12/26/09

8 Websites to Create Animated GIF Online

If you’ve been wondering which online services you should use to create animated gif, then here you are the list of the good ones that worth your time. All of them are free and you don’t have to register to use the provided features.

12/21/09

HOLIDAY GREETINGS



I'd like to wish everyone a Wonderful Holiday Season and a Fabulous New Year!!! I hope the past year has bought blessings to you and your family and may 2010 be even better.  Thank you for visiting my blog

POINTS OF VIEW



Fossil Bonanza for an Animal That Doesn't Fossilize: The Octopus


Ninety-five million years ago, five octopuses met their end in the waters covering what is now Lebanon. The lack of oxygen on the local seafloor kept the area free of bottom-dwelling scavengers, and sediment quickly covered the animals’ corpses, preserving them in unprecedented detail. Last January paleobiologist Dirk Fuchs of the Free University of Berlin and his colleagues released their analysis of these fossils—the most ancient octopods known.

ALZHEIMER'S GENES LOCATED


This past September, a pair of research teams announced that they had identified three new genes associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The scientists also tagged another 12 gene variants as promising candidates for further study. Previously, only four genes were known to be linked to Alzheimer’s, which affects an estimated 5 million Americans. Both reports appeared in Nature Genetics.

To pinpoint the new genes, the two groups conducted studies looking for differences between the DNA of people who have Alz­heimer’s disease and those who do not. Epidemiologist Philippe Amouyel of the Pasteur Institute of Lille in France and his colleagues closed in on genes called CR1 and CLU. The precise function of these genes is unknown, but previous research suggests they may be involved in removing a protein fragment called beta-amyloid from the brain. In people with Alzheimer’s, beta-amyloid molecules clump together and form destructive plaques.

HUBBLE'S NEW MIND-BLOWING "SCOPES"

The Hubble Space Telescope demonstrated its newly enhanced capabilities with this stunning image of the Butterfly nebula. In May astronauts docked the space shuttle Atlantis onto the 19-year-old telescope to make repairs and add new instruments. For astrophotography buffs, the most important upgrade is Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), whose predecessor captured many of Hubble’s iconic images, including the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle nebula. The latest version boasts higher resolution and an expanded field of view.
This WFC3 shot captures strands of superheated gas that were expelled by a dying star almost 4,000 light-years away. The Butterfly nebula’s distinctive shape results from a ring of dust that prevents the gas from spreading uniformly in all directions. Its wings stretch more than two light-years across—equivalent to about half the distance between our sun and the nearest star.

RUSTBOY - CG animated short



CONCEPT ROBOTS by Brian Despain


 

12/20/09

FANTASTIC LIGHT SHOW - Etienne de Crecy


 

BLUE XMAS / aka NOEL BLEU

A must see video.  It is stunning.  Noel Bleu is a video mapping project on the Notre Dame Church of Guebwiller, a happy village located on the "WinePath" in Alsace, France.  The show consists of a 18 min. graphical exploration of the Church, designed by 1024, following a musical ambient score composed by Vincent Violuis.  The show runs 8 times every weekend at dusk, til Xmas.  The video in HD format is warped in realtime on the facade, using custom software.

AVATAR FEATURETTE



12/19/09

AVATAR - A NEW EDEN, BOTH COSMIC & CINEMATIC

Movie Review by NY Times: With “Avatar” James Cameron has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life — our moviegoing life included — as we know it. Several decades in the dreaming and more than four years in the actual making, the movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the spirit filled with Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action. Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie — one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump — is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged."  To read the full review, click on the heading above.

12/16/09

12 Coolest Steampunk Gadgets


10 Most Incredible Earth Scars

Amazing photographs show what  explosions and massive machines have scraped into the earth’s crust.  Open cast mining has made an unpleasant impact on the planet’s surface. The face of the earth is  full of giant scars, created by our ongoing plundering of the planet's natural resources. Here are 10 of the holes most needing a bit of environmental ointment – where rehabilitation of the land could take some time".

MY GOOGLE READER

 

12/11/09

SUSHI ETIQUETTE


IDAHO'S FIRE RAINBOW



The atmospheric phenomenon known as a circumhorizon(tal) arc, or "Fire rainbow", appears when the sun is high in the sky (i.e., higher than 58° above the horizon), and its light passes through diaphanous, high-altitude cirrus clouds made up of hexagonal plate crystals. Sunlight entering the crystals' vertical side faces and leaving through their bottom faces is refracted (as through a prism) and separated into an array of visible colors. When the plate crystals in cirrus clouds are aligned optimally (i.e., with their faces parallel to the ground), the resulting display is a brilliant spectrum of colors reminiscent of a rainbow. The example shown above was captured on camera as it hung for aboutan hour across a several-hundred square mile area of sky above northern Idaho (near the Washington border) on 3 June 2006.

Visual Effects: 100 Years of Inspiration

Watch 100 Years of Cinematic Special Effects in 5 Minutes.  

The early effects look positively primitive when put next to the special effects of today. The films featured at in the video are: The Enchanted Drawing (1900),  The Great Train Robbery (1903), The Ten Commandments (1923), Sunrise (1927), King Kong (1933), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Thief of Bagdad (1940), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Forbidden Planet (1956), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Mary Poppins (1964), Star Wars (1977), Tron (1982), Back to the Future (1985), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), The Abyss, (1989), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992), Jurassic Park (1993), Spider-Man 2 (2004), King Kong (2005), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007), The Golden Compass (2007), The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button(2008).
YouTube - Domona Lisa http://ping.fm/j8J5J

12/8/09

MNTV 2009 | Edifice Wrecks


Tim Fort's ingenuity is not to be denied.  This is better than dominoes.  To see more outstanding videos you've go to head over here ----->  http://bit.ly/5LfsKj  

DATA VISUALIZATION & INFOGRAPHICS RESOURCES


If you love visualizations of information as much as I do, then this is for you.  It's a listing for finding fabulous infographics and data visuals around the web.

LIGHT ART PERFORMANCE PHOTOGRAPHY

Light graffiti.  Just amazing images that you must see to appreciate the beauty of this technique.



12/7/09

12/2/09

Re-imagine the Twitter Avatar


New twitter avatar
Originally uploaded by Ape Lad

Artist Adam Koford, a.k.a. Apelad, has crafted a pretty wicked set of icons riffing on the Twitter bird and incorporating pop culture figures varying from Sesame Street to Harry Potter to Yoda — and even Twitter’s own iconic fail whale

WORD JUMBLE EXPERIMENT

Acorncidg to a rseeecahrr at Caimdgbre Urnvsitiey   it doesn't matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and yo u can still read it without problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole.

12/1/09

FIFTH GEAR LOOP THE LOOP - Video


Replicating the classic Hot Wheels loop the loop with a real car!

Quoteskine Regina Spektor Journal Flat

I found this to be so right on the money that I want to share it with you. To see more skines, head over to http://bit.ly/5TAWv1