Check out these great tronix paintings, now hanging at Progressive Grounds in Bernal Heights:

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On Martin Luther King Day, I decided to take Sebastian Schmieg’s Search By Image, Recursively project, and start with a seed image of MLK from Wikipedia.

After about a thousand images we arrive at the Hubble Deep Field. Interesting to compare to Sebastian’s project, where he very quickly arrives at the Deep Field when starting with a transparent image.

I took the code that Sebastian Schmieg made available on his Search by Image page and wrapped it in a loop. The modified code can be found here.

Update:

Here is the full 9 minute video. After crawling about 8500 images, the algorithm stopped after it couldn’t find any new related images. We skip the broken images, which leaves us with about 7000 frames:

And here it is with a soundtrack, as suggested by Aaron.
-raj

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mang has been posting build pics of the Dimple of Tears, under construction for this year’s Balsa Man. It was cut on a Lasersaur, and is a homage to David Best’s 2001 Temple of Tears.

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I was thinking about Apple today, and thought I would dig through some old Apple stuff. Internally, Apple extensively documented the company’s achievements by printing T-shirts. There is a T-shirt made for every team, every product, and every conference. Here are a few that I managed to save:

The Journey Begins

Every new employee gets a “The journey begins” shirt when they join the company as part of the new employee orientation. This shirt is from 2000, shortly after the switch to the single-color logo. I really like how understated this shirt is compared to other Apple shirts, and I’m glad I managed to hang on to it.

Mac OS X Launch

Apple launched Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) on March 24, 2001, and of course there was a T-shirt. Actually, there were several. Another version was given out at the employee launch party at Hanger One in Moffett Field. If I remember right, marketing thought it would be a good idea to set up a casino night or something. A strange way to celebrate something so great. However, Apple rented out Hanger One! A lot of the OS X t-shirts had a giant candy-colored X on the front. Apple liked to call the new Aqua theme “lick-able”.

Here is higher-quality OS X shirt I got sometime later:

WWDC 2001

Of course, every WWDC came with all kinds of swag. This was my favorite: a Steve-style mock turtleneck from WWDC 2001 for staff. Apple gave black leather jackets out to attendees with a blue X on the back, which were pretty tacky, especially compared to these awesome mock turtlenecks.

Back then, WWDC was still held in San Jose. Speakers were briefed by marketing about what to wear, and one of the rules was “no sneakers”. One of my coworkers got up on stage to speak, wearing her staff shirt, but without any shoes. A marketing person noticed immediately, leaned over to our VP, and exclaimed “she’s not wearing any shoes!” He calmly replied, “you said no sneakers“.

WWDC 2002

Here is a speaker shirt from WWDC 2002. Not nearly as awesome as the mock turtleneck!

WWDC 2003

2003 was the year WWDC went from a mid-size software developer conference in San Jose to something completely different. In 2003, Apple moved WWDC from San Jose to Moscone Center West in SF, and announced new hardware, the G5, at the conference. Moscone West was just finishing construction, and the Moscone people promised that a robot billboard would be operational by then, slowly gliding around the outside of the building. Sadly, the robot billboard never came to be.

If you look closely, you’ll see that the tag is cut off from this shirt. By 2003, a huge percentage of my wardrobe consisted of Apple T-shirts. Since I hated looking like an Apple billboard (or looking like I was STAFF anywhere I went), I wore the t-shirts inside out. This annoyed one of my coworkers, and she would sneak up behind me and cut the tags off my shirts.

QuickTime Live

QuickTime Live was my favorite Apple conference. It ran until 2003, when it was it was folded into WWDC. QT Live was a ton of work for my team, but it was also a blast. It was held the Beverly Hilton in LA, which set it apart from most Apple events.  The “Develop. Produce. Deliver.” slogan dates this T-shirt to the 2001 conference I think (which was postponed until Feb 2002). Apple had started using short three-word slogans after the “Rip. Mix. Burn.” campaign in 2001.

We had been working hard on MPEG-4 support in QuickTime, and were pretty burned out. MPEG-LA wanted to charge broadcast license fees in addition to the codec license fees for MPEG-4 streams, so Apple very publicly pulled back the launch and successfully got MPEG-LA to not charge broadcast fees for MPEG-4.

2002 wasn’t as surreal as the previous year. Bob and Joe came to see me, and we stayed up way too late. Then I went, sleep-deprived, into David Lynch’s keynote, where he showed a preview of Rabbits. I was totally not prepared for that. Lynch said he shot a lot of this on his front lawn at night, until his neighbors called the cops.

MacWorld Keynote 2005

I worked the keynote in 2005, helping to seat people in the VIP section or something. Engineers usually didn’t get to go to a keynote, so it was kind of neat to be there. Also, we had been working incredibly hard on H.264 and 4-way video conferencing in iChat AV 3, which Steve demoed during the keynote. It got a huge reaction from the crowd, which was nice to hear.

