consolejockey

They compiled some video, they wrote a song, they put it on YouTube.

More songs by the same guy.

StarWars.com has a brief write up on two great tastes that taste awesome together. Lucas Online senior designer Craig Drake has created a Patrick Nagel inspired print of Princess Leia. It can be yours for only US $49.99. Also, check out the Leia slave girl outfit, which I had no idea you could buy up until I saw the very appropriately placed ad on this write up.

I remember downloading way to many Patrick Nagel prints on my 300 bps modem back in the day. Due to the limited color palette of his work, Nagel’s prints were easily compressed to the GIF format. This made them prevalent on every bulletin board around in the late 80’s and early 90’s. So basically Drake hit a bull’s eye here, combining two things many geeks are very familiar with.

I just got through watching this series of videos of Dean Kamen from the All Things D: D6 conference, where he talks about his team’s work on the mind blowingly cool prosthetic arm nicknamed the “Luke Arm.” Due to the increase in effectiveness of body amour and huge advances military field medicine, wounded soldiers are far more likely to survive serious injuries than they were even in the first Gulf War. Though more soldiers are coming home alive, they often do so with missing limbs. Kamen and his team were tasked to create a new generation of prosthetic arms that come as close as ingenuity and technology can to replacing a missing limb.

The results of Kamen and his team’s work shown in the videos is inspiring and a reminder of two things. Design is all about problem solving and due to that, design, along with engineering and a host of other disciplines, can make a huge difference in people’s lives.

I’ve known about Dark Side of the Rainbow for years, even saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse way back when, but up until recently I had never known about the mysterious connection between Pink Floyd’s Echoes and the final act of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Wired’s Listening Post has a write up along with some YouTube videos of the film synced with Floyd’s epic psychedelic rock song. Talk about when worlds collide.

I’ve been both a Pink Floyd fan and a fan of Kubrick and Clarke for a while. I’ve seen the film a bunch of times and read the first three Space Odyssey books in high school, about the same time I got into Floyd via the live double album Delicate Sound of Thunder (I know, I got on the scene pretty late.) About six months ago I rented David Gilmour’s Remember That Night, which he, with the recently departed Rick Wright, performed Echoes in it’s entirety. Bands just don’t write songs like this anymore. If it can’t be condensed into a three minute top ten hit, the major labels won’t go near it. But I digress.

Forget about Dark Side of the Rainbow, Echoes and Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite sync up eerily well. And Pink Floyd band members won’t go on record as saying that it’s just a coincidence. I want more. I want Explosions in the Sky to create a sound track for the end of Solaris, Nine Inch Nails needs to score the end fight scene of Aliens, or how about Radiohead re-do the sound track to anything.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to try and figure what sci-fi film Acid Mother’s Temple And The Cosmic Inferno’s half-hour-plus Starless And Bible Black Sabbath syncs up with.

Amazon has become my second favorite source for legal non-DRM MP3’s (Emusic is my first.) Everyday they have a special in their MP3 store and sell albums for as little as $1.99 (usually these specials carry over into the next day.) Today they are selling The Best Of Talking Heads for $3.99. I’ve been a fan of Talking Heads since the 6th grade and though I have to protest the “Best Of” title (my best of list would be a lot different) this is still a psychotically killer deal.

I saw this posted to one of the many blogs I read, I can’t remember which one. Someone has been cool enough to post Douglas Engelbart’s weirdly accurate demonstration on how people would use computer workstations “in the future.” Originally presented on December 9, 1968 this demo, later called The Mother of All Demos, featured such revolutionary concepts as the mouse (which Engelbart is credited with inventing), copying and pasting, hypertext, video conferencing, and a whole lot more. This demo predicted these features decades before they would see widespread use.

This is very cool, Pandora Internet Radio. It’s based on the Music Genome Project and it’s a very cool way to find new music, based on the music you already listen to. And it’s a life saver when you’re at work and you’ve listened to all the MP3s you have about 100 times already.

Who doesn’t want USB drum pads? Add one of these M-Audio mini keyboards and you can be Nine Inch Nails on a budget.

While watching a show about cars on the History Channel I learned about a “jet” powered car Chrysler developed in the mid 1960’s. Apparently Chrysler had tried for a number of years to produce a viable turbine powered car, and in 1963 they finally found a solution that worked. The car had 80% fewer moving parts than it’s contemporaries and could run on any combustible liquid, including vegetable oil. From a Barracuda Magazine article:

Although the recommended fuel was diesel, the Turbine Car would run on ANY flammable liquid. At one point or another, Turbine Cars were run, without adjustments, on unleaded gas, kerosene, jet fuel, home heating oil, peanut oil, tequila and even Chanel No. 5.

For a variety of reasons, such as the odd sounding engine, which apparently sounded like a vacuum cleaner, sluggish acceleration and tightening EPA emission restrictions, Chrysler did not have the confidence to put the turbine car into production. It’s too bad really. I could see an evolution of this car being just as green (if not more green) as the diesel cars on the road today running on bio-diesel or vegetable oil.

Some links for ya:
Wikipedia: Chrysler Turbine Car
Barracuda Magazine: The 1963 Chrysler Turbine Car

I have to admit I did not know this fun fact: Lemmings are not really suicidal. There’s a weird and messed up story behind the myth. Gotta love Snopes.