How We Cope with Spammers, Fakers, and Cloners

[Funny and interesting. -egg]

The Echo Nest knows approximately 2.4 million artists as part of our database of music information, which is the largest in the world. However, we also keep a list of artists to ban from our system intentionally, so they never get recommended on any of our clients’ services, or in their apps.

This isn’t a matter of taste (so Coldplay and Raffi are in no danger). It’s because those banned artists are spammers.

Musical spam is much less familiar than email spam, but it works the same way: If it’s too hard to find the 10 people who might enjoy a shady or questionable product, spammers go for sheer volume, in their attempts to spoil your online experience with unwanted email or music.

Let’s take a tour through the tawdry world of musical spam, including a few exceptions that we choose not to ban.

via The Echo Nest Blog.

Watch The Incredible Trailer For Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 23 Year Return to Film, ‘The Dance Of Reality’ | Sound On Sight

[Holy shit! New Jodorowsky? Yay! -egg]

Of the many promising films by some of our favourite directors premiering at Cannes, my most anticipated film is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Dance Of Reality, the filmmakers first film in 23 years. At the age of 84, Jodorowsky who hasn’t made a film since 1990′s The Rainbow Thief, has returned to his hometown of Tocopilla in the Chilean desert to create a kind of magic-realist memoir of his father, Jaime Jodorowsky. The French/Chilean filmmaker, the man behind several cult hits including El Topo and The Holy Mountain, is widely known around the world as the creator of psycho-magic, a therapeutical technique that heals through metaphorical acts that appeal to the subconscious by combining literature, psychoanalysis, eastern philosophy, and magic. Although a controversial character, his work has long captivated fans because of its unusual essence. The very first clip from his new film has found its way online, and as expected, it looks spectacular. Enjoy!

via Watch The Incredible Trailer For Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 23 Year Return to Film, ‘The Dance Of Reality’ | Sound On Sight.

Recycled Bike Part Chandeliers Under a Texas Overpass | Colossal

[Oh hell yes. -egg]

Ballroom Luminoso is a series of artists Joe O’Connell and Blessing Hancock currently installed in San Antonio, Texas. Made from custom made structural steel, custom LEDs and recycled bicycle parts, the lights project colorful silhouettes of sprockets and other pieces onto the otherwise drab cement underpass. From the artist’s statement about the project:Ballroom Luminoso references the area’s past, present, and future in the design of its intricately detailed medallions. The images in the medallions draw on the community’s agricultural history, strong Hispanic heritage, and burgeoning environmental movement. The medallions are a play on the iconography of La Loteria, which has become a touchst. Utilizing traditional tropes like La Escalera the Ladder, La Rosa the Rose, and La Sandía the Watermelon, the piece alludes to the neighborhood’s farming roots and horticultural achievements. Each character playfully rides a bike acting as a metaphor for the neighborhood’s environmental progress, its concurrent eco-restoration projects, and its developing cycling culture.

via Recycled Bike Part Chandeliers Under a Texas Overpass | Colossal.

Drawing Dynamic Visualizations on Vimeo

[Someone bring this man a MacArthur genius grant, stat. -egg]

Throughout the history of science, diagrams and graphs have been essential thinking tools. In the past, such visualizations were drawn with pen on paper, and could embrace the directness, freedom, and expressiveness of hand drawing. Most modern visualizations are programmed instead, where a single description can dynamically generate a unique picture for any dataset.

Today’s tools offer the benefits of one or the other — either directness or dynamics — but not both. Photoshop and Illustrator allow direct-manipulation drawing of static pictures. D3, R, and Processing allow indirect-manipulation coding of dynamic pictures.

This talk presents a tool for drawing dynamic pictures — creating data-driven visualizations, like D3, but via direct manipulation of the picture itself, like Illustrator.

via Drawing Dynamic Visualizations on Vimeo.

Dictionary of Numbers | xkcd

I don’t like large numbers without context. Phrases like “they called for a $21 billion budget cut” or “the probe will travel 60 billion miles” or “a 150,000-ton ship ran aground” don’t mean very much to me on their own. Is that a large ship? Does 60 billion miles take you outside the Solar System? How much is $21 billion compared to the overall budget? (That last question is  why I made my money chart.)

A friend of mine, Glen Chiacchieri, has created a Chrome extension to help solve this problem: Dictionary of Numbers. It searches the text in your browser for quantities it understands and inserts contextual statements in brackets. It might turn the phrase “315 million people” into “315 million people [≈ the population of the United States]“.

via Dictionary of Numbers | xkcd.