Ze Frank discusses the potential positive and negative energy of online interactions, illustrated in the above diagram and the below video. For those of us who strive to build communities both in our personal and professional lives, this is a five minute video worth watching.
Here is a short video I created along with my coworkers celebrating the craft of the everyday located around our office in Mumbai.
We had a limited amount of time to plan (2 days), shoot (1 day) and edit (4 days), but those constraints ended up making the process a lot of fun. At one point there was going to be a series of hand-carved frames in each shot highlighting the craft, but that became just impossible to execute and (as expected) drew a huge crowed.
Five of us got into a Toyota van and ran around the city for a day filming carpenters, frame wallahs, a paan wallah, a juice wallah, garland wallahs, and a sugarcane wallah. We used my 5d mark II camera and a host of lenses (18mm fisheye, 35mm f2.0, 50mm f1.4, 70-200mm f2.8 non-IS) in a pretty stripped down rig. I didn’t even have my Zacuto Z-Finder with me – so there was a lot of zooming in to focus and stopping down so the depth of field wasn’t too shallow.
It would have been nice to have a shoulder rig, which would have stabilized any moving shot, but we had to content ourselves with locking the camera down on a very lightweight tripod. This ended up being a blessing since we could set up and strike the set quickly, but also meant that we had to really strip down and constrain the shooting style.
E. chromi is a collaboration between designers and scientists in the new field of synthetic biology. In 2009, seven Cambridge University undergraduates spent the summer genetically engineering bacteria to secrete a variety of coloured pigments, visible to the naked eye. They designed standardised sequences of DNA, known as BioBricks, and inserted them into E. coli bacteria.
Each BioBrick part contains genes selected from existing organisms spanning the living kingdoms, enabling the bacteria to produce a colour: red, yellow, green, blue, brown or violet. By combining these with other BioBricks, bacteria could be programmed to do useful things, such as indicate whether drinking water is safe by turning red if they sense a toxin. E. chromi won the Grand Prize at the 2009 International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM).
Before a city becomes a thing of steel, concrete and glass it is a theater of visions in conflict.
As a city ages, the visions do not die but come up against the physical and ideological resistance of the place and its people. The city we see today is the direct result of radical visions, gradually changing the way the future is realized. This is an account of a Manhattan that could have been – might have been. A phantasmagorical Manhattan where the visionary meets the everyday – the absurd and the sublime. The island as we know it is but a pale reflection of a city designed by visionaries – a city of mad, incongruous utopias.
Below is a Space Shuttle Atlantis retrospective from NASA:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/bcvideo/1.0/iframe/embed.html?videoId=100000000866518&playerType=embed
In Tennessee, Fireflies Are Beacon for Tourists:
The secret is out about this marvelously rare and very brief annual spectacle. About a thousand tourists a night come to Elkmont, a small trailhead in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, during the two weeks each June when the country’s largest population of synchronous fireflies puts on what locals call “the light show.”
That is not exactly true, but the finer details of Photinus carolinus remain mysterious. The synchrony is more a race than a drum beat. One dominant male blinks and then all of the others flash almost instantly too. They follow a pattern, Morse-code-like, of roughly six seconds of flashing and then six seconds of darkness that lasts for about two hours after dusk.