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Photos: Crystal City Beneath Five Fingers

So my friend Elise McIntosh was on a business trip in Crystal City (near Washington, DC), and decided to take a walk. She wears these crazy shoes called Vibram Five Fingers -- which I refer to as "the gorilla feet." Anyway, she looked down at one point and noticed that on a short walk, she was walking over all kinds of interesting-looking patterns. So she started taking pictures and posting them on Flickr, in a set called Crystal City Beneath Five Fingers. She wrote: I was talking with Siri [a... READ ON

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V.S. Ramachandran: A Neurological Theory of Artistic Experience

If you enjoyed the TED Talk I pointed to last week, How Brain Damage Reveals Brain Function, I have a treat for you. Here's a ninety-minute lecture by the same speaker (V.S. Ramachandran), in which he talks about how the human brain deals with visual art. Why do we enjoy art? How do we know what is "good" art? How does the brain process metaphors? What does neurology tell us about how the brain processes visual information? This is a great way to spend an hour and a half -- it's enlightening,... READ ON

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Body Anomaly Tattoos

More people than you realize have some condition that makes their physical bodies different from the majority. Many try to hide those differences out of self-consciousness, even though the anomaly might be something you'd never notice anyway. Then there are some who celebrate their differences with a clever tattoo that provokes smiles and puts people at ease. Amputee... READ ON

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Stunning 1000-frames-per-second Slow Motion

A demo reel for the I-Movix SprintCam V3 HD has been making the internet rounds this morning -- the SprintCam is a super-high-speed video camera, allowing some of the slowest slow motion I've ever seen. In this demo, we see footage from a rugby game -- including cheerleaders, firebreathers, pom-poms swishing, and some actual rugby -- shot at 1000fps, or more than 40 times slower than realtime. The final shot shows a block of rippling red Jello, and it was recorded at a shocking 2500fps. Check out the... READ ON

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Edward Leedskalnin and his Coral Castle

Eward Leedskalnin was born in Riga, Latvia in 1887. He was a small man, around five and a half feet tall and barely 100 pounds, but he built a castle by himself completely out of coral. It took him decades, but he did it... and he disassembled, moved it, and built it all... READ ON

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One-man Construction: 7 Lifelong Personal Projects

All through history there have been people, mostly men, who devote years and years of their lives building something very unique and personal. Lucky for us, these erections are built to last. For the most part. 1. Salvation... READ ON

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Little Red Riding Hood as an Infographic

For today's geeky video pleasure, I bring you a version of Little Red Riding Hood reinterpreted as a series of infographics. Each scene is deconstructed into infographic form, showing excessive data about each location, person, and animal the eponymous LRRH encounters. Check it out (though you might want to turn down the sound, as the soundtrack is kind of over the top): SlagsmÃ¥lsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo. It's easy to imagine a version of the Three Little Pigs... READ ON

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Layer Tennis: Art as Competition

We've discussed Layer Tennis before: it's a live online competition in which graphic designers trade art back and forth, building upon and changing the art during each fifteen-minute turn, in a kind of graphic design Battle Royale. You may say: huh? Well, here are some sample layers from last week's match between Brooklynites Armin Vit and Sam Potts. In the opening salvo, Vit introduces a wrestling/typography... READ ON

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Machines that Almost Fall Over

Artist Michael Kontopoulos brings us today's weird web video: Machines that Almost Fall Over. Kontopoulos calls it: "A system of sculptures that is constantly on the brink of collapse. My intention was to capture and sustain the exact moment of impending catastrophe and endlessly repeat it." Kontopoulos has created three machines in which a hammer strikes the machine, knocking it off-balance, but the machine just...barely...doesn't fall over. This is a short video showing those machines, tirelessly... READ ON

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Smart Blocks: Siftables

MIT grad student David Merrill and his team created a set of computerized toy blocks, called Siftables, that are aware of each other. Because the blocks are aware of their own orientation and (to some extent) surroundings, they can interact with each other. For example, around 2:30, Merrill shows a demo of addition via blocks -- by moving around blocks labeled "2" and "3" as well as "+" and "=", the blocks can sum themselves, forming a sort of interactive math problem. Merrill's Siftables demo is only... READ ON