reminds me of a video i saw probably 6 months ago by AKQA, another san francisco based operation. someone remind me why i left again?

microwaves sing jingle bells to you.

As it turns out, this interview Pance and I did/shot with Jonah in April of 2007 for ‘Sup was both enlightening (acronym-wise) and, looking back, a fun, off-hand prediction of things that have since come to pass. Namely, Claire! She’s a full-fledged partner, and fully amazing, on the(ir) new album, See Mystery Lights. Love it.

Early versions of the Phantom had capabilities to shoot as fast as 1000FPS. (for super slow motion, you must shoot more frames per second, and the project that data at the standard 24FPS, creating a potentially confusing situation in which you have to shoot faster to get slower.)

But the good people at Vision Research were unmoved. “This is not slow enough!”

So they continued on. Fast-forward (no pun intended) to a few days ago when Vision Research announced their latest model, the Phantom v710. 1000FPS you say? please.

In news that surely gave Zach Snyder nocturnal emissions, Vision Research’s latest model can shoot at speeds of up to ONE MILLION FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND FRAMES PER SECOND, creating undeniably the slowest fucking motion ever.

As an aside, I believe Vision Research’s only competitor is the laughable Photron, who touts their “FastCam SA5” as “The world’s fastest high speed camera” clocking in at a measly 7500FPS. So congratulations guys, you official embarrassed your competition.

Have you ever solved one of these? Well that’s called CAPTCHA and this is the dude who made it up. It basically started as a test to determine legitimate users vs. spamming software and it worked very well. But Luis thought he was wasting too much of Humanity’s time (±1.666 Million hours in 2007). So what did he do? With the advent of reCAPTCHA, every time you solve one of those annoying verification puzzles you are helping to decipher and digitize some of the 150+ years of non-digital, non-computer recognizable NY Times archives that exist as scans or microfilm. Keep in mind, this started last year and Ahn expects to be done by the end of 2009.

Some other interesting notes:

The Empire State Building took 7 million human-hours to build.

The Panama Canal took 20 million human-hours to build.

9 Billion Human-Hours of solitaire were played in 2003.

Granted, the energy output of a game of solitaire is not equal to one of manual labor, but think about the scale of this. Thanks to Nova Science Now for bringing this up.

Harper’s, June ‘09. Search the Harper’s Index, too. So dope.

The play, in 6 parts on YouTube, stars Laurence Olivier, Alan Bates, Malcolm McDowell, and Helen Mirren, all of which, in my opinion, are in their absolute primes here.

Required viewing.

unrelated sidenote: this is the salon’s 300th post! explore the site, we are deep.

a dvd of his animations–certain doubts– is available on amazon and through the sfmoma shop, but the price is pretty steep so you should know it’s also available through netflix. (thanks keene)

Onwards from AKQA on Vimeo.

muppet/fraggle esque animation by james jarvis (sponsored by nike) just put a little pep in my step.

notice the character’s eyes while he’s stretching. our little yellow man looks up diagonally during arms stretches just like i do (and i am sure many of you do, too). really quite inpressive to me. i also couldn’t help but bop around to the caribou soundtrack.

happy sunday.

-mm