Mechanical reproduction of digitized speech on a piano
Possibly the coolest thing I have ever seen. A work by Austrian composer Peter Ablinger. [via Neatorama]
art
Software generates photos from your sketches
Too lazy to actually get out and take pictures? Then you might want to check out Photosketch, an interesting research project by researchers at Tsinghua University.
Help write the Necronomicon
The Howard Phillips Lovecraft Historical Society, whose work I dearly love and have written about before, is compiling a complete prop edition of the Necronomicon from reader submissions! There was, apparently, a “Necronomicontest” of some sort to encourage submissions, the deadline of which has now passed, but they are still accepting “mad ramblings” here.
“Fiction science” theory of Superman’s powers
Back in 2005, I wrote a fictional scientific paper (.pdf) postulating that zombiism is in fact caused by a prion, rather than a virus, as is commonly hypothesized. I also wrote a short essay about the idea of “fiction science” at the time. Now Ben Tippet, at the behest of Dinosaur Comics’ Ryan North, has written a similarly fictional scientific paper (.pdf) presenting “A Unified Theory of Superman’s Powers” from a physicist’s perspective. I’d be interested in hearing of other examples of people co-opting the serious literary forms of science for fictional purposes. If you know of one, please drop me a comment. [via Neatorama]
Today is 24 Hour Comic Book Day
Doctor Popular writes: Today is 24 Hour Comic Book Day, meaning artists all over the world will be attempting to write and draw their own 24 page comics in 24 consecutive hours. Nearly 40 artists will be attempting the challenge in San Francisco and we’ll be live broadcasting the entire time… if you like watching […]
My people call them maize mazes
Cool post over on Hack-A-Day about corn maze entrepreneur Scott Skelly, shown above with his trusty GPS-enabled riding lawn mower. Scott explains his maize-maze-making process thusly:
A maze starts as nothing more than a large field of corn. The design is created using a computer, then translated into GPS coordinates by fitting it into a field whose outline coordinates were previously captured on foot. Once the field coordinates are reconciled with the map design the data is used in one of two ways; the routes can be made by tilling under a path when the corn is very young, or more commonly it is cut lawn-mower-style when the corn is anywhere from knee-high to full grown. This corn-meets-satellite hack makes for a whole lot of fun!
Crawling wooden automaton
A newly posted work from Japanese kinetic sculptor Osamu Kanda, whose elegant praying mantis automaton I blogged two weeks ago. This one is called Crawl. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]