Observe The Banana

Apparently my message has reached the American public. It’s a movement people!

A guest post from Uncle Jack

Last night on the tube I saw an ad for the new Journey to the Center of the Earth movie. Brendan Fraser movies are generally a plus in my book [he is George of the Jungle!], and I had read that some of the movie was shot in Iceland –prob’ly places I never saw– so I was interested. I had also read the Verne novel when I was a kid, and was curious as to whether the new movie includes the Snorri Sturluson angle.

So far, Snorri seems to be left out. The IMDB cast listing is only six names long and no Snorri. Next I check the “Official Site.” There I’m greeted by bombastic theme music and the rest of a typical official movie site stuff, much of which doesn’t work. Of note is the Vernian Log that links you to the “Asgeirsson Institute for Progressive Volcanology,” and a “polar opposites” widget. The first has me wondering if this movie’ll be the Indiana Jones of hard geology –I’ve gotta look up my college neighbor and ask– and the second purportedly finds one’s antipodal location on the globe.

The widget was fun for as long as it took for me to notice that everybody I know lives opposite the Indian Ocean. I s’pose that you enter your global location as a US zip code should have tipped me off. Determined to test the limits of this widget’s powerful technology *heh, heh* I look up zip codes in Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Interestingly, Kotzebu, AK is still opposite the Indian Ocean [near Antarctica], but Hanalei, HI is opposite somewhere along the Namibian/Botswana border [not Madagascar] and San Juan, PR is opposite somewhere outside Helen Springs, Australia. Methinks the widget’s algorithm is a wee bit off.

I come out of this adventure feeling a little robbed ["No Snorri! Crappy widget!"], but at least it was educational. I now have a better idea how large the Indian Ocean is, and I found a locality check tool that is much more fun.

Addendum:
According to IMDb, the 1959 JTTCOTE [hereafter pronounced "Jaitey-coat"] had Pat Boone [yes, that Pat Boone] and James Mason scampering around Lone Pine, CA pretending it was Iceland.

I guess watching time lapse video of rocks can be interesting after all, you just have to wait long enough

Das Rad

We just watched the movie Chronos from Netflix.

The description said, “Chronos is a wonder — it’s the first nonverbal, nonfiction movie filmed entirely in time-lapse photography.”

I thought, “time lapse photography, that should be cool. Plants shooting out of the ground, storm clouds massing, swirling and dissipating, the sun and moon chasing each other across the sky as days fly by. There are lots things in nature that look way cool when sped up through time lapse photography.”

Unfortunately this movie had none of those things. Instead they had, almost exclusively, rocks, statues, monuments and buildings. What do all these things have in common? Nothing moves! Staring at 5 minutes of a stone formation compressed from 5 hours is really no more interesting than 5 minutes of standard film would have been. And since the time compressed was only of hours, not days or weeks, you did not see erosion, the sun racing across the sky, or clouds swirling by, instead you saw a shadow . . . creeping . . . slowly creeping . . . slightly faster than usual, but still creeping, across the terrain. -yawn- . Then a sunbeam sweeping . . . again only slightly faster, across a room. This movie showed a lot of very beautiful scenery, yet it was painfully boring to watch. Just past the mid-point they had some city traffic scenes, which were kinda cool, then some pedestrian traffic streaking through a train station that was really cool. Then back to buildings with nothing moving at all. The good news was that this film was only 45 minutes long, much more and I would have just stopped it. I actually watched large portions of it with the DVD player set on double speed, and that made it tolerable. It even helped the “music” sound decent. Based on the reviews on Netflix I can see that some people loved this movie, I guess if you could slow down enough (meditation maybe? or heavy sedation more likely) it could be a beautiful thing, but for me and B it was waste of time.

If you are going to make time lapse video of rocks, you need to wait long enough to make it interesting.

Todays YouTube Banana sighting - Banana Phone! Catchy tune, clever lyrics, and bananas; what’s not to love?

Update: Okay, I just learned that is a Raffi song from 1994 which has been the basis of quite a few internet videos, but I still like this sped up version more than several others I have seen. Enjoy

Here is a rather odd Banana sighting from YouTube.

This dark German techno tells the tale of a young man und his appealing attributes.

Beware the milky pirate!

Now here is a guy with some mad skillz on an excavator. Watch as he carefully (partially) undresses the rather brave women using a large Case tracked excavator with (what I think is) a dangle demolition grapple. Appears to be from Italian television. Apparantly “scommettiamo che…?” translates to “We bet that…?”




Stripped by a Mechanical Shovel! - video powered by Metacafe


OK, this is weird, this guy not only built a cool machine to shoot 3.5″ floppy disks (which isn’t really so weird), but then made a wacky bizarre video about it. “…transfer files effortlessly to your computer, with extreme prejudice”. “Also effective against squirrels, vegans, clowns, hippies, street urchins, girl scouts, and more!” And I never knew that using a CD to transfer data could be so hazardous.
Enjoy!

