Observe The Banana

Over at London Bananas they have a collected a surprisingly large collection of photos of banana peels spotted laying around the London cityscape.

“I see them everywhere. They’re languishing on doorsteps, hanging out in the middle of the road, dangling off street signs, peeking out of piles of garbage, reclining in the middle of the sidewalk, riding the bus for free. A great number of them are bright yellow as if they’re fresh and have just been dropped, although they appear in all states of decay.”

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.

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!

I just discovered you can get your daily dose of childhood joy with Calvin and Hobbes over at calvinandhobbes.com where everyday they re-release another days strip. They are in order so you follow the story lines, and if you are so inclined you can even order fancy reprints. Go check it out, and embrace your inner tiger.

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


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:

We are very avid users of our local library. We go to the library at least once a week, frequently twice or more. We get loads of children’s books for our son the super reader, and adult fiction and non fiction, and sometimes videos (although less now that we Netflix). We love the easy interlibrary loan system available to us and are always requesting things from other libraries in the system. We often have 20-30 items out at one time with 3 or 4 different due dates. With all this going on it would be impossible to keep track of when things were due without the help of the wonderful free service “Library Elf“. This service checks our library account online daily and sends us email notifying us of when books are due the following day, or when interlibrary requests have arrived. You can configure how early it alerts you, or how often it emails. They have almost every major library system available, or (as in our case) they will be happy to add your local library system if it is a Polaris PowerPac (v3.2 or later) or a Dynix library system. Check them out!

From www.libraryelf.com:

Track your library books

Let Elf help you manage your library loans and holds

Avoid overdues with email alerts Check multiple library cards Track books, DVDs, CDs, videos, etc. Join for free

Who uses Elf?

• Anyone who wants to reduce overdues

• Families with children and lots of books

• Individuals with several library cards

• Anyone who requests a lot of holds

What’s delivered?

• Email and/or RSS alerts before items are due

• Email and/or RSS alerts on overdues and holds

• Consolidated list of yours or your family’s library loans and holds

• Cellphone text message alerts for holds (US and Canada)

• Real-time checking by browser

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.

Today while browsing the very fun and informative retro pop culture site Duck Soup Retro I discovered the world of TV Lamps. Apparently when TV’s started getting popular in homes in the 50’s there was concern that watching TV in a dark room would cause eye damage, so the TV lamp was born. These decorative lamps were made to sit on top of the TV to provide some ambient light in the room (long before the Phillips Ambilight TV) and came in a wide variety of styles. These were probably purchased for their decorative value as much as for health concerns. The cool one at Duck Soup includes a painted mountain scene behind what appears to be a small fish tank. Upon some further searching I found www.tvlamps.net which includes more historical information and many photographs of a wide variety of TV lamps.

I am somewhat new to the world of podcast fiction, but was looking for something to occupy my attention on long bike rides and came across the excellent Escape Pod Science Fiction podcast magazine at http://escapepod.org/ . Today I enjoyed listening to the rather humorous story “Conversations With and About My Electric Toothbrush” and I look forward to discovering more good treasures on their site. I also really like that each entry includes a rating like movies and video games so I know which ones I can share with B, who really enjoyed todays G rated story of the talking electric toothbrush.