Israel by Timelapse

Posted on September 4, 2011 by Brian D. Butler

Eran Amir created this engaging stop-motion within stop-motion video with the help of 500 close friends. The film travels around Israel in 100 seconds.

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BookLamp…what is it?

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Brian D. Butler

Have you ever wished that  you could find new books the same way Pandora helps you find new music? Using a series of algorithms, BookLamp analyzes your favorite books for five style elements and then delivers you customized recommendations with similar themes and style.

BookLamp measures 30,000 points of data for each book in its database. When you enter a specific book in the search engine, it spits-out an extensive list of reading suggestions for you based on that book and author.

The site currently tracks more than 618 million data points, trying to decode the DNA of literature. Here’s BookLamp’s explanation of how it works: “Motion, Density, Description, Dialog and Pacing are stylistic metrics or terms developed to help make the complicated under-workings of our analysis more understandable. They are not the complete picture of what makes up a book’s writing style, nor a complete picture of what BookLamp tracks in a book, but they do measure elements that a person can easily understand.”

The online tool was created by Novel Projects, a company formed to help work on the Book Genome Project in 2003.

Booklamp’s Five Metrics Defined

1. Motion: “Motion refers to the level of physical motion in a scene or book”.
2. Description: “Description refers to the level of descriptive language that the author uses in his or her writing.”
3. Pacing: “Pacing refers to the layout of the text on the page. A scene with high Pacing will have characteristics that quickly move the reader’s eye down the page.”
4. Density: “Density refers to the complexity of the text. Text with high Density will take longer to read than a text of equal length with low density.”
5. Dialog: “Dialog refers to the amount of spoken text between two or more characters in a scene

I gave it a spin with the suggestion of Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic A Study in Scarlet. Booklamp provided a suggested reading list that included: Oliver Twist, The Moonstone, Frankenstein, Crime and Punishment and When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro. I think they have some work to do on the analytics. But give it try and see how it works for you.

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Alternate History (with monsters)

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Brian D. Butler

Pennsylvania artist Matthew Buchholz reinterprets American history through imaginatively altered vintage prints, postcards, maps and photographs. His ongoing project, titled Alternate Histories, incorporates aliens, monsters, robots and horror icons into historic scenes. Here’s a sample of his historical vandalism. But you can see more, and support the project, at his Etsy storefront.

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Toronto : The Good Bike Project

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Brian D. Butler

Urban dwellers are well acquainted with the sight of abandoned bicycles that stay locked to poles for months, rusting away and slowly being stripped of all of their parts. In Toronto, Caroline Macfarlane and Vanessa Nicholas decided to do something about it. The artists/gallery managers paint bikes in bright neon colors, sometimes adding planters and flowers to their baskets, and place them around the city.

At first, they ran faced an unappreciative city bureaucracy, their initial piece of bike art in front of their gallery received a ticket for being stored on public property. But since then, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has endorsed what is now called “The Good Bike Project,” which has grown to include 50 reclaimed bikes, and the city government has begun donating abandoned bikes to the artists. “Our intention is to fuel a discussion about cycling and public art in the city,” Macfarlane says.

Here’s a sample of some of the transformed bikes brightening up Toronto’s streets:

The artists will name a bike after anyone who donates $100 oe more to the cause.

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Jerry’s Map…Jerry’s World

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Brian D. Butler

Michigan artist/cartographer Jerry Gretzinger has been creating his own fictional world through his nearly half-century mapmaking project. If you love maps as much as I do, you’ll find Jerry’s world mesmerizing.

You can support Jerry’s life-long project by visiting his website and by purchasing a “postcard” view of Jerry’s world on Ebay.

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Paris Skyliners

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Brian D. Butler

Five young men of questionable sanity recently attached a thin nylon line between Paris’ twin 400 foot Tours Mercuriales. Then then proceeded to defy death by cavorting on the slackline for this amazing video.

You can see more of their dare-devil antics at the Bad Slackliners website and on photographer Sebastien Montaz-Russet’s adventure blog.

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Belgium : The Last Horse Fishermen

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Brian D. Butler

Oosterduinkerke, on the coast of Flanders, is the last place in Europe to see the 500 year-old tradition of commercial fishing by horseback.

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New York City : Day to Night

Posted on August 28, 2011 by Brian D. Butler

Last Sunday’s post included this (above) astonishing photograph, which artfully captures the duality of life in the Big Apple. The photo is from the upcoming exhibition by Stephen Wilkes that will run from September 8 to October 29, 2011 at the ClampArt Gallery in Chelsea, NYC.

Wilkes creates his intense images by setting up cameras above iconic New York locales, taking hundreds of shots from dusk to dawn. he then blends the photos into one large, dramatic image, creating an original hybrid scene.

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Final Frontier B & B

Posted on August 27, 2011 by Brian D. Butler

An ambitious company called Orbital Technologies has an out of this world plan to put an actual hotel/space station in orbit. The little getaway will be nestled 217 miles above the Earth.

A five day stay,including round trip transport, will set you back $500,000 per person (assuming the space hotel ever gets off the ground).

Each room in the orbiting hotel is designed for seven guests. There won’t be much privacy, except for the stylish zero gravity hanging sleep sacks. But the hotel does come equipped with a microwave oven, fridge, shower cubicle and air toilet. Leave the wine at home, because alcohol will be forbidden.

Orbital Technologies plans to have the hotel in orbit, via Russia Soyuz rockets, by 2016. So get your deposits in pronto.

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Airport Buzz (more)

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Brian D. Butler

That buzzing sound you hear at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport could be a jet taking off. Or maybe it’s coming from the 1.5 million bees that call the airport home. In May, the Chicago Department of Aviation partnered with a community group to start a 2,400 square foot apiary on-site. Now 23 beehives are up and running and are scheduled to yield 575 pounds of honey this year.

The project offers a creative, sustainable, and productive way to use otherwise wasted open space at mega-airports like O’Hare. The bees’ new home on the east side of the airport campus had long stood vacant, so it was a natural spot for the bee program to begin. And if that’s not enough benefit, the beehives provide employment opportunities for formerly incarcerated adults (similar to other projects that teach prisoners beekeeping).

Sweet Beginnings, the offshoot of the local economic development agency that’s managing the project, trains felons in the art of beekeeping and the process of making honey, candles, and lotions, which are sold under the brand Beeline. O’Hare’s shops intend to start selling the hyper-local honey products soon.

The “airport beekeeping movement” has been growing in Germany since 1999, when scientists realized honeybees could be helpful for monitoring air quality, but O’Hare is the first American airport to get an apiary. In a way, it’s a return to the airport’s agricultural roots: O’Hare was founded on a former apple orchard, which lives on in the three letter airport code “ORD.”

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