How They Did It — Giant Megalopolis of the Ants Edition

For this week’s How They Did It, I had to share this amaz­ing video I saw on boing boing, Exca­vat­ing an ant colony. Pretty amaz­ing what these lit­tle guys can do. Fact beats fic­tion any day! Plus I love the descrip­tion of the ant colony, “the giant mega­lopo­lis of the ants,” yep that about sums it up.

10 Best Video Series on the Internet for Self Education

The inter­net is an amaz­ing resource for learn­ing new things. If you want to put in the time, there are many great things you can learn. The fol­low­ing are ten great free video series that you should really check out.

These are sites and series that I reg­u­larly watch, so it is a per­sonal list. Hence the rather ran­dom, nature of the sub­jects. I am very curi­ous about pretty much every­thing from my pro­fes­sion of graphic design to sci­ence to pop cul­ture to reli­gion. You’ll have to for­give the rather scat­tered nature of the list, but I per­son­ally attest to the great­ness of each of the listed shows.

TED: Tech­nol­ogy, Edu­ca­tion and Design
The great­est col­lec­tion of experts wax­ing poetic on their fields. A must watch for anyone.

The Peri­odic Table of Videos
Video Jour­nal­ist Brady Haran cre­ates videos about chemistry.

Sixty Sym­bols
Video Jour­nal­ist Brady Haran cre­ates videos about physics.

Bibledex
Bibledex is a project by the Uni­ver­sity of Nottingham’s Depart­ment of The­ol­ogy and Reli­gious Stud­ies in con­junc­tion with video jour­nal­ist Brady Haran. The videos are by no means com­pre­hen­sive — rather they’re a curi­ous assort­ment of aca­d­e­mic insights into what is prob­a­bly the most famous col­lec­tion of books in history.

Back­stage Sci­ence
Great videos about sci­ence by Brady Haran.

Deke’s Tech­niques
Deke McCel­lan is my Pho­to­Shop hero. I find him the most enter­tain­ing and excel­lent teacher of dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools ever. Here are dif­fer­ent sites to check out this great series:
blog.lynda.com/tag/dekes-techniques/
deke.com/
youtube.com/user/lynda

InDe­sign Secrets Video Cast
Quick tips on secrets from the mas­ters of InDe­sign. A must for any­one work­ing in pub­li­ca­tions design.

Global Pub­lic Square with Fareed Zakaria
My favorite liv­ing intel­lec­tual and polit­i­cal thinker has an amaz­ing show on CNN which is broad­cast on the inter­net. His show is what news should be, a thought­ful exam­i­na­tion of events and issues with the lead­ers and great thinkers.

Ontwink
A great resource for web design­ers and devlop­ers. It is a repos­i­tory for talks on the tech­ni­cal side of design.

Watch Free Doc­u­men­tary
A col­lec­tion of great non-fiction films. Though I would quib­ble the site about many of the pseudo-science and con­spir­a­to­r­ial bent of many of the doc­u­men­taries. So buyer beware on some of them.

Extra Series to check out!

After Hours on cracked.com
I had one extra one, it is more a humor­ous look at pop­u­lar cul­ture. I am not sure if it belongs with the other videos in this list, but I highly rec­om­mend it.

Awesome or Awful (depending on taste) Auto-tune songs

Nor­mally this blog deals with graphic design and it’s related top­ics, but today I wanted to share some exam­ples of a thing I have a love-hate rela­tion­ship with. Auto-tuning.

One one hand it seems like cheat­ing if you are an actual singer and you are using it to cor­rect imper­fec­tions in your craft is cheat­ing. Or rather, the per­ceived imper­fec­tions in your craft, if a singer can’t hit a par­tic­u­lar pitch, most fans really won’t care so long as the song is per­formed with emo­tion, mean­ing and impact. Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain weren’t the best singers but they were so raw they touched peo­ple at a dif­fer­ent level. So when singers are aided covertly by auto-tuning I find that irk­some. If it is done in an obvi­ous man­ner for effect that can be fun (Cher’s “I Believe”), so long as it doesn’t sup­plant the feel­ing behind the song.

How­ever, as a fan of socially cre­ated media, mash-ups and inter­net memes, I love when peo­ple take found mate­r­ial and use tech­nol­ogy to cre­ate some­thing that has per­sonal mean­ing for them. In that spirit I want to share some of my per­sonal favorite Awe­some or Awful (depend­ing on taste) Auto-tune music videos/songs. It is true that maybe the music is a bit generic, but the artists have gen­uine feel­ing invested in these songs and at end of the day that’s what it’s really all about.

Sym­phony of Sci­ence Auto-tune
These fol­low­ing songs pro­mote sci­ence, so beyond being cool they speak to me at an emo­tional and an intel­lec­tual level.

Movie & Tele­vi­sion Auto-tune Mashups
One part Hol­ly­wood one part auto-tune!

Some clas­sic inter­net Meme Auto-tunes
Okay these aren’t quite as high minded as the Sym­phony of sci­ence, but I still like them.

