A collection of digital wonders and some other stuff
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)
Check out the top ten best 8-bit games as rated by the Game Trailer Countdown. A couple of my favorite 8-bit games, Tetris and Excitebike, didn’t make the cut, but the GT list does have some classics.
Cultural phenomenon Malcolm Gladwell gave a talk at the New Yorker Conference 2012: Stories From the Near Future. His talk Genius: 2012 illustrates the importance of stubbornness and collaboration in problem-solving.
David Sedaris, author of “Me talk pretty one day”, a book about learning to speak French, shares some tid-bits about life in France in an interview with Franceguide, the official website of France Tourism.