Sao Paulo Goes Advertising Free

"Back in December, 2006, the mayor of the 11-million-person Brazilian city of Sao Paulo banned all outdoor billboard advertising, citing advertisers' unwillingness to comply with the city's rules on what sort of billboards can be placed where. Now the rule is in effect, and Flickr user Tony de Marco has documented the eerie sight of a city stripped bare of commercial visuals."

Quote and Link from Boing Boing

...This picture set is amazing

Internet Clean Slate

Here's an article in Yahoo News about researchers potentially scrapping the internet as it currently exists.

The information about the rebuilding is interesting, but more interesting is the manner in which everyone in the article refers to the internet. It is constantly referred to as an actual physical thing, and the discussion also brings up a lot of how integrated the internet has already become in our society.

Thought you all may find this interesting.

Perhaps a little optimism from a gentleman.

Second Life Memorial for Jean Baudrillard

Ars Virtua, a gallery and new media center located in Second Life, held a virtual wake for the passing of philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard. Very interesting.

The New Sound of New York

Hunter College is inviting the New York general public to submit sounds recorded anywhere in the five buroughs. Sounds are archived on a (google generated) citywide map. Have a look at www.soundseeker.org

Blight of the Suburbs

New York Times article about the "spreading economic fallout of mortgage foreclosures" in the Cleveland suburbs. Interesting read for all the Long Islanders out there.

The Sound of Music

This piece by Andrew Demirjian tracks the stock prices of the three music mega-corporations and converts them into music. From VVORK.

Post-Post

"microsoft word doesn't understand duchamp"


and "hugsuit" by joshua schwartz

"The Great Global Warming Swindle"

This is from the latest post from RealClimate.org concerning a UK TV program that just aired entitled The Great Global Warming Swindle. Below are the YouTube videos for it, or watch the whole thing on google. Messed.

"Holy crap! That's the biggest f&$%ing squid I've ever seen!"

"Sick bro. Let's kill it!"
"Yeah dude."

Newsday- February 23, 2007

Get democracy

A Cooper Union grad and a WPI grad came together to put together a website called Democracy: Internet TV, a free press sort of sight. Check it out.

http://www.getdemocracy.com/

A sprinkle of water

This guy named Buckminster Fuller had a pretty cool idea about 80 years ago. First, the inspiration. He was at the helm of a boat cruising along after having gotten his hands dirty with grease. Must to his surprise, he found that the sea mist was taking the grease off of his hands. After a little experiment back home, he deduced that it was the mistiness that was key.

So here's his idea: have water come out of the faucet and shower as a fine mist. I haven't seen anything like this and it's been 80 years, so I was skeptical. I happened to have a little water spritzer handy and a dirty dish of encrusted pasta sauce, so I ran my own experiment. Guess the results.

Ok, so with about 20 little spritzes of water, my dish was wet enough to wipe clean. The water in the bottle was at room temperature and I didn't use any soap. I'm pretty sure it would have taken me at least a cup or two of water to clean it conventionally, compared to the table spoon or so of water I spritzed.

So what? Well, imagine all the water that could be saved by having spritzing faucets in public restrooms and apartments without dishwashers. Fuller had showers too, but I'm not such a fan of that application.

Run your own experiment at home with an emptied perfume/cologne bottle; or be messed, it's up to you.

I think I'm learning Japanese.

Some interesting statistics come from the Japan For Sustainability website. The article describes a city which has declared to practice "slow life".

"Humans live about 700,800 hours (assuming an average life expectancy of 80 years), of which we spend about 70,000 hours working (assuming we work for 40 years). The remaining 630,000 hours are spent on other activities, such as eating, studying, and leisure, including 230,000 hours sleeping. Until now, people often focused their lives on these 70,000 hours of labor, devoting their lives to their companies. However, with the "slow life" principles, we would now like to pay more attention to the 630,000 hours outside of work to achieve true happiness and peace of mind."

Also check out the insightful cartoons draw by Prof. Hiroshi Takatsuki a.k.a 'High Moon'.

Reinventing the wheel...

The developing relationship between robots and humans

Thanks to Boing Boing

Hoots callin' me?

In this week's issue of New Scientist (No. 2592) there is an article about researchers at MIT who have extended the functionality of the cell phone to include communication with other species. The project is yet another example of how researchers are using the internet to draw on volunteers or "citizen-scientists" to help them process the huge amount of data necessary to effectively monitor the environment. By calling on these around-the-world-logged-on citizen-scientists, researchers can create networks of sensor nodes (in this case, cell phones) at ever higher resolutions with minimal impact on the area under study. Granted there are problems inherent with relying on "non-scientists" to accurately collect and analyze experimental data, but the hope is that the researchers can create a clever user interface which is both instructive and intuitive, thus minimizing the potential for error.

I attempted to call the owl's at the website for the Owl Project, but collection was offline. You can get a feel for the interface (which unfortunately is geared towards researchers) in the scheduler section, where it appears you can schedule an experiment.

HDRI means sexy.

High dynamic range imagining (HDRI) is a method of combining bracketed exposures of digital images by a process called tone mapping. The effect is a stylized image which offerers an amazingly (un)real view of the subject. In other words, some freaking sweet photos.



A gallery with over 25,000 HDR images: stuck in customs.
A good sub-album of that album.

Ironic celebrity tatoos

A multi media presentation

Glenn Branca is awesome.

Maybe this isn't a typical Chippies post, but Glenn Branca is one awesome composer/performer - he was doing lots of very cool [what's-now-referred-to-as] noise-rock "symphonies" 30 years before it become known as a hipster music genre. He was part of [what's-now-referred-to-as] the "no-wave" movement in NYC in the late '70s and early '80s.

Check these out too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Branca
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_wave

Scrambled Hacks

This is probably one of the coolest things I've ever seen.