Gork

(SteamRolln)

Painstakingly created over a four year period while a student at the California Institute of the Arts, animator John Ross shot Gork live action on 16mm film and then spent the majority of that time painting cels and rotoscoping it the old-fashioned way with a "downshooter" camera system.

Interesting note: Ross was taught how to rotoscope by Michael Patterson. An instructor at CalArts at the time, Patterson was also a freelance artist who, with his wife Candace Reckinger, was in the midst of making a music video for the song "Take On Me" by an obscure Norwegian pop group known as a-ha.

via A Very Wide Array

Philip José Farmer (1918-2009)

Philip José Farmer, January 26, 1918 - February 25, 2009. R.I.P.

P.J. Farmer moved peacefully to a new Tier this morning. He might also be found roaming about Riverworld, or the Wold Newton Universe.

The True Stories of Philip K. Dick

painting by G.K. Bellows

The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet: Philip K. Dick (pdf) (excellent 1975 Rolling Stone article by Paul Williams)

Articles, Essays and Fiction - a collection of PKD related writings

via Ministry of Truth

Zombie Lincoln....

...is an interesting search term.


















There's the odd Photoshop job, or two.... (via)


















Uncyclomedia Commons














Refacing Government Tender















I liked emancipation of the zombie presidents featuring, from left: James K. Polk, Richard Nixon, Martin Van Buren and Abraham Lincoln....


















...and, of course, Zombie Lincoln on the Moon.

Terry Gilliam on the making of Brazil

(NOTAMARKinc)

In this excellent interview, Gilliam discusses a variety of issues surrounding the production of his film Brazil - from his creative process to communication, bureaucracy, science fiction, his battles with Universal, poo-poo, and much more. They cram a lot into 13 minutes.

previously: Terry Gilliam - Storytime (1968)

$2500 15 MB Radio Shack hard drive

I'm not sure when this dates from, but regardless, it's hard to imagine what people did with all that space!

I read somewhere that, back in the day (early '90s?), someone wrote a flight simulator program that was around 450K. I might be off on the exact figure, but it was less than a meg.

I also remember reading a William Gibson story (Johnny Mnemonic?) where a badass data courier had a whopping 100 megabytes of storage on his head chip!

I always figured that if one would write a spec-fic story featuring computer technology, jack your capacity and performance to well beyond what you will think it will be and then multiply that by a million. Then it might not seem so ridiculous to someone reading it 15 years later.

from Colt + Rane
via watcher of the skies

Philip K. Dick, A day in the afterlife

(video link)

An excellent 1994 BBC documentary, including interviews with Tim Powers, James Blaylock, Thomas M. Disch, Kim Stanley Robinson, Brian Aldiss, Terry Gilliam, an assortment of ex-wives, friends and associates, as well as PKD himself.

I liked how this film riffs on Ubik, a favorite of mine, which is probably his most lucid and complete work.

Interesting note: Tim Powers was a close friend and submitted the typescript for Radio Free Albemuth, written in 1976 but published posthumously as Dick's "last novel" in 1985. The character "David" in VALIS is based on Powers and a later edition of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - published concurrent with the release of the film Blade Runner - is dedicated to him.

see the rest here

found thanks to MetaFilter

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Getting A Story Made at National Geographic After talking with several National Geographic photographers about shooting for the magazine I became intrigued with the process of getting a story made. The collaboration between the photo editors and photographers and then the photographers involvement in all the steps along the way is unique and important to how they make stories. More magazines should spend this kind of time with their contributors. The few times I’ve had photographer come into the office and present their images to us have been incredibly rewarding and certainly I think made the story that much better. I asked David Griffin, National Geographic’s Director of Photography about the process of getting stories made and the rumored years it takes for a story to go from idea to printed page... (via)

Jacking into the Brain--Is the Brain the Ultimate Computer Interface? How far can science advance brain-machine interface technology? Will we one day pipe the latest blog entry or NASCAR highlights directly into the human brain as if the organ were an outsize flash drive?

From Silver Lake to Suicide: One Family's Secret History of the Jonestown Massacre A cache of letters hidden in the basement brings to life a house, a family and the tragedy that would change everything (via)

Love story: The librarian, the postal worker and their art Art takes up all the air in Herb and Dorothy Vogel's cramped one-bedroom on the Upper East Side. Minimalist and conceptual works cover every inch of wall and dangle from the ceiling. Because there is no other place for it, a Richard Tuttle painting clings to the inside of a louvered door that leads to the tiny kitchen. Other pieces crowd shelves and table tops. And the Vogels, who are giving the Miami Art Museum and 49 other institutions around the country gifts of 50 artworks each and are subjects of a documentary that will screen in December during Art Basel Miami Beach, say there is plenty more under the bed and jammed into the closets of this modest, rent-stabilized space they have called home since 1963.

Library Ghosts: Northeastern U.S. Last year about this time (just in time for Halloween), I posted on this blog a list of libraries that are said to be haunted. Now the library ghosts are back, by popular demand...

also:
Stanislav Petrov, the man who could have started a nuclear war, but didn’t (via)
Know Your Intelligence Agencies: National Reconnaissance Office
Biology in Science Fiction: Erasing Memory
The History of Some of Today's Most Common Phrases (via)
Recent additions to the Chambers Slang Dictionary
Punctuation Game
1000 artworks to see before you die (via)
Podcasts from the University of Oxford (via)
Haruki Murakami interview (via)
Wayne Coyne interview
Aerial Phenomena Research: Selected Papers - Jacques F. Vallee (via)
Casting the Runes by M.R. James
Oboe Bong

Futility Closet: Over the Moon Jules Verne earned his title as the father of science fiction. His 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon contains eerie similarities to the Apollo program that unfolded a century later. (read more)

viddy:
The Anti-Fascist trailer
Parallel Universes, Parallel Lives 1/6 (Eels frontman Mark Everett in search of his father's brain. Dr Hugh Everett III proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics.) (via)
Hog Hunting (A plague of feral hogs has descended on the American South. They've been spotted here in Savannah.) (via)
The Real Secret Of The Matrix: The Haunting Sound Of The Waterphone (You'll know it as soon as you hear it.)
Daily (kinda sorta) Weather with David Lynch (via)
Angkor Wat, Cambodia (1930s newsreel)

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Pentagon plans ‘spaceplane’ to reach hotspots fast The American military is planning a “spaceplane” designed to fly a crack squad of heavily armed marines to trouble spots anywhere in the world within four hours.

The History of the India-China Border There is no territorial dispute which has been, and still is, more susceptible to a solution than India’s boundary dispute with China. Each side has its non-negotiable vital interest securely under its control. India has the McMahon Line; China has Aksai Chin. Only a political approach, climaxed by a decision at the highest level, can settle the matter. In a couple of months it will be half a century since the issues were joined. (via)

Debt Collection, Outsourced to India With her flowing, hot-pink Indian suit, jangly silver bangles and perky voice, Bhumika Chaturvedi, 24, doesn't fit the stereotype of a thuggish, heard-it-all-before debt collector. But lately, she has had no problem making American debtors cry. (via)

Biology in Science Fiction: Big Giant Heads Before transhumanism became all the fashion, science fictional depictions of far future often gave our human descendants fantastic mental powers along with giant brains. But there is a serious problem with that idea: human brain size at birth is limited by the size of the opening in the pelvis, and those far future women never seem to have extra-wide hips to go along with their giant heads. (excellent post)

