May 8, 2007

Stylewar

Filed under: Uncategorized — machinesandhumans @ 10:43 pm

Swedish Production company Stylewar . I came across this site while watching this video (Ruby)

by the Kaiser Chiefs. Stylewar has some very effective and elegant motion tracking videos, namely their promo for “Bingo” and “Expedition Robinson”

December 18, 2006

How the brain makes it’s translation, I’ll never know.

Filed under: Uncategorized — machinesandhumans @ 11:49 pm

Exhibit A: Input.

Exhibit B: Output.

splash-whale.jpg
I suppose I could analyze this but that might become a bit embarrasing.

December 16, 2006

Sinner Saint Cars

Filed under: Uncategorized, drawing — machinesandhumans @ 8:01 pm

I’ve been drawing these little bubble domed hatchbacks lately, for some reason they’ve been stuck in my head for some time, so I had better get them out…

devil-angel-cars.jpg

And a thumbnail sketch for a traffic problem.  This might make a nice shirt if anyone is interested. It would be a good excuse for me to figure out how to use Cafe Press.

sketch-for-a-traffic-proble.jpg

December 9, 2006

Evolved NYC

Filed under: Uncategorized, Art, new york, animals, history — machinesandhumans @ 9:22 pm

I’m in New York for the weekend and stumbled across this store.  Evolution, For many hundreds to thousands of dollars you can purchase 220 million year old fossils of lizards, bugs, squirmy things, and wingy things.  I love this place.p_456601_964617.jpg

I also discovered the Elizabeth Street Gallery, original and replica architectural ornmanentia (what is that word), ancient safes, shooting gallery mechanisms, hitching posts, architectural facades, statuary and everything else you can rarely get close to these days.   I talked to the owner Allan who along with selling the originals (I believe) has some of the work duplicated and then refitted for other purposes.  The environment was a dimly lit open studio filled (but not packed) with the original and replica items.  Most of them I believe were originals as I was given a brief tour where we talked about what he sells.   In the middle of the space sitting on a low table was a 19th century catalogue from a French fixture company.  Hundreds, thousands of engraved drawings were in this book.  I am grateful to the Allan and his staff who intially hesitated to open the book as the pages were very thin and fragile but then flipped through a couple of the images letting me look through the work and taking their time to talk to me about what they do.  Sometimes I think I expect their to be an attitude associated with such luxury, probably because there usually is.  As I’ve been working in the Jewelry field my own knowledge base has been rapidly expanding on techiques of fabrication and construction.  I think that if I had gone in here a couple of years ago I would have only had an aesthetic point of view to begin from and I would have been limited in my ability to discover more.  It was a great feeling to actually talk about and discuss the techniques in use and to some extent imagine myself doing the work rather than ‘just’ drawing the work.  The world opens more and more… 

 

 

Free Energy Forever! (maybe)

Filed under: Uncategorized, technology — machinesandhumans @ 8:50 pm

If this works, if it is not a hoax, if it is validated by the scientific community then it will amazing.  Apparently the company Steorn has stumbled upon a technology that puts out more energy than goes in and they are in the process of getting public unbiased scientific validation for it right now.  In an open advertisement in the The Economist, they have solicited the help of the science community to perform unbiased tests on their technology, and after recieving 79,231 applicants they have narrowed it down to 492 for their first phase of testing.  If it is proven to work or proven false they say they will abide by and step up to the results.   The thing is that they are a real company with a long history.  On the surface they would appear to be little to gain in the long run from making such a fantastic claim.  This may be naive on my part however, any way to publicize a business seems to go these days.  I hope it works though  (do I?).  Reminds me of the movie Primer, the concept of creating a technology for one purpose and then finding that it has properties that were unimaginable and unexpected.  The premise being that most breakthroughs happen in this fashion rather than a person sitting down to ‘design’ a revolution.  I think every kid in the world has had the dream of making a perpetual motion machine once they discover the magic of rubber bands and magnets, squashed of course by any grimfaced rudimentary science teacher and the first law of thermodynamics.  Maybe they should go on Myth Busters.

Here is a brief description of what they claim they can do

 1. The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%. 2. The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts. 3. There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature).