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Archive for the ‘Oddities’ Category

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25 Feb 2010

New discoveries

This was posted on reddit today. I agree entirely with the poster’s sentiment: interesting links on reddit are, more often than not, not links to the gateway of a whole website of interesting stuff. When they are links to a website’s front page, it’s generally a very narrow, single-purpose website that is quickly forgotten about. Hopefully, the poster’s subreddit — apparently yet to be made — will be a success.

In any event, having gone through the blog-post he had linked I decided to share some of my new discoveries here myself:

  • Building Maker: A Google app I was unaware of, which lets you add the 3D element to Google Maps. For all bored architects out there (since this is just what they want to be doing in their time off.)
  • Ikea Hacker: Neat stuff done with bog-standard Ikea furniture.
  • Strange Maps: A blog of, well, old and interesting maps. I don’t know if I’d go as far as to say strange…
  • Newseum: The front pages of newspapers from 78 countries around the world.
  • Cooking For Engineers: This one reminded me of my father, a pragmatist who insists on weighing pasta before cooking it, in order to make sure he’ll be doling out the correct amount. Nothing wrong with approaching cooking as a science, as opposed to an art!
  • GetHuman.com: An excellent idea for a website. This one tells you which keys you need to press in order to get an actual human operator on the line when calling a large company, saving you the time of listening to and trying to interact with a computerised system.
  • PDFGeni.com: Another great idea — a repository of PDF documents such as old technical manuals, academic texts, and so on.

I feel I must write a disclaimer, saying I haven’t used or read these sites extensively, having just discovered them a few hours ago, but from first impressions they do look like they deserve a bookmark.

25 February, 2010 at 16:21 by aengus

Posted in Architecture, Computers, Design, Internet, Oddities | No Comments »

22 Feb 2010

Clearing the backlog

Some of these links have been sitting in my Gmail Notes a year now, and I’ve become sick of looking at them. A few of them I’d planned on leaving for when I had time to adequately address their theme and topic in a proper blog-post, but I’ve realised that’s not going to happen any time soon. So: Read the rest of this entry »

22 February, 2010 at 18:49 by aengus

Posted in Architecture, Art, Bad Music™, Design, Music, Music theory, Oddities, Photography | No Comments »

11 Oct 2009

Fleet Foxes: Un concert a emporter

The Fleet Foxes play Sun Giant and Blue Ridge Mountains in an abandoned wing of the Grand Palais, Paris. Recorded in May 2008.

Slightly dodgy camera-work (did the cameraman really need to stand so close to them?) made up for by the music itself.

11 October, 2009 at 17:32 by aengus

Posted in Architecture, Art, Live, Music, Oddities, Videos | 1 Comment »

7 Oct 2009

Die Stimme des Klaviers

Peter Ablinger, an Austrian composer currently residing in Berlin, has done something rather interesting: he made a recording of a child reading the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court, then invented a mechanical piano player capable of reading notes in a very high time resolution from a computer.

The computer performs a frequency analysis of the sound spectrum, aided by Ablinger himself, which is then fed into the piano player and out comes the child’s voice.

<object width=”490″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/muCPjK4nGY4&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/muCPjK4nGY4&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” allowScriptAccess=”always” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

(Video in German with English subtitles)

While I wouldn’t have much hope for people trying to work out what the piano is “saying” without the aid of seeing the words as they’re heard, I think it’s a pretty interesting experiment. The auto-player in itself is something to be marvelled at. Neat!

7 October, 2009 at 18:20 by aengus

Posted in Art, Berlin, Computers, Experimental, German Language, Germany, Linguistics, News, Oddities | 2 Comments »

30 Sep 2009

An anecdote

A few weeks ago, I was asked to act as a proxy and present a paper on language evolution at a conference on artificial intelligence and life taking place in Budapest. The presentation went well, considering I’d only had a week or so to read up on what is an enormous subject I’d never studied before.

Later on, in the evening, I had been walking about the town, looking for a suitable place to have dinner when I came across an Irish pub which I decided to have a few drinks in later that night, after having eaten. A match was on that night between Manchester Utd and Besiktas for which they had the projector screen out and all. Upon entering, I attempted to take a seat at the bar, since I had absolutely no interest in the match, only to be chaperoned to the pub audience and told I must be seated with everyone else, in front of the projector screen.

