I’ve always loved t/l, especially of plants growing, but until recently it’s been expensive to produce decent footage. I mean, you have to leave a camera in a field or the woods for some period of time, taking it out of production and risking it being stolen. Recently, though, I was lucky enough to meet Roger P. Hangarter, a botanist at Indiana University, and an expert and artist of the time-lapse medium. He’s a scientist… and an artist!

He told me to give PlantCam a try. It’s cheap and produces an HD-ish image. It’s early days yet and I’m still learning how to best deploy the cameras, but here is an early effort that isn’t too dumb. This is about 5 days worth of images compressed into 50 seconds. Warts and all.

His String Trio is hot stuff, too. Check out this 6+-minute version of Skye’s composition, “Happy Cake.” Skye bakes the cake, and the mando solo is the shit!

Video is a fresh, dynamic, and increasingly essential way for you to reach your customers.

* Visitors who view online product videos are 95% likelier to buy than visitors who do not view the videos. (Internet Retailer, April 2010)

* Video increases the likelihood of a front-page Google search result by 53x with proper page optimization. (Forrester, January 2010)

* A minute of video is worth 1.8 million words according to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research. (Forrester, January 2009)

Loving Lampposts, a documentary by Todd Drezner: highly recommended.

Loving Lampposts: Living Autistic

Review by Brian Charles Clark
4.5 stars (out of 5 possible)
Directed by Todd Drezner
Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

Todd Drezner’s beautiful investigation of autism is motivated by the personal. His son is autistic and loves to look at lampposts. They walk every day they can in Central Park and the young boy gazes up at the lampposts, recognizing them as individuals in ways us mere normals simply cannot.

There is a lot of bad information about autism out there and, with grace and compassion, Drezner gives even the lamest and most discredited notions their moment in the sun. The film is divided into sections and a recurring one is called “Autism is…” The reality is, no one knows for sure. But it is certainly not caused by vaccines or mercury, and it very likely isn’t genetic, either.

The director's son, Sam, and a lamppost.

More likely, as my biologist wife pointed out to me, it is a vast complex of conditions we know so little about at present that we lump them all together. This is a helpful insight in a number of ways. It gives us hope for the future, in as much as scientists are likely to discover nuances and biochemical facts that will help treat those who truly need it. It also sheds light on the present state of autism, as a cognitive and communication condition, as a scientific problem, and as a social reality.

The reality is this: humans are basically simple-minded creatures who eschew complexity whenever possible. And whatever else autism is, it is very complicated. Instead of embracing that complexity and being willing to acknowledge their state of ignorance, many parents of autistic children feel they must do something – anything – to “help” their child. In so doing, they compress and simplify what might be called the autism narrative. They draw straight lines between (perceived) condition and (apparent) cause.

The vaccine conspiracy is a case in point. It’s unfortunate that the medical journal Lancet years ago published a study drawing a causal relationship between vaccines and autism, but that study has been repeatedly disproven and, indeed, the authors of the study have long since withdrawn their conclusions. But never let science throw a curve in an otherwise serviceable narrative: many parents live their lives obsessed with the notion that they must not succumb to the social pressure to vaccinate their child against communicative diseases lest their child become more autistic or “catch” autism. Autism isn’t a communicable disease, so not vaccinating children has instead exposed thousands of kids to TB and other diseases that a couple decades were just about extinct.

Nor is there an “epidemic” of autism. Rather, several previously unrelated conditions have been, in recent decades, lumped together under a single rubric. Asperger’s Syndrome, for instance, is now considered a form of autism and thus the number of autists has, seemingly, dramatically increased.

One of the great things Drezner does in this film is interview adult autists. Lots of people are quite functional and are leading a “neuro diversity” movement. Indeed, some consider their autism a gift: they may not be able to communicate in precisely the “normal” way that non-autists do but, as we are constantly reminded by the state of the world, normal ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Hats off to Drezner for this wonderfully sensitive and compassionate look at what it means to be autistic in the 21st century. He doesn’t leap to conclusions; the film leaves the subject wide open, bravely embracing uncertainty with love.

it’s so sad that rebecca blacks bullshit has 30 million something views, and this which is amazing only has 65,000 someone needs to fix popular culture

Yeah, well, as Nietzsche said, “Success has always been a great liar.”

In Hong Kong, because of the space, apartments are small and expensive. Gary Chang, an architect, decided to design a 344 sq. ft. apartment to be able to change into 24 different designs, all by just sliding panels and walls. He calls this the “Domestic Transformer.”

I started thinking about how I could re-purpose the keyboard of the dismantled piano I keep in the garden, so I thought to build a new instrument by combining it with some other parts I had laying around. I ended up with this mechanical hybrid thing I thought to call “Bassoforte” (bass + pianoforte).

The neck is from a broken electric bass, as a bridge I used a cabinet handle, the pickups are from a guitar, and the part at the top where the strings are attached is a chimney cap, which works as resonator as well as percussive sound.