Coincidence?

So, a year ago I posted this, linking to the video above and commenting on how the setting reminded me of Pattern Recognition, which I had just finished re-reading. This past Tuesday, William Gibson posted this on his blog, linking to the same video on YouTube.

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but it could also mean one of three things:

1) I was correct in my assessment of the Gibsonian nature of that particular video; it just took him a year to find it for himself.

2) William Gibson was vanity-surfing, stumbled across my old post and liked the video.

3) William Gibson reads my blog regularly, liked the video, but held off a year posting his own link so I wouldn't know that he's a fan. Because he's shy, you see.

Are you reading my blog, Bill? It's okay if you are. You can tell me, I won't be mad.

Olafur Eliasson On Wired News

Wired News today has a feature story about a new show by Olafur Eliasson. Eliasson is a contemporary artist who works with light and projection. One of his best-known works is The Weather Project, in which he created an artificial sun. As I occasionally dabble in lighting design for the theatre, I'm always interested to read about him.

I first saw his work when the Hirshhorn Museum in DC called to ask for help repairing a Strand (Quartzcolor, actually, but that's another story) OneLight fresnel spotlight. It was part of his piece Round Rainbow which was being shown in their Refract, Reflect, Project exhibit.

Since the Smithsonian wasn't all too keen to ship part of their art collection up to Frederick, I piled into the truck with Sam (our head field-service technician, seen above admiring the "Round Rainbow") and we headed for the city.

Sam was able to get the fixture working again and the staff offered to let us see how it was used in the piece, and show us around the rest of the exhibit while everything was still being installed.


Lighting is an essential part of my work, so I naturally get excited by the sort of art they were showing off in this exhibit. There were weird projected-color pieces, light-as-sculpture pieces, and a wheelbarrow constructed of what appeared to be dozens of fluorescent tubes. I'll admit that I still don't get the wheelbarrow piece but I thoroughly enjoyed the Thomas Wilfred "lumia," especially given that I was able to look behind the screen and see the genuinely antique equipment that created the projections. The public generally never gets to see that part of a Wilfred work.

Eliasson, on the other hand, makes a point of keeping the "gear" in plain view, which I love. For me, part of the fun of a piece like "Round Rainbow," is walking into a gallery and first being stunned by the light dancing around the space and then getting to see how he pulled it off. Refract, Reflect, Project has since closed, but there's lots of good images of Eliasson's work on the web, and Take Your Time, his current show at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, will be coming to New York in April of 2008.

link to Wired News Story

Checkers Solved! Can Mouse Trap Be Far Behind?

19:00 19 July 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Justin Mullins

The ancient game of checkers (or draughts) has been pronounced dead. The game was killed by the publication of a mathematical proof showing that draughts always results in a draw when neither player makes a mistake. For computer-game aficionados, the game is now "solved"

Draughts is merely the latest in a steady stream of games to have been solved using computers, following games such as Connect Four, which was solved more than 10 years ago.

The computer proof took Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer-games expert at the University of Alberta in Canada, 18 years to complete and is one of the longest running computations in history.

In honor of his achievements, Mr. Schaeffer has been appointed to the University's prestigious Cracker Barrel Chair as Professor of Jes' Sitting on the Front Porch Playin' Checkers, Y'all.

In related news, how the heck do I get a job where I play checkers for 18 years?!

link via Boing Boing

Jeff Victor's Pop Culture Bubbleheads

Over at his blog Wicked Crispy, Jeff Victor is showcasing his extra-cute "bubblehead" character portraits. They're mostly taken from Star Wars, but there's other movie and comics referenced, as well as some examples of Jeff's commercial illustration work.

I'm loving his take on George Lucas' characters, although the portraits of humans all look like South Park characters to me.

The First Pogo Possum Strip

My dad introduced me to the Pogo comics, and I quickly fell in love with Walt Kelly's style of drawing, his characters' outrageous dialects, and the often equally outrageous lettering styles that accompanied them.
Recently, I learned that Fantagraphics will be publishing a complete collection of Pogo daily and Sunday comics in the near future. And then, today, Drawn! tells me that there's a hi-res scan of the first ever Pogo strip up at the Arflovers blog. Click on Li'l Ol' Pogo over there for the link.

Backpack Penguin!

Backpack Penguin!

Backpack Penguin!

Backpack Penguin!

Lolz.

I've been meaning to post this comic from the always excellent and nerdy webcomic XKCD. (Seriously, one of the only webcomics I've found with a decent funny : nerdy ratio.)

I have to admit, I feel a bit guilty for enjoying the whole Lolcat / Caturday phenomenon ... but that doesn't stop me from squandering hours of perfectly good internet on sites like I Can Has Cheezburger? and CuteOverload.

Also: lolrus

Thank You 120 Minutes

Last post I mentioned how MTV's 120 Minutes introduced me to a lot of great music back in the days before the Interweb. Out of curiosity, I dug up the playlists from my junior and senior years of high school to see just how much music I would have missed out on had I actually gone to bed at a decent hour on Sundays.

Quite a lot, as it turns out. Here's some of my favorites, with links to videos where I could find them. I can remember making some of my first mix tapes with these songs, patching the audio output from my parents' VCR into my boom box and recording everything onto glorious Maxell 90-minute cassettes. Fresh.

The Sisters of Mercy: I loved goth-rock before I even knew what goth was. "Lucretia My Reflection" aired in July of '88. Almost twenty years later, I still don't know what the lyrics are supposed to mean.

That same episode featured "Peek-a-Boo" by Sioxsie and the Banshees. I think I bought the cassette of Peepshow the next week.

The video for Billy Bragg's excellent "Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards" aired in June. This YouTube video is actually for "There is Power in a Union" from Talking With the Taxman About Poetry. It's worth watching for the AFL-CIO organizer in full cheerleader drag. Due to the relative obscurity of Bragg here in the States (or, at least, in Scenic Western Maryland) I didn't get my hands on an album of his until two years later, when I stumbled on copies of Worker's Playtime and Taxman in the discount bin of the Virgin megastore in London.

The Primitives' "Crash" was another July '88 offering - I must have been up late a lot that July. Apparently, it was remixed for the movie Dumb and Dumber; something I only just learned as I've been steadfastly avoiding seeing any part of that movie since it came out.

Finally, "Reptile", by The Church, aired in August of '88. I think I may have actually seen the video for "Under the Milky Way" earlier that year, but I can't prove it. Both songs together got me to pony up for a copy of Starfish in time for the back-to-school moping season. (I lettered in Mope.)

The Audacity Project

I'm slooowly working my way through a box of my old cassette tapes from the 80s and 90s, converting them to MP3 by way of a neat, free program called Audacity. Briefly, it's a program that allows me to record the input from a borrowed cassette player (thanks, Dad! I'll return it someday soon, I promise!) as a .wav file on my hard drive. I record each side of a tape as its own file, then go back through and chop it up into individual tracks. For the most part I've been happy with the results, although albums that feature tracks fading into each other can be tough to split up. Into the Labyrinth by Dead Can Dance, for example, was a royal pain.

I just finished converting one of my favorite tapes from my early college days, Only Life by The Feelies. I remember hearing "Away" for the first time on 120 Minutes, back in 1989 or so. That show lead me to a lot of good music back in the days before the Interwub...but that's a different post. Anyway, here's a link to the MP3 of "Away." Illegal, I guess, so check it out before The Man shuts me down.

Next up: Floodland by The Sisters of Mercy. Bring on the gothy goodness!