This past weekend, Ming and I planted a couple of tomato plants in pots to grow. As part of the fun, we’re keeping a log of how fast the plants grow. Doing this has given me flashbacks to LDEF SEEDS experiment which involved both school children and “real” scientists growing tomatoes that were exposed to the radiation of space for almost six years. (FYI: Space seeds had higher germination rates, but tasted the same as Earth tomatoes.)

While thinking about plant growth rates, I came across Natural Selection by Tom Simpson of Studio Lithero. It is perhaps the most boring death race ever. (Actually, it’s pretty cool sped up.) Three plants enter. One plant leaves (HA!), and becomes president. Sensors at the top of the stand trigger cutters at the bottom.

Makes me want to breed some sort of super plant, á la the Russiansilver fox experiment.

Related posts:

1. Robot Gardeners
2. Synthetic Plants

Evan Miller’s (Pixelante Studios) art game ImmorTall is an poignent game about an alien that crashes to earth, befriends a family, and then must protect them from the military.

What I found most interesting about this game was the comments on Kongregate that sprung up around it. Predictably, there were those that got it, and those that didn’t (my favorite comments are after the jump), but that here was a game that didn’t have an explicit backstory, yet a common one kept reappearing: the military was there to attack the alien.

I thought that was interesting, since I didn’t get that at all. Looking at the backgrounds, I imagine that the alien was that after a quiet time, war came to the countryside, and the alien was helping the family escape Von Trapp style (or so Rodgers and Hammerstein would have you think). The alien, was just caught in the middle like everyone else.

I guess it’s just the effect of too many B-movies.

Felixoo7: “Its a shame really… Just one more thing to show us all that instead of being threatened by things we don’t understand we should try to understand them… Too bad this won’t reach the people that need it the most… 5/5″

randommonkey: “fantastic, nice work :) good to see someone extending the idea of what games are and aren’t! goes to show you can make a very impressive interactive experience that’s just a few minutes long. 5/5″

Chromolot: “There is a lot that can be read into this story. Is the military really aiming at just the alien or is it some kind of all out war? The family is being attacked from behind. The planes are going down in smoke. Some of the tanks have their barrels pointed upwards and shooting into the air as planes go by. None of the bombs from the plane lands on the alien but rather on or near the family. If there is one alien, maybe there are more. Where they sent here to protect Earthlings from their own destruction or was that one sent here to protect that one family. If so, why”

ImTooJacked: “This game is not for you to enjoy. It was for you to think deeply, and realize how precious life really is. If you watch closely you can probably guess what the dialouge would have been. Here is how i thought it would be like. A little girl finds this alien which she immediately falls in love even though shes very young and doesn’t appreciate much. She helps the alien grow up into a young alien when the boy sees it. He thinks it’s cool so he likes it. When the parents see they are immediately alarmed and they hide inside the house. The boy goes in and explains to them that it’s harmless. The next part with the war is about protecting the people you love no matter the cost, and when the alien dies, it was all for protecting the family(it’s hard to explain in words). They end is the best part: they are more instructions but basically to tell you to live your life. Also notice that the name of the game is: Immortal”

Ace Blue: “If your goal is to protect the family, then you want to die as quickly and effectively as possible, since those idiots sometimes run into bullets, or the game sends you soldiers on both sides at once. It follows that you need to speed-die to minimize the opportunities the game has to screw you up. When you finally die with all four idiots intact, you can raise your fist triumphantly and let out a proud YES! And yet I wonder. Is that the effect the designer had in mind?”

Kosedragen: “Mrgh, that’s the lamest appology in the world. “If you find it so bad, make a better one”. Mrrgh, just because I’m not a shaite who spends all his time trying to make subtle and fascinating plots, to otherwise boring and uninteresting games (and completely failing at subtlety at that, like a burglar trying to steal a priceless china in the middle of the night with a raging bull tied to his back), doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to critizise it. So shut it. And @ImTooJacked: The fact that I didn’t like the game was not that I’m to stupid or dull to get the point. There’s nothing there to not get; and that’s the main issue. Arty games can be good, but only if they really manage to let the plot twist up your spine only to rip it out the instant you realise what it’s all about. And this game fails at that so blatantly that I couldn’t even begin to call it arty. It’s “arty”. Simply a pretentious piece of pretentoisness. How much more pretentious can it be? No, I didn’t like it. No offence.”

GuineVir: “Nice concept, but too laggy no matter what browser I use.”

