The City Dark is a feature documentary about light pollution and the disappearance of the night. The film follows filmmaker Ian Cheney, who moves to New York City and discovers skies almost completely devoid of stars. Posing a deceptively simple question — why do we need the night? — he leads viewers no quest to understand what is lost in the glare of city lights.
Upon one of the first things I noticed when I moved to Los Angeles was the inability to see the stars in the sky. Of course the city has plenty to offer to compensate, but that dull tint that covers the night skyline of heavy urban environments is still a sad thing. Looking forward to this flick.
Proof that photographer and director are not one in the same. Mute this video less you want to hear something not unlike a Goo Goo Dolls song. If this is all what “living” covers are about, then save for the glorious resolution of the Red Camera, there’s not much beyond some weird borderline territory of shitty music video and softcore porn. To top it all off, the actual cover of “the sexiest woman alive” just plain.. sucks. Color me disappointed.
Every day, in a city the size of London, 30 million meals are served. But where does all the food come from? Architect Carolyn Steel discusses the daily miracle of feeding a city, and shows how ancient food routes shaped the modern world. Understanding the flow of food will help us reconnect with what we eat. (Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 15:41)
If you’ve been to a summer house party within the last two years, there’s a high chance you’ve probably heard a Girl Talk track at some point — infectious multi-snippetted jams that blend and recontextualize samples into an almost elevated form of the mash-up. Jonah Lehrer breaks down Girl Talk’s work from a neurological perspective, proposing that the mash-up song is an apt metaphor for the production of new ideas in working memory.
Let’s say you’re listening to that catchy Wu-Tang song, with the chorus “And let’s start it like this, son, rollin’ with this one / And that one, pullin’ out gats for fun”. Once the acoustic snippet enters working memory, individual neurons in the prefrontal cortex will fire in response to the stimulus – they are the neural representation of the song. Here’s where things get interesting: even when the stimulus disappears – you’ve now started listening to a different song, perhaps that Boston song “Foreplay/Long Time” – those working memory cells continue to fire. They’re still holding on to the Wu-Tang clip, which is why working memory is a type of memory. This echo of activity only lasts for a few seconds, but it’s long enough so that our thoughts get blended together, as seemingly unrelated sensations overlap. (Scientists refer to this as RAM-like activity, since these brain cells are acting just like random access memory in a computer, which is rewritable temporary storage that allows multitasking.) The end result is that prefrontal neurons start to form connections that have never existed before. We can imagine how Wu-Tang and Boston might sound as a mash-up, if only because working memory allows the samples to intersect in the frontal cortex. From the perspective of the brain, such new ideas are merely old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.
On LAist a story about arrests of looters following the Laker’s Championship win in June. LAPD using a combination of security footage, Flickr, and Youtube to nabbing already 20 individuals
“It’s nearly impossible to stay anonymous in this age of cell phones, video, and social websites; and that’s a good thing, if it holds people more accountable for their behavior,” said Lt. Paul Vernon, head of LAPD detectives downtown, today about the 20th arrest related to the Lakers Championship melee on June 14th). Detectives have been using security footage from around downtown, complementing it with videos and images posted on websites like YouTube and Flickr.
You’ll feel as though you’ve taken a few tabs after watching this strangely edited/remixed clip of Captain K on a voyage to the great beyond.
[via Nerdcore]
Dublab the prolific collective for audio/visual programming in Los Angeles turns 10 this October. In celebration, they’ll be throwing 10 events from the 1st to the 10th, including everything from screenings, exhibitions, and retrospectives as eclectic as you’d expect. Come to enjoy and support.
Wired’s cover article for their newest issue is now available online for consumption. I always enjoy reading things like these, regardless of how plausible any of these options may be. Because really, the idea is to open yourself up to alternative viewpoints, perspectives, options, etc. Right?
Imagine housing, recreational and cultural facilities connected to a continuous, lushly planted, green strip, floating above the water-an aerial garden, as the city’s newest park through which you could walk and wander and enjoy the most spectacular views of the bay,” reads an excerpt from the proposal by architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello. The image here depicts a “tennis court, bicycle path, and observation module.
Of course none of this will happen, but it’s stimulating nonetheless imagining some alternate future where this would exist.
[Gizmodo ]
