blacksundae

Oceansize is a really impressive short monster movie created by four French animation students. Here’s a direct link with more information, and here’s a version with English subtitles (although you don’t really need it). [via io9]

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime. The first English edition was approximately 150,000 words and the sixth is a much larger 190,000 words. In the changes are refinements and shifts in ideas — whether increasing the weight of a statement, adding details, or even a change in the idea itself.

On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces is a visualization of the edits Darwin made to the book over the course of six editions. This was created with Processing, something I’ve been meaning to try out. via Pharyngula

This got me thinking about the data that is hidden in various social network information streams - Facebook & Twitter updates in particular. People share a lot of information in their tweets - some of it shared intentionally, and some of it which could be uncovered with some rudimentary searching. I wondered if it would be possible to extract travel information from people’s public Twitter streams by searching for the term ‘Just landed in…’.

Link. Via http://waxy.org/links/

A wonderful homage to my favorite movie, John Carpenter’s The Thing. Via MeFi

Interactive Video Object Manipulation from Dan Goldman on Vimeo.

“Existing approaches to interaction with digital video are complex, and some operations lack the immediacy of interactive feedback. Our research in video annotation, visualization, and interaction harnesses computer vision to aid users in understanding and communicating with digital video. We are developing new approaches for computing the motion of points and objects in a video clip, and interactive systems that utilize this data to visually annotate independently moving objects in the video. We have applied this interface to construct visualizations of a short video clip in a single static image, using the visual language of storyboards. The principal advantage of the storyboard representation over standard representations of video is that it requires only a moment to observe and comprehend but at the same time retains much of the detail of the source video. The layout of the storyboard can be optimized to place the elements in a configuration that maximizes the clarity of presentation. We also explore novel interaction techniques for random video frame access using the natural spatial dimensions of a storyboard representation or an individual video frame.”

Read on.

sweetgifs.com Via NOTCOT.org

These monsters are result of my effort to learn Processing and encourage others to do so by showing the source code. Also, at the end, my plan is to do a short music reactive video using these monsters. So if you feel like you can make one too and be part of it, rules are simple:

Link!

Don’t think I’ve posted this before, and if I did who cares? It’s awesome, and I just rediscovered it. Now that I’ve been taking care of a cat for a while (Please don’t leave me, Kitters!) it seems even more realistic. Especially the batting at the face.

A really neat tech demo for a game where you “illuminate” — if that’s the word — a completely colorless and contrastless world by firing ink blobs at everything. Via Kotaku

Alan Kay presenting Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad, one of most influencial programs in the history of graphical user interfaces. Sutherland developed Sketchpad in 1963.

Via Reddit.