This is a year-long time-lapse study of the sky. A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds. From these images, I created a mosaic of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day. The days are arranged in chronological order. My intent was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year. More info about the project here.

This video is designed to be viewed in a large format, so it's best viewed in full-screen mode at 1080p.

Previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Louis Vuitton:

Also those are totally Stormtrooper boots.

Previously, previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

There are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived.

This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living. We surpassed seven billion dead way back between 8000BC and AD1.

In "2001: A Space Odyssey", Arthur C Clark makes the assertion: "Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." But Ms Baldwin points out he was not wrong. "He was making his statement in 1968. There were maybe 3.5 billion people currently living on earth so if you use our method, that would be one living person to 29 dead."

And will we ever reach a point where there are more alive than dead? This would imply a very high rate of population growth. "Could we imagine a carrying capacity of the Earth of 100-150 billion? I find that quite unimaginable."

They're counting from 50,000 years ago, "behaviorally modern humans", instead of from 200,000 years ago, "anatomically modern humans", which seems iffy to me.

Previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

This month the House of Lords declined to grant a posthumous pardon for the crime of gross indecency for which he was convicted in 1952. Not only was he forced to undergo chemical castration, his security clearance was then withdrawn and he was unable to work for continue his work for GCHQ, Britain's intelligence agency. Turing committed suicide two year's later.

"A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence. He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted."

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Also an eerily silent and largely Ken Burnsey video of the manufacturing process:

Previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

The Death and Return of Superman

"I'm not drunk in the video, I only get about three cups in. The original rant was 45 minutes long, so of course we had to cut a bunch of stuff out for time, and because it was just too stupid. Like for instance the part where Pa Kent dies of a heart attack and literally GOES TO HEAVEN. AND SEES SUPERMAN."

This is an entertaining rant, even though I never read "The Death of Superman", having already been squarely in the "who gives a flying fuck" camp at the time, so I didn't realize just how stupid it was. Apparently it was even stupider than I had imagined. And I can imagine quite a bit. I do disagree with his conclusion, though, that this craven stunt "broke" death in comics. It was already broken when they got there. Characters were dying and coming back all the time long before that, and anyone who thought Superman would stay dead was a fucking idiot.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

"How do robots see the world? How do they gather meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us? This is an experiment in found machine-vision footage, exploring the aesthetics of the robot eye."

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 110.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Before Ice Cream Shop Can Open, City's Slow Churn

The Ice Cream Bar opened Jan. 21 in the Cole Valley neighborhood -- an homage to the classic parlors of the 1930s, complete with vintage soda fountain and lunch counter seating. It has become an immediate sensation, packed with both families and the foodie crowd, savoring upscale house-made ice creams and exotic sodas (flavorings include pink peppercorn and tobacco). The shop also employs 14 full- and part-time workers.

But getting it opened wasn't easy.

Ms. Pries said it took two years to open the restaurant, due largely to the city's morass of permits, procedures and approvals required to start a small business. While waiting for permission to operate, she still had to pay rent and other costs, going deeper into debt each passing month without knowing for sure if she would ever be allowed to open.

Ms. Pries said she had to endure months of runaround and pay a lawyer to determine whether her location (a former grocery, vacant for years) was eligible to become a restaurant. There were permit fees of $20,000; a demand that she create a detailed map of all existing area businesses (the city didn't have one); and an $11,000 charge just to turn on the water.

The ice cream shop's travails are at odds with the frequent promises made by the mayor and many supervisors that small businesses and job creation are top priorities.

"Someone of lesser fortitude would have left three months into it," Ted Loewenberg, president of the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association, said of Ms. Pries. "Through these hard times we've heard all the rhetoric about streamlining the process, about one-stop shopping. It hasn't happened."

Even the planning department itself is calling for reform. "Hello City Planner," an animated cartoon produced by the department and posted on its Web site, depicts a litany of farcical city hassles faced by a woman applying to sell ice cream.

Cases like Ms. Pries's inspired the video, although some believe her runaround was exceptionally absurd. Even after she acceded to all the city's demands, her paperwork sat unprocessed for months. Ms. Pries would not say exactly how much it all cost, including construction, but smiled and nodded when asked if it was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And let's not forget:

I started the process of trying to cut a door in the wall between my restaurant and nightclub in February 2011. It is now February 2012, and we still don't have the necessary permits and have not yet begun construction. If we have a door in that wall -- and are allowed to let people walk through it -- before 2013, we will consider ourselves lucky.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

83 year-old woman got 3D printed mandible

The University of Hasselt announced today that Belgian and Dutch scientists have successfully replaced a lower jaw with a 3D printed model for a 83 year-old woman. According to the researchers, It is the first custom-made implant in the world to replace an entire lower jaw.

The lower jaw of the elderly woman was badly infected and needed to be removed. Considering the age of the patient, a "classical" microsurgical reconstructive surgery takes too long time and can be risky. Therefore a tailor-made implant is the best choice.

The artificial jaw is slightly heavier than a natural jaw, but the patient can easily get used to it.

Previously.

Update: Pictures!

Mirrored from jwz.org.