Archive for June, 2008

This post strays a bit from the normal audio / visual fare you might be used to finding here, but whether or not you care about the science behind this film, it’s a visually stunning piece and well worth the 5 minute run time. 

Magnetic Movie is an aptly titled animated short which uses animation to visualize magnetic fields. We can normally only visualize magnetic fields in large scale contexts such as our Sun’s Corona or Earth’s Polar Auroras, so it is very interesting to be able to see the small scale fields that we interact with on a day to day basis. The animations and sound design in this short are superb. Now if we could just control these things maybe we could get a Tokamak working.

Watch Magnetic Movie

"A Semiconductor Film by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt shot at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley, California"

Last weekend i finally got to hang out with Scott again so with a few hours to spare i drove him to Ann Arbor, MI and on the way got to feel out his music taste beyond what we post on the blog. I remember this track coming up on shuffle among many others and we talked about it for awhile and i think i read somewhere that its one of Boards of Canada’s favorite tracks at one point in time or something of that nature. I would of posted the artwork but i think the true ISO50 fans here would maybe not ever want to see a post from me again just because its a bit on the silly side which isn’t a bad thing. Also, i think the last 2 covers i’ve posted have been beauties so instead i found a great photo of them live on Fujirockers.

Super Furry Animals – Some Things Come from Nothing

Some very nice information design going on in the top example from Ken Garland’s Portfolio.

When I was in grade school the U.S. was trying to convert to the metric system. Obviously, it didn’t quite work out as planned. We used to have metric study sessions for a few years when the conversion attempt was at it’s strongest, but it seemed to sort of lose steam by the time I got to middle school. It’s really a shame; inches suck, and so do quarts. The conversions and units never really make sense, they’re always these arbitrary ratios. Metric is so clean, you can deduce any conversion based solely on the latin prefix and you don’t have to factor in the length of some king’s foot when you’re trying to measure things. But I guess that all goes without saying. Everyone else also have way cooler plugs than us, but that’s a whole other post.

Just a couple examples of the influential work Ken Garland was doing in the 60’s and 70’s. See more at his portfolio. Sorry for the quality on the second one, couldn’t find a large version so I had to scale it up.