Category: Art

Categories
design

The Future of Dubai Buildings

Designboom has picked out 50 amazing architectural projects currently being proposed, constructed, or developed in Dubai and its surrounding region in a new article entitled, The future in Dubai, any one of which is truly an amazing endeavor.

There is some amazing stuff there and they didn’t even mention the World Islands, a collection of man made islands made to resemble the world continents or Dubailand, a collection of amusement parks twice the size of the Walt Disney World parks.

Pictured here is a render of the completed Burj Dubai. Construction began in 2005 and is expected to be completed this year. At an estimated height of over 800 meters, it will easily be world’s tallest building when finished. It will be almost 40% taller than the the current tallest building, the Yaipei 101.

Apparently the Al Burj, when completed will take over the title of world’s tallest building at 1200 meters. That would make it more than 30% taller than the Burj Dubai and three times as tall as the Empire State Building.

Some other interesting projects not mentioned in the article:

  • Dubai Sports City. A huge collection of sports arenas located in Dubailand.
  • The Dubai Marina is an entirely man made development that will contain over 200 highrise buildings when finished.
  • The Dubai Mall will be the largest shopping mall in the world with over 9 million square feet of shopping and around 1000 stores.
  • Ski Dubai, which is already open, the largest indoor skiing facility in the world.
  • The Dubai Metro system, once completed, will become the largest fully automated rail system in the world.
  • The Dubai World Central International Airport will become the largest airport in size when it is completed. It will also eventually become the busiest airport in the world, based on passenger volume.
Categories
education Music

Guitar Noise Podcast

Guitar Noise PodcastI just subscribed to the Guitar Noise Podcast. In the first episode, managing editor David Hodge goes through some of the basics of strumming. If you’re just learning the guitar, as I am—my parents gave me a guitar over the holidays, then I recommend you check it out.

I hope that, as they get a little more familiar with the technology, they will take advantage of dividing their podcasts into chapters and then show relevant “artwork” such as a JPG of the strumming pattern or chords that they want you to hit. But as it stands now, it’s still a great example of using podcasts for teaching.

(Yes, I realize in order to use chapters the podcast needs to be in AAC format instead of mp3, but as an iTunes user, it’s a trade-off that works for me. Perhaps they could have two streams, a normal podcast and an enhanced m4a version.)

Feed link.

Categories
Photography Science

Advanced Photography Research at Stanford

Last fall Robert Scoble and Thomas Hawk interviewed Marc Levoy, Stanford University Professor of both computer science and electrical engineering.

Levoy shows them leading edge research about automatically stitching images together, digitizing real world three dimensial objects like statues, and among others, camera technology that allows you to refocus the image AFTER you shoot it!

Multi-array image

You can view the interview here.

See also: CNet’s article about the multi-dimensional focusing technology.

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Categories
life Photography Sport

Basketball Dunking

Jeff DunkingBy way of a little self indulgence, here is a photo my brother took of me dunking the basketball last weekend. Does my long hair and beard remind anyone else of Teen Wolf?

Categories
animation Music

Knitted Animation Music Video

This amazing music video by Director Simon Laganière, for the Quebec duo Tricot Machine, uses artwork of entirely knitted yarn to animate each frame. (A tricot is a plain, warp-knitted cloth of any of various yarns.)

Over 700 unique knitted pieces were created for the video by designer Lysanne Latulippe of the fashion label Majolie.

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Categories
animation movie

Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts for 2008

The Oscar nominations for the 80th annual Academy Awards were released yesterday. The nominations in the class of Best Animated Short Film are:

  • I Met The Walrus (Josh Raskin) View
  • Madame Tutli-Putli (NFB, Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski) View
  • Meme Les Pigeons Vont Au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go To Heaven) (Samuel Tourneux and Simon Vanesse) View
  • My Love (Moya Lyubov) (Alexander Petrov) Part one, part two, part three
  • Peter And The Wolf (Suzie Templeton and Hugh Welchman) View DIVX version.

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Categories
life Music

Learning to Play the Guitar in the 21st Century

In answer to the age of question of “What would you like for Christmas”, I told my parents I would be interested in having a guitar. A couple of Christmas’s later, my parents came through for me! I am now the proud owner of a fantastic sounding Fender acoustic guitar.

Learning to play has been slow but rewarding. The first couple of days were painful on my fingertips. Then suddenly, after a blister or two, I can now play for as long as I like.

It’s great.

Really.

Practise

The guitar I picked out came as a package along with extra strings, a strap, some picks, a tuner, and a “Getting Started on Guitar” DVD.

I was surprised to find how easy and useful the DVD turned out to be. The host teaches you how to play a basic chord and then another track lets you play along to some canned backup music. The process repeats, slowly building up your skill.

It’s pretty sweet; my only complaint is that after the music stops, you have to grab the remote and navigate back to the song to start it playing again. It would be nice to be able to set it to repeat, and to have more than 3 practice tracks.

Lately I discovered a method of practising that solves this problem.

I got myself a copy of “Play Guitar Today! A Complete Guide to the Basics”. It’s a music book for beginners that has a CD enclosed for backup music. Well I ripped the CD to iTunes, scanned the music, and then set each track with it’s appropriate “album art” ie. the sheet music or instruction that fits.

iTunes—Sheet music as album art

Now when I practise the guitar, iTunes is the teacher. The corresponding sheet music pops up and I can go to town.

It was a bit of a hassle setting this up, but I’d recommend it to anyone learning to play—it’s totally worth it.

I wonder how long it will be until they sell it like this?

Categories
Photography

Time’s The Year in Images

The best images of 2007 as picked out by Time. (Someone needs to teach the time.com web developers the magic of AJAX).

Categories
Art download

Heraldic Brush Set

The other day I came across a neat collection of “Heraldry Brushes” by MrTentacleGuy on deviantART. I was disappointed to find out that the brushes were actually in vector format and while great for resizing and maintaining their original integrity in Illustrator, not very handy for quick and dirty Photoshop work where a brush set (.abr) is all you really want.

So I took his heraldry vector collection and made it into a brush set. I’m releasing it under the same Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Here is a little sample I threw together using the new brushes (sorry the red background is not part of the set).

Heraldic Brush Set Example

Download the Heraldic Brush Set (.zip)

There are over 70 high resolution brushes in this set! If you use it, please leave a comment and don’t hesitate to link back to your work as well.

Categories
Photography

From Wednesday’s Photoshoot