Fitzy101: “sheild? wtf? u cant sheild?”

deathman521: “how do u get passed the first part??”

pktheonlyone: “1/5 you cant win”

hiperjei: “soooooooo stupid.”

stafoth: “so in the end…. it says live, forever immortal. does the alien become immortal and eventually befriend even the military?”

holcat27“The girl who this creature lived protect…she kneels by its side and weeps. She is too young to understand war; all she can see is that people like herself killed this gentle giant she had befriended. Even as the snow begins to fall, she stays by its side and mourns her loss. Finally, when her dear friend is invisible under a thick blanket of snow, she walks away, regret fuelling every step. She knows her friend died to save her. She knows she will never see it again. And, most strongly of all, she knows that it was her kind that murdered him – a friend who died on an alien planet, not understanding why it was being attacked. If she turns back, she will only see whiteness where he once lay. Yet even she, the youngest and purest, leaves him eventually. And though she may think of it in years to come, she has a life to lead. A life full of suffering and loathing that her friend would have tried to protect her from; the life he died to keep from her.”

ProjectSturm: “Either aliens want to kill everyone (e.g., um, most alien movies), or make us better people (e.g. E.T.). There’s nothing wrong with having more of the latter really, as I think we’ve had enough destructive aliens for a lifetime.”

Related posts:

1. You Only Live Once

Fritz Lang’s masterpiece “Metropolis” was screened at the Brandenburg Gate for the most recent Berlin Film Festival. What’s noteworthy about this screening is that it was the first public screening of the most recent, and more complete, restored version.

When “Metropolis,” was originally shown in Berlin in 1927, it had a running time 153 minutes. However, the export version was cut down to 114 minutes. Soon it was cut down further to a mere 90 minutes in order please theater owners, who wanted a higher turn over of customers each day, and because the plot was too “controversial.” (And just think, “Atlas Shrugged” was still 30 years away.)

With all the cuts and differing versions, the original was thought lost. Then in 2001, a restored version was put together using footage collected from the different versions along with intertitle cards for missing scenes. This version clocks in at 124 minutes.

In 2008 a copy of what may be the original cut, was found in Buenos Aires, and a further 25 minutes of additional footage was added to the 2001 reconstruction. Unfortunately, the Argentine copy was heavily degraded, and was a 16mm copy of a damaged 32mm copy, meaning that the additional footage will probably always be noticeable. It was this 2008 version that was shown this year in Berlin.

So what does this mean if you want to watch Metropolis yourself? My recommendation is to wait, and and be careful about what you buy.

I own the unrestored 90 minute version, and it’s completely unwatchable. The images are dark, cropped, and constrained to a flickering circle in the middle of screen. For instance, the scene shown in the above movie poster is limited to about the middle ninth of the still. Don’t pay attention to the running time. The time is stretched because the film is run back at less than 24 fpm, and so all the music is out of sync. This version is a complete waste of money.

Then there’s 2001 124 minute version. This is version that is recognized by UNESCO. It’s available today, but in light of the latest reconstruction, I’d also stay away from it.

Unfortunately, the 2008 reconstruction has yet to be released, but is expected to come out at the end of this year.

No related posts.

I said the movie didn’t suck, back in 1999, because I desperately wanted it not to, but deep down, I knew it was a lie. It was always a lie.

There are so many things wrong with this film, and the entire new trilogy, it’s not even funny.

No related posts.

Fashion designer Alexander McQueen is dead. I was never someone who followed fashion, in fact for years I found haute couture baffling until I stopped seeing them as ostensibly clothes, but rather simply as art.

The reason I bring this up is not only because the guy apparently committed suicide, or that the man knew how to put on a show, but because I’ve been sitting on that picture of the Milan Fall 09 “The McQueensberry Rules” show for a year in my drafts folder, and I’ll never get it out if I don’t use it now.

Any of these would have been perfect for someone attending the Edwardian Ball.

No related posts.

The only picture hanging in my apartment is the above photo of Fidel Castro playing baseball. It’s a poster entitled, “Fidel at Bat: Images of the 20th Century.” I bought it because it was such a non sequitur. There was Fidel, playing baseball in a full stadium, with cameras all around him. There was no context for this photo. It was just there.

I wondered what was going through the pitcher’s mind. Was he told to give up a hit to El Presidente? Does he lob the ball up there so Fidel can get a hit? If he does, he can’t make it too obvious that it’s just a lob. What if Fidel just whiffs at it? What if, Fidel when he enters the box, says, “Give me your best pitch.” Do you show it?

Did Fidel play the whole game? Probably not. It was probably just a stunt, but in my imagination, he plays the whole game and goes 3 for 4 with a sacrifice bunt. (“We must all make sacrifices for the good of the whole,” Fidel is quoted as saying in the post-game interviews.)

Originally, I was just going to leave this post with that image, but as I searched around for a scan of the photo, I found several more photos of Fidel playing baseball, including wearing a baseball uniform, instead of his trademarked army uniform. Unfortunately my search added a bit of context to these photos, but it flesh out my alternate reality a bit. Castro was a star pitcher in college, noted for his curveball, so of course, he’s a pitching. He also, lead off. Lead off pitcher. That’s my Fidel.

