to plan ahead and take several shots of your landscape so Tourist Remover can ascertain what shouldn't be there. Still, with a little pre-planning, you can get that perfect vacation shot you've always wanted.

BOOK - COSMIC VIEW: The Universe in 40 Jumps

Cosmic View

"Kees Boeke's Cosmic View is a classic on learning about the scale of things. It is similar to the Morrison's Powers of Ten, but aimed at a younger audience. Its legacy includes Charles Eames's film Powers of Ten, the resulting book by Philip and Phylis Morrison, and several similar books which followed. Unfortunately, the problems Kees hoped to address, including peoples' understanding being fragmented by scale, remain as pressing today as they were in 1957." Some dude scanned in the entire book, it consists of a series of 40 illustrations with text and captions.Here's a link

ANIMATION - 1977's "Powers Of 10" zooming out to the edge of the universe and back

Power of ten.

Created by Charles and Ray Eames, 1977's "Powers Of 10" zooms from the hand of a picnicker out to the edge of the universe and way back into the hand for a view of a molecular core. This animation follows "Cosmic Zoom" created in 1968 by Eva Szasz which was inspired by Kees Boeke's book, Cosmic View

ANIMATION - "The Power Of 10" updated with today's knowledge and animation capabilities

New Fangled Power of 10.

Zoom out from a group of kids playing in a square to the edges of the known universe. A modern take on Charles and Ray Eames 1977 "Powers of 10". This clip is half the length of the original version but is updated with today's knowledge and animation capabilities.

ANIMATION - "The Power Of 10" in the Simpson's universe

The Power Of 10 looped

"The power of 10" remade by the Simpsons. The original Power of 10 was done back in the 70's that used animation to visually show what the power of 10 represented using scale of size. The original went from a picnic goer to the edges or the known universe back to the picnicker and into his hand for peek at his molecules. the Simpson's version adds a little twist to this. Watch the clip to see how.

TECH - Globe4D is a 4 dimensional direct manipulation device for globe viewing.

visit globe4d.

Globe4D is a 4 dimensional direct manipulation device for globe viewing. The 4 dimensions are height, width, depth and time. Imagine a giant old-school mouse with a mouse ball turned upside down. Then manhandle the ball around. As you do that, a projector projects a globe onto the ball which moves at the same rate you move the ball. So the effect is that you are moving the images around. What sets this apart from any library globe that you can spin, is the fact that you can also rotate the base of the globe -holder like a record and see the image of the globe reflect the change. So for example, you want to see the movement of the tectonic plates move away from each other through time, spin the base clockwise, watch them merge back into Pangea, roll back time by rotating the base counter clockwise. Take a look at the video to see how they pulled this off.

ANIMATION - 50 'National Film Board of Canada' animated shorts... free

Internet killed the TV star.

Fifty animated shorts from the 'National Film Board of Canada', including several animation classics, can be accessed directly from this section. You can search them by title, director and year of production. Select a film and watch it now!

WWW - Where are you? Add yourself to the BloatedTrout Frappr map

Add yourself.

I never intended Bloated Trout to be anything more than a hobby. It's a way to explore new web tools, new technology and to keep abreast of what's going on in the internets. But since BloatedTrout has had over 2,000 visitors since I've been keeping track, (mostly from people doing searches for the misspelling of Gnarls Barkley), I've grown curious to see who's been a visiting. So, if you have a moment, add yourself to the Bloatedtrout Frappr map. It's one of those "web 2.0" projects that takes advantage of some GoogleMap code. It's a simple way of seeing where you hail from. You can find the map near the bottom left of this page. So, ah, start frapping.

WWW - Tutorialism, social bookmarking for graphic design and programming tutorials

visit Tutorialism here.

Following the success of DIGG comes a website that borows DIGGs essence and uses it to provide folks a way of spreading the world on tutorials.

Tutorialism is a social bookmarking website for all kinds of graphic design and programming tutorials, including tutorials for the famous Adobe Photoshop program as well as PHP, HTML or Javacript help. All the tutorials are submitted by the users and the users do decide as well which tutorials are promoted to the frontpage: If enough people like you vote for a tutorial they like (by using the Vote! button) it gets published on the frontpage of Tutorialism!

ANIMATION - Bob Sabiston, animator for 'A Scanner Darkly', spoke at MIT

Bob Sabiston talks

Bob Sabiston, Creator of the proprietary animation software for such movies such as 'Waking Life', a small bit of 'I Am a Sex Addict' and most recently 'A Scanner Darkly', was at MIT and gave a demonstration of the software behind his rotoscoping animations. The video clip also contains snippets of his other works. An interesting watch.

ROBOT - modular self replicating robot

Simple but seminal: Cornell researchers build a robot that can reproduce.

Bill Steele writes "Admittedly the machine is just a proof of concept -- it performs no useful function except to self-replicate -- but the basic principle could be extended to create robots that could replicate or at least repair themselves while working in space or in hazardous environments, according to Hod Lipson, Cornell assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and computing and information science, in whose lab the robots were built and tested."

Watch Hod Lipson's creation move in the following video...

MUSIC - KRAFTWORK's Musique Non Stop vintage video

Musique Non Stop on You Tube.

Some say it's Kraftwerk's most innovative promo video of all times featuring CGI. It was released in 1986. C.G.I. used in this context stands for "Computer Generated Image", meaning no hand drawn cartoons here. Although today, this type of imagery could be easily rendered on a cell phone, back then it was bleeding edge tech and only a handful of folks had the capability to create such images. Oh, and the music is cool too.