"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." - William Morris
The unseen video automatically identifies where you are in the world, checks out your local weather and then customizes the video to that. What a cute idea. It needs a bit more work, as it seemed to think our amazingly sunny and spring like winter weather here in New York was actually grey and rainy – still looked awesome though.
Was just checking out the Joomla demo site and saw this little piece of text:
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Unfortunately it’s not attributed, but to communicate what’s being talked about it is very effective indeed.
A Brunel university student has put together a prototype of a ‘feeling music’ device. This device transmits the sound vibrations into the fingertips of the deaf ‘listener’ so they can discern the musical structure.
I’m not sure how well this would work, but then there’s always a big emotional impact when you feel the vibration of loud bass standing next to a speaker at a club. Perhaps at a larger scale this would be more impactful? I’m also reminded of the movie “It’s all gone Pete Tong” about the Superstar DJ who loses his hearing.
On the subject of sound and movies, last night at Superfilm we watched Evil Dead II, the B movie classic horror that launched Sam Raimi. What I’d never appreciated about that movie before was the sheer genius of the soundtrack. Crappy special effects and OTT dialog were cranked up to full fear factor simply by having minimal backgroud music, moments of intense silence, then sudden increases in volume or small skittering noises. Amazing. Plus the left/right channels were reversed in our viewing room which I think helped intensely – the characters would point to something coming from the left and suddenly you’d hear an un-anticipated noise to your right. Boo!
Etsy.com jas a clever interface for choosing items to buy based on colour choices. Select a colour from the pretty balls of colour that grow and fade on the page, and then the items show up around it for your purchasing delight. Nice. Kind of like the Flickr photo colour wheel that turned up on my browser the other day.
Via metafilter
MSNBC have a cute little hurricane tracker on their site. You can see, in ‘real’ time, the progress of hurricanes as they change strength and move about.