I have recently been noticing that watching broadcast television is less and less worth the effort. Between the plague of mind numbingly stupid reality shows, the insultingly huge quantity of commercials inserted into any movie, and the musical chairs scheduling making it impossible to regularly find the rare show I do like - I find I just don’t watch much TV in the evenings anymore. I do time shift (with my good old fashion VCR) a couple of shows like Dr. Who and Mythbusters that I enjoy, but otherwise I usually just turn off the TV and turn to the computer. I have had fun introducing my son to classic Looney Toons cartoons (back when they knew how to make a funny cartoon) via YouTube, but it is always a hit and miss game finding complete episodes and you never know when your going to hit one where someone has dubbed offensive rap music over bugs bunny or something. I just recently discovered the wonderful web site Hulu which offers up a variety of television shows and even some whole movies. They have things as new as last nights Simpsons episodes, and old classic TV as well. There are a few short commercials, one at the beginning, and one in the middle, on most things, but they are short (usually 15sec) and generally not very obnoxious. The other night it was kind of funny to realize we were sitting in front of the turned off television, watching new Simpsons on the laptop on the coffee table. It took years of concentrated effort, but the television executives are finally succeeding at driving away their audience. And a bonus to discovering Hulu was discovering the Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, a bizarre PeeWee’s Playhouse like spoof of Japanese television.

TechE Blog has a nice feature on robots what can skillfully play a musical instrument. I like the way the trumpet player and violin player move and sway to the music they are playing in a very life-like way. The percussion player is very cool in the way it improvises along with a human drummer. I am also impressed with the quality of music they produce as playing a musical instrument requires some subtle control. I wonder how the trumpet player changes its “mouth” to produce different notes from one valve position. I imagine iit won’t be long before we see a entire band or even orchestra made up entirely of robots.

TechEBlog » Feature: Robots That Can Skillfully Play a Musical Instrument

I love this little drumming robot called “Yellow Drum Machine”. I like reading about little “carpet rover” robots, and have done some experimenting with Lego Mindstorms in navigation and obstacle avoidance, but once you have created a little bot that can wander around and avoid things the next obvious question is “now what?” This creative individual answered that by making his bot not just avoid obstacles, but instead drum on them. It finds a suitable surface and plays a little riff with its two front drum sticks while recording what it hears. It then it plays back the riff in a loop and drums along adding in a little floor stick in the rear. Very creative idea. I can imagine a group of these communicating with some swarm behavior programming to find drummable surfaces and make music together. Watch the video and tap along….

Why? Well.. I was sitting thinking what I should do for my next robot, what it should do.. Listening to music.. making a rythm with some robot-parts.. Thought; “Hey, I will make a robot that drives around and plays on stuff”

Get more video and some good technical details at:
Yellow Drum Machine

Today is March 14, or 3/14 which is international Pi day. How will you celebrate it? We have settled on the old standby and made a pie. B made her amazing Kaluha cream pie actually - yum (Basically a dream whip and chocolate pudding pie with a splash of Kaluha for added flavor). There are lots of fun pi day things on the web, a good place to start is http://www.piday.org/ . Interestingly, March 14 also happens to be Albert Einstein’s birthday.
In our household, the number pi will always somehow be linked to the expression of perfection by our favorite robot in love:

I love wind turbines both as a great way to make clean power, and as beautiful things to watch. I really don’t buy the stock ‘eyesore’ argument always repeated in articles about wind farms. I often watch our local turbine and find it easily more attractive than a smokestack. So it is with a certain sadness and morbid fascination that I watch this dramatic video of a wind turbine self destructing. The slow motion replays are amazing. You can see how first one blade goes, which throws it off balance and it twists slightly causing the next blade to hit the support tower.

[From Gizmodo]
[via TechEBlog]

Update:
Boing-Boing has an entry on this today with a slightly different video that leaves out the slow motion replay, but runs a little longer showing the aftermath. They also include the explanation: “The braking mechanism that limits the speed of the wind turbine broke during a storm in Denmark. This was the outcome.” and a link to a news article on the failure. Apparantly it was one of two failures last week of Vestas wind turbines in Denmark. Poor maintenance is suspected.

Over at Extremepumpkins.com they have lots of examples of fantastic pumpkin carving, but I am particularly fond of the “World’s Fastest Pumpkin Carver” video. This guy welded up a set up blades shaped like a classic jack-o-lantern face and attached them to a long pipe handle. With one swing at a pumpkin he produces a basic jack-o-lantern (or a smashed pumpkin when it goes wrong.) Nice.

[Link]

B was very patient trying on every hat I could find in the house (what…you don’t have a hat trunk in your house?) while I took pictures. Music by Barenaked Ladies. Enjoy!