Bicycle Sidewalk » Blog Archive – 242nd Post
Video of a Chinese man balancing on tubes, pretty impressive.
This blogger uses greenscreens so he can give an in-person commentary.
Jan 252007
Obese Zombie Vincent D’Onofrio provide creative services for braaiins
A good opportunity to help out a small start-up business.
Screw Google – HassleHead News #2
Google made video from the US National Archive available online in a proprietary format. Here’s how you can release it from its chains.
VIRTUAL REALITY BOMBERMAN GAME ROOM – The Last Boss
This is awesome. You play a computer game by moving about a room. A camera tracks your movements because you are wearing a brightly coloured hat. The video gives a pretty good idea of how they did this.
style.org > Parsing the State of the Union
See here’s another one and this gets closer to to just aggravating me than the first. The guy says that rather than discuss style or presentation he just wants to show a couple of things that are easily measured. OK, so fair enough. But just because you measure something doesn’t mean it tells you anything important, or anything worth knowing.
I could measure the height of everyone who works for the BBC and do visualisations of how departments compared in terms of height. So what? Does height have any significant impact on the ability of a person to work in a large media organisation? Does length of sentence or number of words per speech tell us anything about the content of that speech that is edifying, useful, or even interesting?
Or are we just visualising things because we can? As if the management consultant obsession with measuring things wasn’t frustrating and pointless enough, now we must spend our time looking at pretty visualisations of those same meansurements, not to mention all the new things people are measuring so they can make visualisations of them.
Visualisation of word use in Bush’s State of the Union addresses. This is fun, but does it actually tell us much that is useful? Maybe seeing things laid out in this way makes certain things clear although obviously with its own biases. Hmmmm.
Jan 222007
DVblog » Man Man – Banana Ghost
This is a pretty cool music video, quite beautiful actually. Not sure I’d even like the music were it not for the animation, but it’s certainly growing on me as I listen to it for the second time.
Jan 202007
I’ve been playing with Babelfish trying to see what happens when you run a phrase through it multiple times. Right now I work on versioning learning content into Irish from English, so the whole translation process fascinates me. We have particular problems with colloquial phrases and idioms that just don’t translate well.
One I had recently was “athas an domhan”, which is a way of describing extreme happiness (athas), the phrase “Bhi athas an domhan orm” was translated as “The happiness of the world is upon me” which is just a crude nonsense that means nothing in English and doesn’t do justice to the English. I think the closest translation of the phrase is “I was over the moon” even though there is no mention of moon in the Irish phrase, just the word “domhan”, which means world [as in the best record shop name ever from world music shop in Dublin (now deceased): Boogie an Domhan - Boogie of the World/Boogie on down].
So much punctuation. Anyway. I put the phrase “over the moon” into Babelfish and started translating it based on the following rules:
1. start in English
2. choose first language to translate to from English
3. in second language choose first language to translate to
4. continue to always translate to the first language option from any given language
5. on second and subsequent times using a particular language, choose the first language you have not yet used from that language (when selecting what to translate to next)
6. if the language you are to choose is the language you just translated from, choose the next available language
7. move back to language you just came from if no other option
8. end on English
I guess that makes no sense, but I knew what I was doing.
Here is a recording of me saying (with dodgy French and German and woefully inadequate Dutch) the words as they came up.
At one point the Dutch word “maan”, which I believe means “moon” was translated into English as “maan”. Once that happened there was no way out of the spiral, in all other languages the “English” word “maan” was translated as maan, presumably the default is to leave an unrecognised word as it is.
Momentshowing: VIDEO: Skin Puzzle
This is gross and completely brilliant. This is a video of a guy with a really, really bad fungal infection peeling skin off his feet as they heal.
If we’re really having a media revolution, THIS is what it’s all about.
Steve Garfield’s Video Blog: Hide and Seek: Unofficial Imogen Heap Music Video
This is a really simple video made using stills. The pictures were shot at a pumpkin festival in Boston and edited together. It’s quite stunning.
