Ambient cinema. Instructions for how to make a “Very Slow Movie Player” using an e-ink display, a Raspberry Pi computer and a picture frame. I really want to do this.
There’s a new version of Microsoft Flight Simulator that uses a combination of Open Street Map data and AI to make a somewhat realistic rendering of the entire world. But there are a bunch of strange and funny errors. It turned Buckingham Palace into a bland office park. The Washington Monument is a skinny glass skyscraper in the middle of a field. A user error in the Open Street Map data caused there to be a 212 story skyscraper in middle of a Melbourne suburb.
My favorite Twitter bot is Every Census Tract, which is working its way through tweeting satellite images of every census tract in the US. It recently started doing Michigan alphabetically by county. One odd thing I’ve noticed is that any census tract with the number 9900 is just the water off the coast of nearby inhabited land. Not sure sure why. The water tracts have lovely shapes, however.
And finally, this 2015 sculpture by Trevor Paglen called Trinity Cube. It’s made out of irradiated glass from the Fukushima Exclusion Zone and Trinitite, the mineral created on July 16, 1945 when the United States exploded the world’s first atomic bomb. Paglen’s website explains, “Trinity Cube was created by melting these two forms of glass together into a cube, then installing the cube back into the Fukushima Exclusion Zone as part of the Don’t Follow the Wind project. The artwork will be viewable by the public when the Exclusion Zone opens again, anytime between 3 and 30,000 years from the present.”
kevinbuist.com 