Dad, you might find this interesting: an opera based on Origin of Species. I have this album and it’s quite strange (as you would expect from The Knife), but I find the concept to be an appealingly unique one. I am very curious to see the performance and visuals for this.
Commissioned by Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma to write the music for their opera based on Charles Darwin and his book ‘On the Origin of the Species’, The Knife decided to make this a collaborative process, working with artists Mt. Sims and Planningtorock for the first time, to capture the huge width of the Darwin and evolution theme. They extensively researched Darwin related literature and articles, with Olof attending a field recording workshop in the Amazon to find inspiration and to record sounds.
Been thinking about this video all morning. It’s so easy to get caught up in the little things, but it’s good to take a few million steps back and take a look at the much, much larger picture.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we’ve ever known.The pale blue dot.
EDIT: Looks like the video was taken down… that was fast! Go to Gizmodo where they have embedded into their own page.
Via Gizmodo
The one-of-a-kind “Julia” necklace, which is being introduced at a couture-week party in Paris tomorrow evening, was inspired by Newson’s obsession with fractals — geometric shapes that can be subdivided into smaller versions of themselves, specifically the Julia Sets of fractals discovered by Gaston Julia in the early 1900s.
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The scientifically-spawned sparkler contains around 2,000 paved stones and took the company’s craftspeople 1,500 hours to realize using rapid-prototyping technology and a minimal three-prong setting, so the stones appear to float on the wearer’s throat.
Incredible talk given by copyright activist/lawyer, Larry Lessig, creator of Creative Commons; entitled “It is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright.” It’s an hour long, but totally worth it.
Via Boing Boing
I had some fun playing with the map on this site today. Compiled from historical maps, archaeological records and ecological data it shows what “Manhatta” was like like in 1609, Before human impact.
Once upon a time a California boy met a Georgia girl in New York. They didn't get along, at first. But, little by little, they fell in love. Today they are happy and still very much in love, running a business and a blog together.