With Apple’s next big iPhone event right around the corner , the rumor mill is churning at full speed. On September 10th, we’ll know if Cupertino’s nextcbig thing really is the long-fabled “budget iPhone.” For the moment, it’s still anyone’s guess, but here’s everything we think we know about the elusive iPhone 5c. Read more…
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iPhone 5c Rumor Roundup: Everything We Think We Know
A team of scientists using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space telescope have discovered a weird dead star , which hides one of the strongest magnetic fields in the Universe. Read more…
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The Mysterious Magnetar WIth an Insanely Strong Magnetic Field
The seven-year-old Emma Mærsk can carry more cargo than a 41-mile-long train and has a turning radius of almost a mile. Even compared to oil tankers, she’s more like a city than a boat—albeit a city that few people ever get to explore. But in 2010, a young photographer named Jakob Wagner became one of the few non-employee passengers to board Emma. Read more…
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A Photographer’s Rare Trip Aboard One of the World’s Largest Ships
Digital Grotesque is an ambitious architectural project using 3D printers and game-of-life-style algorithms to produce a room whose walls, baseboards, ceiling and moldings are all a-crawl with the most astonishing array of forms and complexities. They’ve completed a 1:3 prototype, which is presently on exhibit in Basel, and are proceeding to print out the full-scale item. the prototypes show a regard for both material sensitivity and the limits of technologically manipulated form– millions of grains of sand bind together to create a new typology of sandstone and subsequently treated to be glazed and gilded. drawing from the algorithmic confines of the game of life and cell division, a set of simple geometries met with minimal parameters begets a highly involved form. the result is rich, shimmering composition ridden with impossible undercuts and a transcendental sense of the limits of technology. the term grotesque is derived from the unplanned complexities of a water-shaped grotto, itself a naturally occurring architecture long regarded for the uncanny presence of human-sized spaces in various landscapes. digital grotesque showcases 3-d printed room by michael hansmeyer ( Images: Digital Grotesque ) ( via Dvice )
Here’s a mesmerizing gallery of “Fabrege Fractals” created by Tom Beddard , whose site also features a 2011 video of Fabrege-inspired fractal landscapes that must be seen to be believed. They’re all made with Fractal Lab , a WebGL-based renderer Beddard created. Fabergé Fractals by Tom Beddard, using his WebGL-based fractal engine, Fractal Lab. ( via Colossal )
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Fabergé Fractals
A Second Circuit Appeals Court judge has handed down a landmark fair use decision in Cariou v. Prince . Prince, a collagist, remixed some of Cariou’s photos and sold them for large sums. Cariou argued that the new works were not fair because Prince did not create his collages as a comment on the original (one of the factors judges can consider in fair use cases is whether the new work is a commentary or parody). The lower court agreed, and ordered destruction of the show catalogs and a ban on hanging the new works. But the appeals court overturned, and held that a use can be fair even when it doesn’t comment on the original. “We conclude that the district court applied the incorrect standard to determine whether Prince’s artworks make fair use of Cariou’s copyrighted photographs,” writes Judge B.D. Parker in the decision, which was released this morning. “We further conclude that all but five of Prince’s works do make fair use of Cariou’s copyrighted photographs. With regard to the remaining five Prince artworks, we remand the case to the district court to consider, in the first instance, whether Prince is entitled to a fair use defense.” “This decision absolutely clarifies that the law does not require that a new work of art comment on any of its source material to qualify as fair use,” attorney Virginia Rutledge told A.i.A. by phone this morning after a preliminary survey of the decision. “This is a major win for Prince on at least two counts,” NYU art law professor Amy Adler told A.i.A. via e-mail. (She consulted on the case but was speaking for herself.) “The court decided that artwork does not need to comment on previous work to qualify as fair use, and that Prince’s testimony is not the dispositive question in determining whether a work is transformative. Rather the issue is how the work may reasonably be perceived. This is the right standard because it takes into account the underlying public purpose of copyright law, which should not be beholden to statements of individual intent but instead consider the value that all of us gain from the creation of new work.” Richard Prince Wins Major Victory in Landmark Copyright Suit [Brian Boucher/Art in America] ( Thanks, Tim ! )
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Fair use decision: remixing is legal even when there is no intent to comment or parody original work
Law enforcement didn’t pull any punches during its manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers, going so far as to lock down an entire metropolis while they searched. Even when officers thought they had the second suspect cornered in Watertown boat, they confirmed their suspicions with a camera that can spot people from up to 10 miles away. Just to be sure. More »
It may sound like sci-fi, but lasers are definitely the future of war. As are drones. So what could be better than to see them go up against each other in a blaze of explosive glory? Looks like in the rock-paper-scissors game of modern combat, laser beats drone. More »
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Watch a Navy Laser Gun Blast a Drone Right Out of the Sky
At our sponsor Intel’s LifeScoop site, I posted about ” Music That Writes Itself “: In ambient music pioneer Brian Eno’s 1996 book A Year with Swollen Appendices, the composer wrote, “I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: ‘you mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?’” Eno was talking about generative music, a process by which a computer creates unique works from fixed parameters set by the artist. In its simplest form, you twist a few knobs (virtual or otherwise) and the computer takes it from there, creating music that can be credited to the system itself. The term generative art is most likely derived from “generative grammar,” a linguistic theory Noam Chomsky first proposed in his book Syntactic Structures (1965) to refer to deep-seated rules that describe any language. Steven Holtzman, author of Digital Mosaics (1997), traces the art form to the dawn of the information age in the 1960s, when musicians like Gottfried Michael Koenig and Iannis Xenakis pioneered computer composition. Decades later, a number of generative music apps are bringing Eno’s vision to our smartphones. ” Music That Writes Itself ”
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Generative music apps
This is the map we’ve all dreamed of seeing. It’s a depiction of Earth in which its primary geological features have been inverted , showcasing a planet with a sprawling landmass that extends across two-thirds of its surface. Read more…
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What Earth would look like with its oceans and landmasses swapped