studionebula.com

This is impressive: a company in Israel is currently conducting clinical trials of a powered exoskeleton which enables a person with paralyzed legs to stand, sit, walk, ascend/descend stairs, etc. Part of the cleverness of the design is its relative simplicity: It doesn’t try to do all of the balancing for the wearer; the wearer uses regular crutches for balance. There’s a short article with a video here with links to a longer article and the company’s website.

I’m sure you’ve thought to yourself on more than one occasion–maybe even today–that what the world needs is a website which catalogues the packets of condiments that you get at fast-food restaurants. (You know, the little plastic envelope-like things that contain ketchup and mustard and stuff.) Maybe it’s crossed your mind that there are so many of these packets that such a site would have to let you sort them by type, by brand, and even by country of origin. Maybe you’ve even thought that you should build such a site yourself but just haven’t quite gotten around to it.

Okay, you probably have never thought any of that. Regardless, such a site exists: The Condiment Packet Gallery. There are currently images of 724 packets on display there; you can see them all at once by clicking here. You can look at them by type and by category with the little menus near the top of the window. Apparently you get a free pin if you send a packet that isn’t already represented, but I’m not sure whether the offer still stands since the item listed under the “NEWS” heading is dated early 2005. However, I intend to find out; Japan is under-represented and I’ll try to rectify that after our next trip. (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a condiment packet it Japan, but on the other hand I haven’t been in any fast-food restaurants there either.)

It kind of makes my stomach sour just to look at them all. Thanks go to my long-time friend Gloria for bringing this site to my attention.

My extremely talented and imaginative cousin Ziggy has a new website up at http://ravenland.com. Click that link and take a look at photos of her amazing sculpture and stoneware. I owe a lot to her; she had a profound influence on my musical tastes and overall aesthetic, giving me my first exposure to the likes of Devo, the Ramones, Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, Brian Eno, etc. during my formative years. There’s a good chance that I wouldn’t be doing much of what I do now if it weren’t for her.

Recently I found out about a wondrous thing called CHDK. CHDK is software that adds a number of useful features to Canon digital cameras. It can do things from the mundane, like adding a better battery-level indicator to the display, to the esoteric, like ultra-long and ultra-short exposures. It can even run little scripts so your camera can do stuff by itself, like taking a series of photos for time-lapse movies. It’s completely free and it doesn’t permanently alter your camera in any way, so it won’t even void your warranty.

I found out about it from an article here on the the always-diverting Hack A Day site. That page includes a few nice demonstrations of what can be done with an CHDK-enhanced camera. The main CHDK site is here. I’ve successfully installed it on my SD700 IS but haven’t yet done anything with it aside from paging through the numerous settings in wonder.

Note that this software is mostly useful for point-and-shoot cameras. If you already have a high-end Canon of some sort it probably won’t do much for you, if anything.

I ran across Trey Ratcliff’s blog recently. Trey Ratcliff does spectacular photography using a technique called HDR. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range; essentially it’s a method of combining several exposures to reproduce a wider range of contrast values than can be captured with a single exposure. Trey’s apparently something of a photoblogging celebrity; he’s won a number of awards and his work has been (is?) exhibited in the Smithsonian. I found the blog because I’m interested in HDR photos and he has a good tutorial on his site.

Let me state up front that I find this more amusing than anything else. One of my old cohorts at Cycling ‘74, Gregory Taylor, brought this video to my attention:

I don’t speak Spanish(?) so I can only guess at what’s being said, but it appears to be an excerpt from a Peruvian television show in which someone is showing off various things made with Max/MSP/Jitter. The amusing part is that this person must not be terribly creative, because one of the installations is nothing more than a demo patch that comes with Jitter. I know this because I built the patch. (It was about the only thing I did with Jitter; I didn’t have the time while working for Cycling ‘74 to learn Jitter, and I didn’t have the inclination to learn it after leaving.) Its output is quite distinctive. It’s the wavy abstract stuff that first appears at 0:30 in the video and then again at 1:30 through 1:50.

