Not surprisingly, a ‘Google Doodle‘ has been created to celebrate the occasion:
The CWI (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica) in Amsterdam has unveiled a Turing Machine built from LEGO:
LEGO Turing Machine from ecalpemos on Vimeo.
For more information about Alan Turing, widely considered the father of computer science (and the modern computer), start with the Wikipedia article (but don’t stop there).
O (Omicron) from Romain Tardy (AntiVJ) on Vimeo.
For more information about Hala Stulecia, a UNESCO world heritage building, see the home page, or the Wikipedia page.
Interviews with the designers are also available (unfortunately not really a ‘making of’ video, since they do not reveal much about their methods):
O (Omicron) / Making of from Romain Tardy (AntiVJ) on Vimeo.
Some one asked me whether or not I like pop music, so here’s some pop music I really like. I saw this band play live in Montreal in 1980. They only made one album, but of course Robert Fripp has done many other nice things.
Fripp gave a guest lecture/demo/performance at McGill when I was a student there.
This video records a really nice use of interactive real-time audio-visual effects in a dance performance by the Australian company Chunky Move. Interactive system design is by Frieder Weiss.
This is an admittedly impressionistic take on the Venus transit of 2012. No doubt there are already countless pristine images available all over the web, as well as live feed (while it lasts) and videos. I didn’t really make advance preparations – just piled all the filters I have onto my longest lens, stopped down, and waited for some additional light blockage by thin clouds. No tripod. So … conditions far from ‘ideal’, but for someone involved in the field of images, it would be more embarrassing not to have any picture of this at all.
Here’s a less impressionistic image made by projecting the sun onto a sheet of paper using binoculars. Again, impromptu & handheld:
Exercise for the reader: why is the above image bluish?
One final image of the transit taken at about 12:30 p.m. towards the end of the show. This was made holding the binoculars in one hand and my digital camera in the other. Hence the blur. Distortion of the shape of the suns disk in the following image (and the previous one) is a result of a non-flat projection screen, and non-orthogonal projection angle.
Next photo-op? 2117.