It’s that time of year again, where we (and by “we,” I mean “The Marin County Coroner’s Office”) tally up the number of jumpers from the World’s Leading Suicide Magnet, YOUR GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE!

A drumroll please….

If you chose 31, congratulations! You win a year’s supply of Rice-a-Roni – The San Francisco Treat *ding* ding*. Yes, 31 successfully took the plunge in 2009 (That’s one every 11 days!), and another 77 managed to screw it up (like everything else in their miserable lives) and got stopped by staff. (Another year without a local Lai Jiansheng “helping” anyone.)

So what about the $50 million net that was approved back in aught-eight? Well, that’s still in limbo, since the Bridge District has forbid local money to be used for the nets, and now the Bridge Rail Foundation is trying to get federal funds.

Is 31 a lot? The Pro-Net folks would no doubt saying something vacuous like “Even a single jumper is one too many,” but let’s look the numbers. 31 is 72% more than then average since the bridge opened in 1937, but is that number really meaningful? The Bay Area’s population has been steadily increasing, so what about the “success” rate? There are over 7 million people in the Bay Area today. In 1940 there was less than 2 million. Perhaps if we want more informative numbers, we should look at this instead in terms of suicides per capita.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the number of jumpers per decade, but
the SF Examiner, provided a helpful table of the number of jumpers over the last eight years, that show that every year was “above average.”

UPDATE: Tue Jan 26 00:23:45 PST 2010
I realized that I did have the number of “splash hits” each year that the bridge opened, thanks to the Chron. The Chron’s count differs slightly from the Examiner’s, but not enough to matter. (The Chron counts one more in both 2002 and 2004.) Coupling this with Bay Area population stats, I calculated the GGB Suicides Per Capita.

While I haven’t bothered to do any sort of significance testing, it appears that for the last 30 years, the number of successful suicides has remained constant after controlling for population. In fact, it appears pretty much constant for 4 of the last 5 decades. So just as I suspected, the “above average” statement is a bit misleading.

If anyone wants to look at the numbers, I’m posting a CSV of the numbers.

Related posts:

1. Your Typical Jumper
2. Bay Bridge Arcology
3. My Morbid Fascination

With the Bay Bridge, seemingly always in the news^*, the question is becoming, what to do with the old eastern span? (You remember the eastern span, don’t you?) Current plans are to simply demolish it, but architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello has proposed something different. They wants to convert it into a housing and a park.

He calls his proposal, “The Bay Line,” is a combination of the Florence’s Ponte Vecchio and New York’s High Line. The upper deck would be converted into a greenway, while the lower deck (originally designed for freight trains) would contain commercial and residential spaces. Since the deck can support much weight than a typical home, additional space can be hung directly underneath the bridge.

Rael’s graduate studio, have come up with other similar ideas, but they’re all essentially the same thing.

It’s an interesting idea, but I do have some concerns. First, there’s going to be another earthquake. There just will be. So why would you want to be suspended a couple of hundred feet above the water, in a box that has been bolted onto a structure that is over 70 years, that is literally falling apart. (Well at least it’s not as bad as the old Cape Girardeau bridge. Yet.) Rael points out most of the damage back in 1989 was on the approach, not the cantilevers, but I still have my doubts. My other concern is that it’s right next to new bridge. Which means, you’re living right next to a freeway, and that’s got to ruin your view.

But really, I’d just be happy if they name the eastern span the “Emperor Norton I Span”, but Oaklanders are such killjoys.

Related posts:

1. Bridge Jumpers in 2009
2. Your Typical Jumper
3. My Morbid Fascination

NC State industrial design grad student, Joe Harmon is building a car by hand. Not just any car. A sports car that can reach 240 MPH. Not just any 700 HP, 240 MPH sports car. A 700 HP, 240 MPH sports car made almost entirely of wood. The body? Wood. The dash? Wood. The seats? Well, they’re wicker. The wheels? Oh, they’re wood too. The suspension? Yes, it’s wood too.

Because he wants strength, but also a reduced weight (wood has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than steel or aluminum), he is creating the body out of custom made plywood that consists of layers of eighth inch wide cherry veneer strips that are then weaved together, and glued on top of a weaved birch veneer, a core of balsa wood, and then another woven layer of birch. The panels are then vacuumed formed into shape, using the same technique that’s used for carbon-fiber composites. All told, about 30 species of wood are used to make up the car.

According to the last update, which was about a year ago, the outer shell was complete, but the internal components such as the V8 Cadillac Northstar engine and six speed Corvette transmission were yet to be installed. However, the car has drawn industrial sponsors like Delta/Porter-Cable, and has been making the rounds at different car shows.

Thanks Dad!

Related posts:

1. Media Cabinet