A collection of digital wonders and some other stuff
What you are about to watch is truly remarkable, and it just gets better as it goes.
Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from [Flickr], Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo.
See more on Seadragon and Photosynth.
Paul Dunay, of Buzz Marketing for Technology has a recap of Malcolm Gladwell’s recent speech at the World Innovation Forum about, what else, innovation.
Paul found an opportunity to speak with Gladwell during the conference and recorded his interview.
Gladwell illustrates some of his points from his book, The Tipping Point, and what I found to be quite interesting, how the “last mile problem of marketing” is still trouble for marketers.
“The last mile in word of mouth marketing is personal relationships. At the end of the day I’m most powerfully influenced by those I know, respect and love,” explains Gladwell. The most complicated marketing scheme in the world won’t have a very strong affect on any given individual if the people that that individual trusts aren’t moved by the product.
Gladwell also talks a little bit about his new book. He says it’s about exceptional performers and high achievers, how they got there, and what we can learn from them.
Listen to the “Buzz Marketing for Technology’s” interview with Malcolm Gladwell.
I came across this Superman parody which I think you will enjoy. It’s called “How Superman Should Have Ended” and I couldn’t agree more.
After six very spread out seasons, The Sopranos series comes to a close tonight. Here’s a sheet and some suggested rules to set up a household pool about who’s going to die, how, and other predictions.
Personally, I think Tony’s going to get whacked.
As a follow-up to the recent Malcolm Gladwell speech at the New Yorker 2012 conference, here is a documentary all about Fermat’s Last Theorem (wikipedia) and its proof by Andrew Wiles in 1994.
BBC Horizon – Fermat's Last Theorem from mmenchu on Vimeo.
Even if math isn’t your thing, there is something intriguing about following Wiles’ seven year struggle to solve the mystery. In general I get a bit of a rush out of the beauty of mathematics but watching Wiles create a proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem was just magical.
Ryan Uhrich, an artist living in Edmonton, AB has created a wonderful motion graphics piece called Typographics (19mb Quicktime).
I love watching this kind of thing and wish I was more experienced with compositing.
Paul Preece, creator of Desktop Tower Defense, shares some inside info about his tremendously popular game in a recent interview. He claims to be making nearly $100,000 a year in ad revenue.
Check out this interesting collection of do-it-yourself papercraft. My favorite is the AT-AT Walkers from Star Wars.
Here is the AT-AT papercraft.pdf (234KB)
(Via BoingBoing)
Last week I received an email touting the great benefits of a new kind of web advertising for eBay auctions, called “Auction Ads”. The email stated that just for signing up I’d get a bonus of $5 put into my account within two business days. Well four days passed with nothing, so I emailed them. They responded by saying it takes a week for the money to show up on my account. It has now been about a week and two days. I’ve given them over 24,000 ad views and they’ve given me nothing.
My advice: don’t waste your time with auction ads.
“After the Warming”, stars James Burke, whom you may remember from the days when TLC actually showed educational television and not just a bunch of reality-tv remixes in various flavors of “how to buy a house”, “how to fix up a house”, “how to flip a house”, or “how to be an cretin while making motorcycles”.
“After the Warming” is like a special edition of Connections (wikipedia) in which we learn how changes in civilization, the weather, and industrialization brought on the current climate crisis we now face.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfE8wBReIxw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJLyPSRusc
[“After the Warming” is] an early documentary about global warming. It theorizes and tells facts about the effects global weather has had on our history. It then theorizes a lot more about its effects on our future and especially the way in which we will overcome it’s bad effects. If you don’t mind some, not proofed, theorizing from a reasonably intelligent guy, and are interested in our climate, this is probably a must see.
I found the news clip style predictions of an increase in hurricanes, rising oceans levels, and the devastation of New Orleans particularly chilling. Some of the prediction dates were a bit off, but interesting to think about anyway.
(via)