I think these were the embroidered dayglo shirts they had us wear:

Trade Shows

Apple generally prefers its own conferences and expos over huge trade shows like Comdex and CES. However, after QuickTime Live ended, NAB in Las Vegas became an important conference for QT and pro video announcements.

Although I disliked Vegas, it was usually a blast. We usually had an announcement we were working on, so it was always nice to be done with a big project, and I liked driving out to Las Vegas with Peliom. We went through China Lake once to see a friend and got stuck in mountain snow in the middle of a California summer. My foodie coworkers would take me out for great food and try and teach me about wine tasting.

Another trade show we went to was IBC in Amsterdam, which was over-the-top ridiculous. I only went once, immediately after a trip to Burning Man. I had been working on both the Ambience Ambulance and the TikiCrawler, and for some reason I went straight from the playa to Amsterdam. Also, my brother came along. And a bunch of old friends were hanging out in Prague, so they came to see us too. I remember sitting exhausted in the sushi restaurant in our hotel, listening to a very large Elvis impersonator yell at the Dutch waitress who didn’t speak english, because she didn’t know what a “California roll” was. IBC was a trip.

For trade shows, we got higher-quality shirts!

The first Apple Store opening

Apple opened its first store in Palo Alto in October 2001. They gave these shirts to people who showed up on opening day. Lines outside Apple stores are commonplace now, but at the time, the blocks-long line was pretty ridiculous.

WWDC Beer Bash shirts

During WWDC, Apple holds a beer bash on campus for external developers. They issue these bright-colored shirts to employees to help developers find the right people to talk to.

Berkeley Labs

Not an Apple shirt, but Peliom might like this.. A LBL sweatshirt from the mid 90′s!

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By Madeon:

Also via reddit.

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It starts out pretty nuts, and then part 2 goes straight to plaid.

via reddit

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I was playing around with Google’s Web Font Directory and found some great fonts. I really like IM Fell English and IM Fell DW Pica, both originally designed by John Fell in the 1600′s and digitized by Igino Marini.

Marini’s THE FELL TYPES and some revival fonts page has some background and history:

The Fell Types took their name from John Fell, a Bishop of Oxford in the seventeenth-century. Not only he created an unique collection of printing types but he started one of the most important adventures in the history of typography. You will find here a non-exhaustive history and a modern digitalization of some of them.

Here is a sample of the IM Fell English web font:

I think these will be perfect when we add text mode to the IA bookreader!

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Jon Hope has been taking pictures from a helicopter and posting them to his blog.

I love this shot of the Transamerica Pyramid:

And this one of the Bay Bridge toll plaza:

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The Musalman is a newspaper handprinted in Urdu calligraphy daily in Chennai, India. Here is a short film about it:

via MeFi

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Wendy MacNoughton draws the San Francisco Public Library, In Its Own Words:

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You know, Blade Runner was set in 2019.. that is only eight years away!

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Chanda Mama Door Ke is a children’s song from the 1955 movie Vachan

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Someone cut down the shoe tree in Nevada..

:(

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This is a great video about doodling and graph theory:

via reddit. Here are more videos of Mathematical Doodling by Vi Hart.

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I’ve never seen this video before.. It’s based on “Esther’s” by Amon Tobin. Found via this incredible MeFi post about Ninja Tune.

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When you have kids, apparently your sense of style goes out the window and mail order companies from Kentucky decide that now you are smack dab in their target demo. This is some serious 1950s Sears Roebuck bullshit right here. We got a whole fucking catalog full of this crap. Just look at this disaster:

OK, I admit it. I would so buy this family pajama clusterfuck if they just included some puppy dog pjs for Zara.

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Amazing auto-biographical sculpture made with 100,000 toothpicks over thirty five years:

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Ravi likes the Electric Car song by They Might Be Giants. Cute paper-cutout video too!

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During the 1800′s, letters were sometimes writing using cross-writing to save paper. The Boston Public Library has been scanning letters written by Abolitionists prior to the American Civil War. Here is an example of a letter that shows two levels of cross-writing. However, it is written with a cursive slant so that the ascenders and descenders seem to form additional diagonal layers:

In 1890, Lewis Carrol wrote a booklet titled Eight or nine wise words about letter-writing where he warned against cross-writing:

My ninth Rule. When you get to the end of a note-sheet, and find you have more to say, take another piece of paper — a whole sheet, or a scrap, as the case may demand: but, whatever you do, don’t cross! Remember the old proverb ‘Cross-writing makes cross reading‘. “The old proverb?” you say, en-quiringly. “How old?” Well, not so very ancient, I must confess. In fact, I’m afraid I invented it while writing this paragraph! Still, you know, ‘old’ is a comparative term. I think you would be quite justified in addressing a chicken, just out of the shell, as ” Old boy ! “, when compared with another chicken, that was only half-out!

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A Ken Burns documentary on the San Francisco Coffee Wars

from Killing My Lobster

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(via reddit)

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I always wondered about the wooden ladders used by the SF Fire Department…

Ladder Shop for SFFD from AdamKaplan on Vimeo.

via mefi

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