also:
Stone Age man took drugs, say scientists
NASA sends probe to study edge of solar system
Books: Umberto Eco - Turning Back the Clock
Britain to get first glance at author Burroughs' paintings
Showcasing 'Hidden Treasures' from Afghanistan
Eight Reasons Why You Can't Pay Attention (via)
How to Stay Awake at Work (via)
In the computer age, handwriting is a lost art
20 Places Where Bookworms Go to Read and Socialize Online (via)
Idea Generation (visual arts) (via)
Complete Spy Cam Smaller Than an Eyeball
Open Yale Courses: Introduction to Ancient Greek History with Professor Donald Kagan (via)
Photo Gallery: Hackers delight - A history of MIT pranks (via)
List of common misconceptions (via)

viddy:
17 months and 14'000 km away from technology Swiss adventurer Sarah Marquis, who travels by foot around Europe, Australia and America, explains what happen when you reconnect with nature and try to be autonomous, finding water, getting some electrical energy, collecting food were some of the topics discussed during her presentation.
Ivo Niehe Meets Frank Zappa (’91) (narration in Dutch, interview in English)
Presenting the instrument of the moment (beautiful music on the kora)
Brainwave Synthesis With Percussa AudioCubes
D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln
Insane Train Stunt (completely nuts)
Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" (montage)
Order of the Knights of Malta
Boring Books
The Ruts - Babylon's Burning
Run DMC on Reading Rainbow (via)
Do the Hustle

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Villagers in fear of occult killers who deal in flesh Human genitals are the most prized parts and can be used to attract wealth and increase fertility. Children's body parts are believed to be the most potent. They are cooked and ground down, to be used with herbs and other ingredients. Sometimes parts are used whole - it is believed that if a human arm is waved around each morning in commercial premises it will draw customers.

Space 'smells like fried steak' Nasa has commissioned Steven Pearce, a chemist and managing director of fragrance manufacturing company Omega Ingredients, to recreate the smell of space in a laboratory.

also:
The Five Oldest Banks in the World (via)
Logic Exercises - The Three Laws of Robotics
Meetways.com: find a point of interest between two addresses (via)

viddy:
Robert Wyatt & Bertrand Bergalat - This Summer Night
Björk talking about her TV
Allen Ginsberg interview (via)
Don't you put it in your mouth

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Mayfair, and the Deaths of Harry Nilsson, Mama Cass and Keith Moon
How to Embalm a Body (via)
Middle Eastern Contemporary Artists Booming
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Systems (via)
The Felt Toothbrush
Recommended piano books
Iain Banks talks to Writing Magazine

viddy:
This American Life - Judgement to the Wife (funny)
Zumba Cinco - Moça do Biquini Azul
São Paulo in 1943
Aldous Huxley's Deathbed (as related by his wife) (via)

Frank Herbert hard at work (1943)

from The Official Dune Website

found thanks to Ordinary finds

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Out There: People Who Live Without TV For many Americans the thought of life without TV is akin to forgoing food, shelter or, God forbid, the Internet. But about 1 to 2 percent of Americans do abstain from the boob tube, and they might seem like strange bedfellows. A recent study of those who live without found that about two-thirds fall into either the "crunchy granola set" or the "religious right, ultraconservative" camp... I guess I'm in the other one-third. I haven't had cable or air television since 2005. To be honest, I didn't get rid of the TV because I hated it, I got rid of it because I liked it too much. I needed to get some things done and I figured losing it would eliminate a distraction. It worked. I'm far more productive than I was then. I do watch movies and whatnot on the computer, but I practically have to force myself to sit down for one. I have nothing against people who watch TV. Not everyone can sit at home and write a novel or read Shakespeare after a long hard day of work. It's a matter of preference. I was a bit surprised that it was only 1-2 percent that abstain.

