“No one was murdered in El Salvador on Saturday”:
“No one was murdered in El Salvador on Saturday, officials said, in what was the first homicide-free day in nearly three years”. Herzlichen Glückwunsch!
Philippine Zombie Race
Auf den Philippinen hat man ein Rennen mit hunderten Teilnehmern veranstaltet, die eine Strecke voller Zombies absolvieren mussten. Das ganze basiert auf einem amerikanischen Survival-Marathon (Video oben), ist mit 5000 Läufern dann doch ne ganze Nummer größer. They are running for you, Barbara!
About five thousand people dashed along the five km (three mile) course of the survival-themed race in Laguna Province, about 38 km south of Manila, dodging an assortment of the walking undead in the contest based on a popular U.S. race.
Two hundred actors dressed as post-apocalyptic zombies hid behind trees, bushes and rocky uphill climbs along the five km (three mile) course to surprise the unsuspecting runners and symbolically feast on their brains by stealing flags attached to the runners’ waists.
Caines Arcade
Ich hatte letzte Woche so viel Arbeit und Stress, dass ich gestern alle ungelesenen Feedreader-Items (dürften so rund 5000 ungelesene gewesen sein) einfach weggeklickt habe und es tut mir um keine der verpassten Stories leid – außer dieser hier, die Minidoku um Caines Arcade und den Reddit-Flashmob in der Papp-Spielhalle eines 9jährigen. Ihr kennt das zwar schon alle, ich will das aber trotzdem hier haben.
Hier noch ein Interview mit Caine und seinem Papa:
Nine-year-old Caine Monroy became an online sensation this week for building an elaborate cardboard arcade inside his dad’s used auto parts store. At first, business was slow — that is, until his first customer, filmmaker Nirvan Mullick, was inspired to organize a flashmob through Facebook and Reddit, sending a slew of worthy gamers upon Caine’s Arcade and capturing the magic day in a short film.
Now that the video has gone viral, the Caine’s Arcade Facebook page boasts over 45,000 Likes, with fans and supporters having raised over $100,000 for his scholarship fund in just three days.
Shira Lazar caught up with the young entrepreneur, his father George, and Producer/Director Nirvan Mullick to get their takes on the whirlwind week and, of course, play in the arcade!
Alan Moore-Interview on BBC
Alan Moore im Interview bei BBC Hard Talk, der zweite Teil nach dem Klick.
Bike as digital Turntable Controler
Nur ein Viral für einen japanischen Fahrrad-Sharing-Service, aber trotzdem sehr schick: “The Turntable Rider is an epic bicycle accessory which converts a bicycle into a musical instrument. The bike wheels, become jog wheels. The handbrakes, become sound pads. Mix and scratch at will.” Auf der Website zum Bike gibts noch ein Making-Of-Video.
Google BBS
Norbert Landsteiner hat ein Video von Squirrelmonkey nachprogrammiert, das Google in den 80ern als BBS zeigte (die Twitter und Facebook-Videos von denen gingen neulich ebenfalls rum, findet man in den related Videos).
Atari sketches Wikipedia, 1982
Bob Stein hat auf dem Blog vom “Institute for the Future of the Book” (!) eine Reihe alter Illus über die Zukunft einer intelligenten Enzyklopädie gepostet, die er damals in seinem Job bei Atari bei Disney-Zeichner Glenn Keane in Auftrag gegeben hatte. Die Illus sind okay, als retrofuturistisches Artefakt aber natürlich hochinteressant.
Bild oben: “A third grade class studies various aspects of space travel. The group on the right is running a simulation of a Mars landing while the students on the left are studying a design for a spacecraft.”
Alan Kay had just become the Chief Scientist at Atari and he asked me to work with him to continue the work I started at Encyclopedia Britannica on the idea of an Intelligent Encyclopedia. We came up with these scenarios of how the (future) encyclopedia might be used and commissioned Glenn Keane, a well-known Disney animator to render them. The captions also date from 1982.
Back to the Future — In honor of Encyclopedia Britannica giving up its print edition
Superman Inflation
Youtube DirektSupiInflation, via Honki
Sitzt, passt, wackelt und hat Luft – vieeeeeeel Luft …
Gastbeitrag by Doktor Katze from the interwebs.
California Carnivores
Cool Hunting Video Presents: California Carnivores from Cool Hunting on Vimeo.
Sehr schöner Clip von Cool Hunting über California Carnivores, ein Laden für fleischfressende Pflanzen.
In our latest video we trekked out into the beautiful farmland outside Sebastopol, California to visit California Carnivores, North America’s largest carnivorous plant nursery. We spoke with founder Peter D’Amato about his personal history with these hungry plants, their cultural significance and what it takes to raise up fantastical plants from seed. Taking in the active plant life, we watched Venus Flytraps chowing down and a got a peak inside the stomach of an American Pitcher Plant.
Vintage Insect Anatomy Poster
Bibli Odyssey hat eine kleine Sammlung großartiger Insect Wall Charts aus der “‘Wall charts Entomology and Phytopathology’ collection out of the Special Collections Digital Library at Wageningen University and Research Centre”, hier ein paar meiner Favs:
English Giants long Johns for sale
Demnächst werden im Auktionshaus Tennants die Hosen des englischen Riesen Frederick Kempster versteigert, der 1889 geboren wurde und mit 22 Jahren zu einem Zirkus stieß, mit dem er durch die Lande zog. Beim Ausbruch des ersten Weltkrieg wurde er in Berlin unter Arrest gestellt, zusammen mit einem Zwerg ohne Beine. So ist das.
In 1911, he marched in the “Parade of Giants” at the Crystal Palace in London as part of the celebrations leading up to the coronation of King George V. That’s what gave him the idea that he might actually be able to make a living just by being his tall self.
A few months later, he got a job as a giant at Astley & Co.’s American Circus in Essex. For the next three years he toured Europe and America with the circus, staying near his sister in Essex during his downtime. Articles about him from 1913 describe him as 7’9″ by now and over 300 pounds. Each hand reputedly had a 16-note reach on a piano.
He was in Germany with his troupe when World War I broke out in August 1914. Frederick and four other members of the company including a legless dwarf were stranded in Berlin and kept under house arrest in a room they’d rented. Some news stories report that he was mistreated and malnourished, but in interviews Frederick seemed downright sanguine about his time as a POW. They played a lot of cards and dominoes, he said, and the local police chief would bring his kids around to see them.
Free the Network: Documentary about DIY-Internet
Spannende Minidoku von Motherboard über Hacker, die eigene Netz-Architektur am Rande der Occupy-Proteste bauen.
If the argument for mesh networking, a sort of pirate radio Internet scheme that allows people to talk to one another online through no middle man, is that a centralized ‘Net lends itself to the sort of surveillance and censorship that, however futile, strokes the Internet kill switch of science fiction, is there a way to circumvent that system altogether? Is there a way to build a new network from the bottom up? To occupy a fresh Internet outside the existing confines of the Web? Or is that all just the stuff of ideological fantasy?
To check the pulse of the Internet – and to get a feel for what life’s like in the digital nerve center of what’s arguably the first fully Web-fueled social movement in America – Motherboard has been following Wilder and Tyrone Greenfield, communications director for the Free Network Foundation, for the past half year.
