Posts

One of my goals this year was to up my foundation dev skills and a (sort of) semi-SMART goal of getting up four progressively more difficult apps I’d be scheming about releasing over the course of the year.

Kobayashi, which powers my re-christened blog Tundramonkey, was one of those apps. Yeah, I know… blog software? Can’t you do that in, like… 15 minutes? I mean, there’s a Rails screencast and everything… Well, actually… no. What I found once I got going was that it ended up being quite the little project and while the basic coding behind getting core functionality up was quite easy, the vast collection of details that goes into migrating over eight years of posts and the functionality you’ve actually used means quite a bit of detail sweating.

Pretty fantastic cosmological simulation from the Big Bang to the formation of a Disk Galaxy with “rich merging” and plenty of collisions from NASA’s N-body shop (makers of quality galaxies). Slightly hypnotic to watch and would be much better with a nice soundtrack (and a drink!) to accompany it imho, but cool nonetheless.

Likey? You can also check out a video simulation of a Milky Way like galaxy forming .

Incredible timelapse of ISS photos of our big blue marble. Beautiful. Especially love the way the Aurora Borealis looks with the stitched together shots.

Watch it in full screen in a darkened room with the sound turned way up.

Put together by 18-year-old Croatian Tomislav Safundžić, from photos taken aboard the ISS.

(via Like Cool )

Kinda loving this excellent campaigning video from the Taronga Zoo . Love the wet ink animation style and just the general tone. Great execution (and the zoo is an awesome cause btw. They do fantastic work.).

Only problem is no solid Call to Action on the end.

Just looking at this thing makes me appreciate what amazing things our bodies are. Japanese beatboxer Hikakin and freestyler NonStop. Hypnotic and amazing to listen to and watch.

Put together by myISH . Probably would have been better if they just inset Hikakin rather than split screening but still seriously cool.

Astounding one take video of Alex Chadwick playing 100 seminal guitar riffs to create a brief history of rock and roll. It is very cool and Alex is obviously incredibly talented. Seriously, I’m seriously super impressed. Make sure you watch the whole thing.

I’m humbled. Think I really need to add learning to play guitar back into the goals list. Something I’ve been told all my life I could never do (why do parents and teachers tell you things like “you just aren’t good at languages” or “you don’t have an ear for music” ? Ugh…)

Impressive Effie-award winning campaign to save the Troy Library by Leo Burnett/Arc Worldwide even if using slightly questionable deception and the application of reverse psychology to achieve the goal against a very well-organized and very vocal opposition. Great idea though.

I do wonder at how many times people can use this same idea of whipping up public outrage on a fake campaign and then using psych jujitsu to transfer it over to the actual campaign. Definitely a great strategy in this case, but duplicable in other cases? Trying to think of where else I could apply it in some of the campaigning that’s been done. Definitely a workable strategy on low turnout/care issues where apathy might be an issue.

I already tweeted this, but it was such an amazingly interesting video, I’m posting it on the blog.

PBS Idea Channel on the phenomenon of My Little Pony lovers in the young, male demographic and changing ideas about masculinity. Have to admit to never having run across PBS Idea Channel before, but being super impressed with this as an intellectual inquiry.

Being a non-traditional kind of guy (yeah, not so into the watching sports on tv, fast cars, and playing XBox till my fingers fall off.) I find this interesting because, at least growing up, there was definite pressure on conforming into accepted “male” roles if not outright sterotypes. Not doing so reflected upon not just your social status, but also implied sexuality. It made me a very socially awkward teen, an overly competitive and achievement obsessed young adult and it was a long time before I was comfortable with the fact that I just didn’t fit into the “normal” guy mode (in fact, I’d still say it’s a problem in terms of dating where women influence these gender biases as much as men.).

Kinda great four minute video explaining the cosmic background radiation and the origins of the Big Bang.

Oh, and more cosmically awesome learning materials available over at the Big Bang Registry.

Dare Mighty Things.

Is there anyone else who watched this video and had the feeling that when the EDL team explained this to whoever calls the shots on these things at NASA they must’ve exclaimed, “My God! It’s just crazy enough that it might actually work!”

In any case, on 5 Aug 2012 Curiosity will try to land on Mars. Not a trivial feat as this attests.

Godspeed Curiosity. Fair winds and calm seas.