e-clecticism: February 2012

Wednesday, 29 February 2012

Emoticons

Its been a while since I posted a TED talk so let me rectify that today. Rives (you may remember I posted one of his talks before) tells us a bittersweet typographical fairy tale. Enjoy!

Tuesday, 28 February 2012

A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View.

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

Monday, 27 February 2012

Sorry George

I sadly missed the date completely but the 25th of this month would have been George Harrison's 69th birthday. As a late celebration enjoy this short clip from Martin Scorsese's recent biopic George Harrison - Living in the Material World. It shows Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton discussing George's finest Beatles (in my opinion) composition, Here Comes The Sun.

Saturday, 25 February 2012

Thijme Termaat

Dutch artist Thijme Termaat was not content with producing beautiful pieces of art, so he went one step further and produced a time-lapse video he called I Paint of him working on his collection. The video is now going viral. See his website if you'd like to know more, or even purchase some of his work.

Friday, 24 February 2012

CassetteBoy

YouTube user CassetteBoy has a great knack for splicing and editing things to give them an hilarious spin. Check out his channel but below is my favourite, CassetteBoy v The News. It was made from 15 editions of the BBC's News at Six during January 2012.

Thursday, 23 February 2012

Porkka Rhapsody

Just when I might start to think I'd seen it all. Award winning street band Porkka Playboys from Finland perform a cracking cover of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody...Where else but in a rusty old Volkswagen Polo. Enjoy and check out their website.

Wednesday, 22 February 2012

Rope Swing

Don't try this at home kids! Filmed at the Corona Arch in Moab Utah, the makers insist this is the world's largest rope swing. It gives me goosebumps, but it sure makes me smile too.

Tuesday, 21 February 2012

Jealous Monkey

I shouldn't find this hilarious, but I do. As YouTube user NRucker5 explains...

This is at the cafe inside the Memphis Zoo. The manager of the cafe told me that the alpha male monkey noticed me the second I walked in the door and started going crazy, because, as the alpha male, he feels threatened by tall males. So she told me to go stand by the window and turn my back on him and that he would "attack" me.

Monday, 20 February 2012

FPS Video

This made me chuckle. Italian Youtube user Francesco Zucchi decided to turn the odious task of shovelling snow in to a first person shooter game, using his GoPro camera. It seems Italy has had way more snow than we have this year.

Sunday, 19 February 2012

Aokigahara Forest

I need to warn you that the following video contains scenes that some of you might find upsetting.

The Aokigahara Forest is the most popular site for suicides in Japan. After the novel Kuroi Jukai was published, in which a young lover commits suicide in the forest, people started taking their own lives there at a rate of 50 to 100 deaths a year. This film features a geologist who works a lot in the forest (the forest sits at the base of Mt. Fuji) and has personally found over 100 bodies.

Perhaps because of my own recent experience, rather than find this film morbid and depressing, I found the attitude of the geologist strangely comforting. He shows great wisdom and understanding which really rang true with me. I hope you get something from it too.

Friday, 17 February 2012

Prying Eyes

We are often warned about what we reveal of ourselves online. Whether it be photos on Facebook, dirty laundry on Twitter or personal details on Google+, there is no doubt we are quite willing to share like we never have before and it perhaps is still not clear how this might come back to bite us in the future. Does anyone actually read the privacy policies of any of these sites?

But perhaps you're not concerned, at the end of the day, you are freely allowing this information to be used. You are choosing to upload it right? But how much do you give away involuntarily? Google recently revised its privacy policy so it was consolidated across their services. Perhaps then it might be time to look at this add on for the Firefox, Safari and Chrome web browsers. "Google Alarm" will visually & audibly alert you when your personal information is being sent to Google servers.

Even outside Gmail and YouTube you are constantly sending information to Google through their vast network of tracking bugs: Google Analytics, Google AdSense, YouTube embeds, API calls...All of this data be used to monitor & track your personal web browsing habits.

See it in action below of give it a try here.

Google Alarm from Jamie Dubs on Vimeo.

Thursday, 16 February 2012

Soft Guerilla

Kyle Bean is a very talented young designer who specialises in hand-crafted models. His website and portfolio can be found here but I wanted to share a few images with you from a recent collection called Soft Guerilla where deadly weapons are made from harmless materials. Click to enlarge.

Wednesday, 15 February 2012

Painting At Speed

This is so impressive I'm still not convinced that I haven't been duped. Judge for yourself if this guy can really create miniature works of art in under three minutes by using his fingers, or if it's actually Photoshop. :-)

Tuesday, 14 February 2012

London

This weekend I took the family to London. Outside of work I rarely get to go and, having been born in Dublin, most of the children had never been. We had a lovely time doing the tourist thing and I even got to take some photographs too. Here are a couple of my favourites.