It quickly became apparant that I was the only Irishman in the building: the staff were all Hungarian, there was a group of Americans closest to the screen, then directly in front of me a group of about four Englishmen, and to my left a group of about eight Turks, men and women, who were occasionally chatting to three Danes seated beside them, having dinner. Those Turks immediately to my left were rather friendly and chatty, and after a while we had exchanged pleasantries and stories explaining why and how we had wound up in an Irish pub in Budapest of all places.

One hour and many beers later, and not a goal had been scored. I grew more and more impatient, and the Turks (for whom this game seemed to mean an awful lot) grew more and more raucous. Then, out of nowhere, a shot on-target rebounded off the goal-posts. As it seems, the drink had affected my prior apathy towards the whole event, and I let an annoyed roar of “JESUS!” out of me. One of the Turks turned to me and said with a smile, “Don’t you mean Mohammad?” I responded, “Ah yeah, he’s pretty good too, just don’t draw any funny pictures of him, ye?”

The Danes exploded in laughter.

The Turks went completely silent, staring straight ahead at the projector screen.

30 September, 2009 at 21:28 by aengus

Posted in Censorship, Football, Funny, Oddities, Politics, Religion, Sports | 2 Comments »

21 Jun 2009

[NSFW] Nudity

A while ago, a friend posted a link to Girl Dance’s “Baby, Baby, Baby” on Facebook and it got me in a narky mood. I really didn’t like the video, which simply consists of women walking a kind of naked relay race while the lyrics of the song flash up, word by word, inside black strips censoring their nudity. The music is similarly vapid.

Tonight, however, I came across another music video that revolves around doing fun things with “censor strips”. I like it, it made me laugh, so here it is:


The BPA – Toe Jam Featuring David Byrne & Dizzee Rascal
21 June, 2009 at 3:08 by aengus

Posted in Music, Oddities, Videos | No Comments »

3 Jun 2009

Cassetteboy VS The Bloody Apprentice

Cassetteboy’s gone to work on The Apprentice:

I’ve been working on this video for a couple of months, on and off.  I watched 45 episodes of The Apprentice (most of them several times), and material from 43 of them made it into the final piece.  Basically, it was a lot of work.

Watch it here:

If you enjoyed it, make sure you check out more of their work at their Youtube channel.

3 June, 2009 at 18:57 by aengus

Posted in Art, Electronic, Funny, Internet, Music, Oddities | No Comments »

1 Jun 2009

Abandoned cities

Thanks to padraiq for sending me this: there are some lovely photos on archibase.net of Gukanjima, an island off the west coast of Japan which was home to a thriving coal mine. In the 70s, the mine was closed down and the island deserted, leaving this chaos behind:

3

1

2

This also happens to tie in with Wikipedia’s featured picture of the day: Mane St [sic] of Pioneertown, “an unincorporated and inhabited town built in 1946 as a TV and film set by, among others, Roy Rogers. The town was designed to provide a place for the actors to live while simultaneously having their homes used as part of the set.”

This is a dangerous page to visit, as it’ll inevitably lead to a list of ghost towns, such as Bodie, California:

800px-bodie_ghost_town

And Kayaköy, Turkey:

800px-kayakoy_inside_church

And by the time you’ve read about them all, the day is spent. Good work!

If not, then here are some extra, related wiki rabbit-holes for you to bound down:

Urban Exploration [and some extra photo galleries at undercity]

Urban Decay

Squatting

1 June, 2009 at 12:58 by aengus

Posted in Architecture, Oddities, Photography | 5 Comments »

21 May 2009

Jan Vormann’s Legowelt

Jan Vormann goes around Berlin, patching up war-time holes with Lego.

dispatchwork_berlin_8

dispatchwork_berlin_10

Head over to the Jarmuschek exhibition space for more info, and this Jorymon blogpost for more pictures.

21 May, 2009 at 12:22 by aengus

Posted in Architecture, Art, Berlin, Germany, Oddities | 1 Comment »

17 May 2009

Album covers, Penguin style

Littlepixel has created a lovely picture album on flickr of classic album covers, re-done in design and style as Penguin books.  An example:

Click here for the full flickr album.

17 May, 2009 at 17:10 by aengus

Posted in Art, Design, Internet, Music, Oddities | No Comments »

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