It’s Likely That Times Are Changing A century ago, mathematician Hermann Minkowski famously merged space with time, establishing a new foundation for physics; 
today physicists are rethinking how the two should fit together... In a lab, time is simple. You can watch experiments and record what happens as time passes simply by referring to the clock on the wall (or the computerized timers on the lab bench). But suppose you are studying the universe as a whole, attempting to formulate the laws of quantum gravity that rule the cosmos. There is no wall enclosing the universe on which to hang a clock, no external timekeeper to gauge the whenness of being. Yet quantum physics requires time to tell the universe what to do — time is necessary for things to happen. Or, as the famous restroom graffito puts it, time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. (via)

Heroin addicted elephant clean after rehab Referred to as 'Big Brother' or 'Xiguang' in Chinese media reports, the elephant was captured in 2005 in southwest China by illegal traders who fed him heroin-laced bananas. The traders used the spiked bananas for several months to control him before they were arrested by police. Xiguang was released back into the wild but was soon sent to animal protection centre after his behaviour appeared to suggest he was suffering withdrawal symptoms from heroin, Xinhua news agency reported.

Robot builders seek a little help from sci-fi "It's surprising how often people make nervous jokes about robots taking over the world. I don't want to make too much of that, but I think there's something there." So says one roboticist who thinks finding out exactly how fictional robots influence people can help engineers build real ones.

Bach fan thrills to discovery of lost 1724 pages For 25 years, Teri Noel Towe has deeply treasured a slim volume bound in red morocco that he acquired at an auction house, a volume containing six handwritten pages of a musical manuscript. Pages three and four, containing the last measures of the opening choral movement and all of the following bass aria, cover the front and back of a music sheet presumed lost. Until now. (via)

Digitizing Archives From The 17th Century A researcher on a short trip to a foreign country, with little money, but a digital camera in hand has devised a novel approach to digitizing foreign archives that could speed up research.

also:
The 11 Kinds of Insomnia (via)
How to Read an FBI File (via)
The 100 Oldest Companies in the World (via)
The heaviest and biggest tanks in history (via)

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World's largest machine--the electric grid--is old and outdated The U.S. electric grid is so old and outdated it can't handle the influx of wind power and other intermittent renewable resources.

Space Station Dodges Orbital Junk The International Space Station fired its rocket engines to dodge space junk for the first time in five years on Wednesday.

Is It Possible To Teach Experience? Business veterans claim you cannot teach ‘experience’, but European researchers say you can. (via)

The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history. Anthropologists find evidence of folktales everywhere in ancient cultures, written in Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Egyptian and Sumerian. People in societies of all types weave narratives, from oral storytellers in hunter-gatherer tribes to the millions of writers churning out books, television shows and movies. And when a characteristic behavior shows up in so many different societies, researchers pay attention: its roots may tell us something about our evolutionary past.

also:
Top 10 Amazing Prison Escapes
10 Things Millionaires Won't Tell You
Now Hear This: Don't Remove Earwax (I always suspected that those Chinese candles weren't so good for you.)
6 Funny Things About Asimov's Foundation Series
The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive (via)

viddy:
Cockfighting and dominoes: Haiti's poor at play (via)
Hackers prepare supermarket sweep
Groucho Marx on the Dick Cavett Show

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Update: Best Western refutes story claiming 8 million customer records were breached Hotel chain confirms intrusion, but says that only 13 records at a single hotel were exposed.

Giant Galaxy Cluster Seen in Early Universe The discovery of this far-off group, estimated to contain as much mass as a thousand large galaxies, offers further proof of the existence of the enigmatic force called dark energy.

Daphne Oram – Oramics (Drawing sound) A lesser known but important contributor in the field of ‘drawn’ electronic music is British composer Daphne Oram who worked at the legendary BBC Radiophonic workshop in the late 1950’s. Oram dreamed of making a machine that directly translated graphical notation into sound and this dream came to fruitful realisation with her technique of Oramics. (prev)

also:
Surviving the Biggest Wave Ever (via)
Volcanos in Our Times (photo essay)
Bigelow Aerospace Advances Work on Full-scale Space Habitat
How the Roaring Twenties Changed the World
10 Top Spectacular Festivals in the World
Greg Egan interview

viddy:
Luc de Heusch - Tracking the Pale Fox (mythology and rituals of the Dogon)
Experts' memory: Not as expert as they think (take the test)
Thomas Kuntz Incredible Decapitation Automaton (creepy)
Outrageous My Little Pony collection

Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person? — François de la Rochefoucauld (1613-80) (via)

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Surveillance made easy Now German electronics company Siemens has gone a step further, developing a complete "surveillance in a box" system called the Intelligence Platform, designed for security services in Europe and Asia. It has already sold the system to 60 countries. According to a document obtained by New Scientist, the system integrates tasks typically done by separate surveillance teams or machines, pooling data from sources such as telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records. It then sorts through this mountain of information using software that Siemens dubs "intelligence modules".... However, it is far from clear whether the technology will prove accurate. Security experts warn that data-fusion technologies tend to produce a huge number of false positives, flagging up perfectly innocent people as suspicious.

Revealed: 8 million victims in the world's biggest cyber heist A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of the Best Western Hotel group's online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia. (via)

Historian suggests Southerners defeated Confederacy This interview will blow away everything you thought you knew about the South and the Civil War. It is a matter of fact that a majority (95+%) of Southerners did not own slaves. A substantial and in some places an overwhelming majority did not support the Confederacy. To this day, Southerners bear the brunt of negative popular opinion that they do not deserve. Most people in the South are not racist and are some of the finest, friendliest and most neighborly people I have met in this country. It's time that people pulled their heads out on this issue.

In a Father’s Clutter, Historic Oddities When her father, John Lattimer, died in May of 2007 at the age of 92, Ms. Lattimer knew her inheritance would include more than the family tea set. Dr. Lattimer, a prominent urologist at Columbia University, was also a renowned collector of relics, many of which might be considered quirky or even macabre. Over the course of seven decades he amassed more than 3,000 objects that ranged in age from a few years to tens of millions of years. “He was like a classic Renaissance collector,” said Tony Perrottet, a writer specializing in historical mysteries who spent time with Dr. Lattimer before his death. “Anything and everything could turn up in the collection, from Charles Lindbergh’s goggles to a bearskin coat that belonged to Custer.”

also:
The next president will disappoint you
Opinion: Why Google has lost its mojo -- and why you should care
Models of Invention: the Science Fiction of Leonardo da Vinci (via)
Help Crack the Russian Hacker Mystery
Early American Counterfeiting
Myra Hindley painting taints London 2012 celebrations
Michael Chabon on 'writers who can dwell between worlds' (via)
Open Sound New Orleans ~A Collaborative Soundmap of the City~ (via)
Fellini's Book of Dreams

viddy:
Mars: Springtime 2020
UCB: Hot Chicks Room
Herbie Hancock - Crossings - Oeuvre réalisée par Philippe Charpentier

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Novelist Neal Stephenson Once Again Proves He's the King of the Worlds Stephenson spends his mornings cloistered in the basement, writing longhand in fountain pen and reworking the pages on a Mac version of the Emacs text editor. This intensity cannot be sustained all day—"It's part of my personality that I have to mess with stuff," he says—so after the writing sessions, he likes to get his hands on something real or hack stuff on the computer. (He's particularly adept at Mathematica, the equation-crunching software of choice for mathematicians and engineers.) For six years, he was an adviser to Jeff Bezos' space-flight startup, Blue Origin. He left amicably in 2006. Last year, he went to work for another Northwest tech icon, Nathan Myhrvold, who heads Intellectual Ventures, an invention factory that churns out patents and prototypes of high-risk, high-reward ideas. Stephenson and two partners spend most afternoons across Lake Washington in the IV lab, a low-slung building with an exotic array of tools and machines to make physical manifestations of the fancies that flow from the big thinkers on call there.

Making an Arguement for Misspelling Most teachers expect to correct their students' spelling mistakes once in a while. But Ken Smith has had enough. The senior lecturer in criminology at Bucks New University in Buckinghamshire, England, sees so many misspellings in papers submitted by first-year students that he says we'd be better off letting the perpetrators off the hook and doing away with certain spelling rules altogether. Disagree. Lern too spel, dumas.