This speaks to a broader issue that I’ve mulled over at various times and in various contexts: what constitutes original work in the digital age? If I get up on stage with a Korg KARMA keyboard and plunk my finger down on one key and let the KARMA engine generate myriad patterns, am I the artist or is Stephen Kay, the KARMA inventor, the artist? If I use U&I’s lovely Artmatic software to generate a number of images, then print those images in a large format and hang them in a gallery, am I the artist or are Eric Wenger and Edward Spiegel, the creators of Artmatic, the artists? (Yes, I know that exactly this has been done.) If I string together a bunch of loops with ACID or GarageBand, am I the artist or are the creators of those loops the artists? If someone else grabs my Jitter patch from the demo folder of their Max/MSP/Jitter installation and projects it onto a screen in a gallery, I can’t help but think that they’re not the artist. No, I don’t think that I deserve any compensation or even necessarily any credit, but personally it would be a violation of my own integrity as an artist for me to present someone else’s work in this manner.

In case it’s not obvious, I don’t mean at all to disparage KARMA, Artmatic, ACID, or GarageBand. I have a great deal of respect for the respective creators of those products and admiration for their work. (Well, okay, maybe not so much for GarageBand…) But the inherent power of these products, and the sophistication of what they generate, raises questions about who’s doing the creating when they’re used.

I was pleased to learn today that Raymond Scott’s son is producing a documentary film about his father. Here’s the trailer:

I’m happy to say that Audio Damage contributed to the funding of this project as soon as we learned of it.

If you’re thinking “who’s Raymond Scott?” that’s exactly why it’s important that this film is being made. Raymond Scott was one of the most significant figures in 20th-century American music, and he really deserves to be bettern known, even posthumously. The Wikipedia article provides a good overview, and there’s lots more information at the Raymond Scott website.

I’ve been meaning to track this video down for awhile; thanks go to Ann Blake for sending it to Tracie. It’s of a speech given by a neuroscientist named Jill Bolte Taylor. Ms. Taylor suffered a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain and, as a result, achieved unusual insight into the operation of her brain and perhaps insight into the operation of the human species as a whole.

We just saw The Happening, the new film by M. Night Shyamalan. Let me state up front that I really like his previous movies. The excellence of The Sixth Sense goes without saying but I loved Signs and The Village also and certainly enjoyed Unbreakable and Lady in the Water. Hence it pains me to say that his newest film is really not very good. Coming from any lesser filmmaker it would be so-so; coming from him it’s a major disappointment.

I’m not going to say much about the plot since I personally hate it when someone spoils the plot of a movie for me. I suppose, though, that this review is something of a spoiler in itself. What I’ll say is this: it has a (mostly) very good, strange, suspense-laden build-up, and then it utterly fails to deliver. In retrospect it comes off as a few interesting ideas and some resulting odd situations thrown together in the framework of two plots competing for supremacy, and the competition ends in a draw.

I will say this: if you have any interest in seeing it, you might as well see it in a theater rather than waiting for the DVD. There are some nice bits of cinematography (although nothing as spectacular as, say, the night scene in The Village with the villagers moving through the houses with the dolly camera tracking them) whose impact would be diminished to nearly nothing on a small screen. On the other hand, those scenes might not be worth the trip to the theater. There were certain aspects of the camera work that I found annoying. I was entirely weary of the close-up-on-face-through-wide-angle-lens gimmick even before the film ended. That’s the first time I can recall being actually annoyed by camera work in one of his films.

Mark Wahlberg might be the movie’s strongest point. He’s a good actor; given his youth he might well be an excellent actor down the road. His character is at least convincing, which is more than can be said for many of the others. James Newton Howard did a nice job on the score. It’s not stunning but it works.

I dunno. Maybe I missed the point altogether, but as far as we could tell, if the movie had a point, it’s been made many times over in much simpler ways, and without completely letting down the audience.

I’ll make a couple of other pithy comments in the Comments section which will probably be spoilers, so don’t look at the Comments for this post until you’ve seen the movie, if you think you’re going to do so.