Metamedia

De Revolutionibus (2)

Navlopomo Day 9.

De Revolutionibus (2) is another version of yesterday's film recounting the history of the universe metaphorically in glass balls.

But I really felt after watching the first one, which is silent, that it needed some sound. So, I added some music to it, put together from some library loops with some digital tinkering by me. I say, I do prefer the music version, though at first I thought nothing could match the silent visuals.

I notice that YouTube has added a "pop" to the beginning of the sound track, which is pretty poor codec conversion. But I decided to leave it, as it actually makes serendipitous sense as the beginning of the film represents the birth of the universe (if, indeed it had one; so perhaps the birth only of our localized version. String theory, anyone?)

De Revolutionibus

Navlopomo Day 8.

De Revolutionibus is today's short film recounting the history of the universe (well, at least the solar system, and from a distinctly Taker point of view) in the revolution of glass beads. Shot handheld using the $14 steadycam.

The Moon Wiki

Very nifty: a wiki with everything about the Earth's Moon.

And who are the sort of people who would be interesting in such a thing?

Our Community: There are three main (=obsessed) contributors including Chuck Wood, a lunar scientist, Mark Tillotson, an engineer and amateur astronomer who has fallen in love with the Moon, and Jim Mosher, a retired physicist. Each has contributed knowledge, hard work and skills, allowing us to create 2055 pages in less than 2 months. Amateur astronomers and professional lunar scientists use and contribute to The-Moon.

This wiki is done on Wikispaces and is a great example of how easy it is to set of a wiki with a designated group of editors. Terrific job.

Count Him Not Among Your Friends

"Count not him among your friends who will retail your privacies to the world."
    -- Publilius Syrus

There’s a site online called Swivel  http://www.swivel.com/ that is a rather quirky combination of social network and data set visualization tool.

It allows you to upload or reference existing data sets, then visualize them in various ways, compare them to other data sets already on the site, share them, tag them, comment and get comments on them.

It just started earlier in the year, but already has rather wide range of topics. For anyone doing visualizations of statistics, for either the social or hard sciences, this site could be a useful adjunct to class, as well as a lot of fun.

Here's a nice example of a graph made in Swivel by seema, illustrating an interesting instance of traditional politicians' continued misunderstanding of the power of social software in the recent Obama MySpace debacle: