mathewingram.com/work » Cool

Geek alert: CNN builds the Holodeck

Mathew — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:01:43 +0000

Apart from the historic nature of the U.S. election (which I will let others discuss), the coverage on CNN set new records as far as the coolness factor goes. Not only did the channel have the Magic Wall — which until recently was the height of geek-dom, with its multi-touch input and other features — but then the network whipped out a couple of holograms just to up the stakes a little. Like Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, even though part of me realized they could have done exactly the same thing with a remote camera, a much larger part of me was thinking: “Those holograms are cool.” Plenty of other people seemed to disagree, however, calling the hologram “creepy.” I was less enamored of the virtual Capitol building, which looked kind of cheesy, but the Will.I.Am interview (which is embedded here) was just extremely cool. Yes, I agree that the Jessica Yellin interview had more than a touch of Princess Leia about it, but it was still damn cool. That is all.

Update:

According to a professor of theoretical physics and an expert in holography, what CNN used were not really holograms, since they didn’t project a 3-dimensional image into the studio — they projected it into the camera feed, which is what viewers saw, while the actual hosts were talking to empty space. Okay, not quite as cool. More here.

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Wheelchair backflip: Hardcore sitting

Mathew — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:14:18 +0000

Aaron Fotheringham is 16 years old and has been in a wheelchair since he was eight years old, as a result of spina bifida. But he didn’t let that stop him from attempting, and successfully completing, many of the stunts that his older brother and friends performed on their BMX bikes and skateboard at the local skate park. That includes what appears to be the first example of a wheelchair backflip — something that has landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records. Aaron, who turns 17 in a few days, has also performed a number of other stunts, including a 180-degree aerial, and you can see some of them here and here. He refers to what he does as “hardcore sitting.”

Click through to watch a video…

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Geek Alert: The Archimedes Palimpsest

Mathew — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:06:41 +0000

I just love the Internet sometimes. Thanks to a link at Metafilter, I just found out that the entire text, data and images from the Archimedes Palimpsest have been released on the Web under a Creative Commons license. Palimpsest is an odd word that refers to a manuscript that has been scraped or wiped clean and had something else written over top of it, and that’s exactly what the Archimedes manuscript is. It’s actually what’s known as an “euchologion” or prayer book from the 11th century, but in order to save money the authors reused some parchment they had lying around — and that happened to include a copy of a manuscript by the Greek scholar Archimedes, including several treatises that don’t exist in any other form. It took four years to dismantle the manuscript and prepare it for imaging, something that was done with some help from the Canadian Conservation Institute, and then to scan and use optical-character recognition and translate the text. All of that material is now online.

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Video: Performance art with crutches

Mathew — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 20:21:55 +0000

I don’t know why I like this video so much, but I just had to post it. It’s a short clip featuring music from a artist known as RJD2 (who also appears in the video — he’s the man with the beard at the beginning who tries to help the man on crutches), and it features a man with a specially modified set of crutches who does a kind of acrobatic street dance down the sidewalk. Watching some of the looks he gets from passers-by is part of the fun. The video was filmed by Ghost Robot director Joey Garfield, and there’s also an alternate version, which you can watch side-by-side with the original. For some reason this reminded me of another of my favourite videos: Christopher Walken doing a dance he choreographed himself in the video for Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice. (link via Neatorama).

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Captain Caucasian and the Google Trends game

Mathew — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:13:57 +0000

So how can a band get some positive attention in these multi-platform, attention-deficit times we live in? You could try what Captain Caucasian and the Raging Idiots did: they asked their fans to make them the most searched-for term on Google, and it seems to have worked, if only briefly. Captain Caucasian was the top Google Trend search term for part of Friday, until it was finally overcome by other important topics, such as GM’s stock price and pictures of Angelina Jolie breast-feeding. Some sites tried their best to suck in traffic by mentioning several topics at once, like the site with the headline “Captain Caucasian on the W magazine cover?”

This kind of Google-gaming isn’t new. It even has its own name: it’s known as “Google-bombing.” In most cases, it consists of people trying to rig the search engine so that the number one result for the term “miserable failure” is a photo of President George Bush (for example), by mentioning and linking those things in as many blog posts as possible. In the case of Captain Caucasian, the lead singer of the band happens to be a DJ in Austin, Texas who goes by the name Bobby Bones, and he mentioned his desire to be the number one search on the radio. Apparently some fans heard his plea.

This would be a heart-warming story if Bobby Bones and the Raging Idiots were actually any good, but as the video embedded here proves quite clearly, they are average at best. At one point, Captain Caucasian even forgets the words to the song he’s rapping (Bust a Move by Young MC). Better hang on to that day job at the radio station, Bobby.

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