Music and memory: How the songs we heard growing up shape the story of our lives Matching our intuitions about music, researchers have found that music is an important influence on our memories. We associate songs with emotions, people, and places we've experienced in the past.

Tweaking with Sherlock Holmes I just found this fascinating aside on Sherlock Holmes in a 1973 paper on amphetamine psychosis, suggesting that the cocaine-using Holmes displayed the classic repetitive behaviour often seen in frequent users of dopamine-acting stimulants.

The couple who lived in a mall After Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto found their skyline blighted by a colossal mall, they protested it in an unusual way -- they moved in.

Macbeth (1040-57) King of Scotland Macbeth lived during brutal times. He defeated Duncan I in 1040 and reigned for seventeen years. His story differs from Shakespeare's play written nearly six centuries later.

also:
How can I survive a night in the Alaskan wilderness?
Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene (via)
List of problems solved by MacGyver (via)
The Olympics with MST3k If I hadn't recorded it, I'd think I'm losing my mind. (don't miss it, MSTies) (via)
Cthuugle The complete HP Lovecraft Search Engine (via)
Musée Patamécanique (via)

viddy:
RIAA Lawsuit Victim Becomes Free Culture Activist
World's Largest Record Collection (it's for sale and quite a bargain at $3 million for 2.5 million records)
Jean-Luc Godard: YouTubed
Monty Python on Public TV in 1975

Cosmos vs. The Matrix

Agent Sagan works his stuff on Morpheus.

video: dvlazar
via monocrom

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We've got our wires crossed: The bizarre stories of people whose brains have rewired themselves (don't miss it) Meet the Englishman who emerged from a stroke speaking with a French Accent, (Foreign Accent Syndrome is a rare but recognized medical condition) and the man who can taste words.

Cooking and Cognition: How Humans Got So Smart For a long time, we were pretty dumb. Humans did little but make "the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years," he said. Then, only about 150,000 years ago, a different type of spurt happened — our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials, such as bone, and invented many new tools, including needles for beadwork. Responding to, presumably, our first abstract thoughts, we started creating art and maybe even religion.

Is Our Solar System a Rarity in Milky Way? Three Northwestern University researchers have learned that our solar system in which the Earth orbits our sun is the exception in the Milky Way rather than the rule.

A Bridge between Virtual Worlds The first steps to developing virtual-world interoperability are now being tested between Second Life and other independent virtual worlds... I remember hearing a radio interview with one of the founders of Second Life where he claimed that some characters from World of Warcraft found their way into Second Life and started hacking people up. I still can't figure out if he was just bullshitting or not. Maybe not. (via)

Mystery Surrounds Leavenworth's Underground City Some Leavenworth residents have been unknowingly walking around above an underground city, and no one seems to know who created it or why. I'm surprised we haven't heard more about this. (via)

The World’s Six Most Wanted War Criminals
How to Think Like a Genius Thomas Pynchon maintains that genius lives in work rather than talent. (couldn't find the quote, read it years ago) (via)
Jessica Duchen's top 10 literary Gypsies
Excellent post on John Cage (don't miss it if you're a music fan) John Cage died 16 years ago today.
Iain Banks links
Daily Writing Tips (via)
The Prisoner Production Hazard Checklist
Overheard Comments from United Airlines Employees (figures)
The Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites Not quite as "undiscovered" as I had hoped, but there are some interesting items in there. (via)

viddy:
A Day In The Life Of An MC Escher Drawing (silly) (via)
Creepy Mogwai video
The Yodeling Belgian Cowboy (awesome)

L'Avventure Straordinarissime di Saturnino Farandola

Poster for the 1914 film L'Avventure Straordinarissime di Saturnino Farandola. Art by Albert Robida.

Stills from the film

via Martin Klasch