Monday, 13 February 2012

Rain Jousting

Sorry for the sparseness of the posts over the last few days. I've had quite a bit on, but no excuses, just on with the show. Here's a bit of fun. US college baseball players keep the crowd entertained during an extended rain delay.

Saturday, 11 February 2012

Killer Clones

This is pure brilliance. YouTube user FreddeGedde creates multiple versions of himself to perform a great cover of Killer Queen by Queen.

Friday, 10 February 2012

Needing/Getting

I have posted about the band OK Go several times before. They seem to have a real wacky genius when it comes to their music videos and the latest is no exception. Enjoy!

The new music video from OK Go, made in partnership with Chevrolet. OK Go set up over 1000 instruments over two miles of desert outside Los Angeles. A Chevy Sonic was outfitted with retractable pneumatic arms designed to play the instruments, and the band recorded this version of Needing/Getting, singing as they played the instrument array with the car. The video took 4 months of preparation and 4 days of shooting and recording. There are no ringers or stand-ins; Damian took stunt driving lessons. Each piano had the lowest octaves tuned to the same note so that they'd play the right note no matter where they were struck.

Thursday, 9 February 2012

Build a TARDIS

So of course this blog is an eclectic mix of my interests, but sometimes I'm lucky to come across things that just tick all the boxes for me, and this is one of those times. sillysparrowness describes herself like this...

A German teacher with a leaning towards silliness and a bunch of quirky likes, obsessive enough to regularly upload videos, sometimes about school, sometimes about anything I find inspiring, always about chickens (at least in spirit).

...And she decided to build herself a TARDIS from my favourite TV show, Doctor Who. She is a geek's dream girl. :-)

Wednesday, 8 February 2012

New Domain

Blogosphere as a network of interconnections

Image via Wikipedia

Hello loyal readers (including the lurkers that I don't know about). Those of you that have been following this blog for a while will remember that it wasn't always hosted at e-clecticism.blogspot.com but once had its very own domain of e-clecticism.com. Sadly this was hijacked from me when I wasn't reminded of its renewal and I lost an awful lot of followers in the process. I have resigned myself to the fact that e-clecticism.com is long gone and is never to return (it appears to be a Japanese health & beauty blog now) but the simple fact is that a domain of your own seems to help a blog progress in a big way. Not only in terms of readership but exposure and features as well. So I have therefore taken the bold step of trying again (with extra precautions this time) with a brand new domain of www.e-clecticism.net. So although I have a redirect in place if I can kindly ask all of my friends out there in the blogosphere to update their links, bookmarks and indeed to spread the word, I would be most grateful.

Also, can I remind you all I'm still interested in getting some guest bloggers organised. Take a look here for details.

Tuesday, 7 February 2012

What Computers See

How do computers see the world? It might not come to a shock to you, but computers don’t see like you or I do. They are programmed to recognise something, like movement or a change in brightness, and then, if the programmer wants, they are given parameters by which they can visualise what they “see”. The following video is a look at how something we've designed can make the world we know so well, seem so foreign and complex.

Robot readable world from Timo on Vimeo.

Monday, 6 February 2012

Image Recursion

Are you familiar with Google's Search By Image feature? If not, you may want to watch this before watching the video below. Sebastian Schmeig, a Berlin-based artist, set up a recursive image search algorithm and animated the results at 12 images per second, tracing its evolutionary drift. Beginning with a transparent .png image file, the "Search By Image" function turns up the most similar image it can find and then searches for the closest match to that image, and so on. The resulting flip book of 2,951 images is fascinating and quite hypnotic.

Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG, #1 from kingcosmonaut3000 on Vimeo.

Sunday, 5 February 2012

Swarm!

I have posted about quadrocoptors before but this is definitely worth watching. The GRASP (General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception) lab at the University of Pennsylvania has developed a nano version and linked several together so that they can fly in quite intricate formations. A swarm if you will.

Friday, 3 February 2012

Phil Lynott

Having lived in Dublin's fair city for many years, I couldn't help but get a great education when it came to the Irish music scene. One of the superstars I wish I could have met has to have been Phil Lynott. I was sadly too late and had to be content with visiting his grave and listening to his superb legacy. Check out this rather nice animation that was made for the Why Music Matters campaign.

Phil Lynott from Conor Ryan on Vimeo.

Thursday, 2 February 2012

Appliance Murder

This video is just one of those strangely compelling ones. Someone causes a washing machine to self-destruct by loading it with heavy objects. Watching it slowly tear itself apart, I can't help feeling saddened as if it were a tortured animal. Finally the murderer throws in a large brick to put the poor creature out of its misery and with a final death scream from its electric motor, it goes to meet its maker. I need to go and watch something funny now.

Wednesday, 1 February 2012

One Man Orchestra

Here's a great piece of music to brighten your day. A street performer in Spokane uses an electric violin and a loop pedal to create a wonderfully "big" sound all by himself. Enjoy!