Dou­ble Rain­bow Auto­tune (Orig­i­nal Video)

Char­lie Bit My Fin­ger Auto­tune (Orig­i­nal)

Auto-Tune the News

Obama Auto-tune

Happy Carl Sagan Day!

Today, Novem­ber 9, 2011 is Carl Sagan Day! It’s a great day to reflect on the uni­verse and our place in it. This is one of my favorite clips from Cos­mos, the famous Pale Blue Dot Speech.

Burn It Up!

Fri­day is really hot! A time to burn it up! But have you ever won­dered what fire actu­ally is?

Okay, that’s quite a stretch I know, but any­thing for a pun, right? The fol­low­ing is a fan­tas­tic ani­ma­tion from One Minute Physics explain­ing what fire is, why it is the color it is and why it dances about. So in case you skipped your high school physics class now you can get caught up in 90 seconds.

Plus, the ani­ma­tion is top notch, sim­ple, fun and explana­tory. It will make you want to break out your white­board! Using sim­ple icons and draw­ings help make a dif­fi­cult con­cept eas­ier to under­stand. I’d say in the days of Pho­to­shop fil­ters, tex­tures and 3D ani­ma­tion, it would be good to take a hint from this great ani­ma­tion and we can real­ize that some­times less is more.

Photoshop helps the Hubble!

I saw this great video on Boing Boing and I had to share. A brief video show­ing how Pho­to­Shop helps cre­ate all those great Hub­ble images of the uni­verse. It reminds me of a line from the Man­i­festo of the Con­struc­tivist Group from 1922:

PREVIOUSLY: Engi­neers relaxed with art
NOW-Artists relax with technology

Great Read: Exit To Tomorrow, World’s Fair Architecture 1933–2005

Here is another great book for the design book­shelf: Exit to Tomor­row, World’s Fair Archi­tec­ture, Design, Fash­ion 1933–2005 by Andrew Garn, Paola Antonelli, Udo Kul­ter­mann and Steven Van Dyk. This fab­u­lous and copi­ously illus­trated book cat­a­logs the major World’s Fairs through­out the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury; and details their impact on design, tech­nol­ogy and architecture.

Exit to Tomor­row also fea­tures many great essays about the rise of World’s Fairs as pop­u­lar spec­ta­cles through their hey­day and finally chron­i­cling their even­tual demise due to eco­nomic and tech­no­log­i­cal obsta­cles. Each essay gives great insight into these once pop­u­lar events, one that I par­tic­u­larly liked was “Of Imag­i­nary and Con­crete Fan­tasies” by Paola Antonelli, wherein she gives great per­spec­tive, includ­ing this lit­tle nugget describ­ing the under­ly­ing phi­los­o­phy of a World’s Fair:

A great World’s fair, just like a good sci-fi movie, is a plau­si­ble fan­tasy based on the impact of sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy on soci­ety. But while the world por­trayed by the movies can be on the verge of a dark cat­a­stro­phe — or just emerg­ing from it —  the dream invoked by a world’s fair nearly always a gleam­ing utopia within arm’s reach.”
— Paola Antoneilli from the essay “Of Imag­i­nary and Con­crete Fantasies”

It’s a great book, espe­cially for any­one inter­ested in the inter­sec­tion of cul­ture, archi­tec­ture, sci­ence and visions of the future. Read­ing the almost naive opti­mism of these World’s Fairs is quite infec­tious, in fact I’ve put on my rose tinted space aged glasses and I see it’s a great big beau­ti­ful tomorrow!

Finally, I thought I’d end with a few clips from YouTube with footage from one of my favorite World’s Fair’s… The Cen­tury 21 Expo­si­tion or The 1962 Seat­tle World’s Fair. A World’s Fair that pro­moted space travel and man’s future explo­ration of space. I am par­tial to this World’s Fair for three impor­tant reasons:

1. It was the set­ting for a delight­fully tacky Elvis movie.
2. The Space Nee­dle is awe­some… mid-century archi­tec­ture at it’s finest!
3. I live in Seattle!

Design Something Everyday Day 1: Volcano

I read the great post by Jad Lim­caco on Smash­ing Mag­a­zine called “Design Some­thing Every Day!” It is a very inspir­ing, if not daunt­ing idea, to design some­thing every day, but it is a call I would like to take up. I wanted to do it in Jan­u­ary, but some projects and a hint of fear kept me from attempt­ing this project.

Since today is my birth­day I thought this would be a good time to start the project, so begin­ning today, Feb­ru­ary 3rd I begin my year of daily design­ing. Wish me luck. So far the hard­est part is lim­it­ing myself to only 15–45 min on these designs. I just want to keep “plussing” the design. So here’s day one, the inte­rior of a volcano.

Design Some­thing Every Day: Day 1: Volcano

Tools: Adobe Illus­tra­tor, Col­ors: kuler.adobe.com
Source: Vol­cano infor­ma­tion: GeoBytes­GCSE