Here's a little piece of animation that's almost 100 years old. Windsor McKay was so far ahead of the artistic curve that the world still hasn't caught up. He drew every frame himself, and this was many years before Walt Disney did his thing. Watch and be impressed.
The folks at Gizmodo pull back the curtain of mystery on the Lego factory tour and reveal a wonderous place filled with robotic factory workers and injection-molded goodness as you like it!
Check out this prize-winning animation that uses computer visualization of very low frequency sounds created by magnetic fields to try and see what magnetic fields might look like. Way cool stuff that mixes real science with cutting edge art. You can read a lot more about it and see it at a larger size here. If you have a slow connection, I recommend pausing this and letting it load on your computer so you can watch it without the heartbreak of jerkus interuptis.
Remember when video games were things you had to leave the house to play? Back when I was a kid you needed a pocket full of quarters and a way to get to the arcade to get your fix of bleeps and bloops. Now you can relive the experience again (sans quarters) at California Extreme 2008. Every year all the best classic video gamers descend on the Parkside exhibit hall in downtown San Jose for the biggest classic gaming show around. Not just video games, but all your favorite electro-mechanical games like pinball and all the rest. You'll find me in the pinball section, I hope to see you there!
The Mythbusters need your help to try for the third time to debunk the myth of Archimedes Death Ray, which was supposedly used to light Greek ships on fire by 300 Roman soldiers. They've tried testing it twice already, but both times their tests seemed really flawed.
On one hand, it seems unlikely to be true. On the other hand, Archimedes was a pretty smart dude, and we've all lit fires with magnifying lenses, so who knows? They need a few hundred volunteers to set something on fire in an undisclosed bay area location sometime in September, so click the link above if you're interested.
Actually there are several reasons, including the fact that I spend so much time with the computer already, I don't need another reason to. But more importantly than that, as a programmer, I know that there must be other less than scrupulous programmers (who are waaaay smarter than me) out there figuring out ways to gain an edge in online games.
I once actually overheard a conversation between two college students where one said she was renting her identity to someone to use to play online poker. It's so easy to spoof one's IP address that there just have to be lots of folks who are out there playing 3 or 5 hands at one single table. Even just seeing one other player's cards at the table gives you a huge edge in the right situations.
Now to make matters even worse, some smarty-pants at the University of Alberta have created Polaris, a poker playing program that took down a table full of poker pros and came out on top. Basically, this means that it plays perfect poker and never gets tired or goes "on tilt" like us pesky meat puppets. Yet another good reason to just play poker with humans, and let the robots battle each other into oblivion.
This wall-mounted cocktail mixing machine looks like so much fun it makes me want to take up drinking. I these kind of machines a lot, and the coolest part is that they were all inspired by comics by the legendary cartoonist Rube Goldberg, for whom the National Cartoonists Society named their coveted Reuben award after. He was trained as an engineer at UC Berkeley but quit that to persue his love of drawing comics. Good move!
Join rock poster and scooter artist R Black as he putts down the coast from Oakland to San Diego on his 1979 Vespa promoting the release of his new book: L'Art De R. Black: Futura. He'll be making a stop at Hijinx on Sunday, July 13th starting around noon. Get inside the creative mind at Hijinx Comics!
There's something funny about this graph that's generated using Google's cool charting API. It allows you to generate very cool graphs just by futzing with the url of the image. I discovered this graph when I was messing around with different values for the simple data encoding.
It's pretty nerdly, but I still thought it was funny. Don't get it? Check out the url used to generate the image and prepare to not laugh very much at all, but be glad if you get it.
Due to the holiday, comics will be shipping on Thursday July 10th instead of Wednesday. Don't let the terrorists win. Instead, go celebrate independence by blowing stuff up yourself!
I saw this video on the Flowing Data blog (the best data visualization blog I know of) that tries to put the costs of the Iraq war into terms we can understand. Check it out, but be prepared to get angry.
