[This is oddly soothing to watch. -egg]
– –
Coin rolls on treadmill for an hour:
This dime rolls for a little more than 58 minutes at 3.4 miles an hour. It traveled a little over five miles in that time. Check out 38:30 when the experimenter sticks his head in frame and stick around for the analysis at the end.
Coin rolling on treadmill via burritojustice
Our Pakistani trucks already rule when it comes…: 
Our Pakistani trucks already rule when it comes to indigenous art but this Pakistani scooter just won all the awards in the world. You can see Jinnah, a peacock, a duck, a mosque, smokin’ eyes and what not. So random, so Pakistani.
I need this.
Westerners believe a lot of dumb shit about Pakistan, but at least the ornate trucks are pretty famous!
Musical Physics, Baby! A 3D AV Sequencer Box, Physics Resources for Max:
The Box from Mike Todd on Vimeo.
Knobs and faders, we love you on hardware. But when it comes to the unlimited possibilities of the computer, we know how to get the party on:
“Add some physics bodies.”
(See below; that’s really a quote.)
Mike Todd, whose work we’ve seen before on CDMotion, sends us a physics-based sequencer/synth built in Max/MSP and Jitter. It’s a quivering, humming three-dimensional world of sound, in which visuals and noise are entangled in a single design. (Ableton Live acts as a sound engine.) As Todd says, he’s “not sure which CDM site this would go on (a good thing, right?).” Good, indeed.
Lots of tools now let you add physics easily, but Max 6 is uniquely well-equipped – and a set of tutorials get you started.
Find a whole mess of tutorials – with “patch-a-long” video how-tos – here:
http://cycling74.com/physics/
And yes, unlike the abysmal track record I had with physics labs in high school, here even mistakes can be fun.
I’d love to see more of these experiments, so do send your work our way.
[Oooof. That’s pretty damned ugly. -egg]
– –
Economic recovery in the US actually made 99% of Americans poorer, top 1% captured 121% of gains:
“Striking it Richer,” a paper by Emmanuel Saez (an economist at UC Berkeley) looks at the way that the dividends of the slow US “economic recovery” have been distributed. Saez finds that 121% of the economic gains since 2009 have been captured by the richest 1% of Americans — in other words, despite economic growth, the poorest 99% of Americans actually got poorer through the “recovery.”
This confirms a pattern that Matt Stoller highlighted: that income inequality increased more under Obama than under Bush. And the new Saez paper also describes how it came about. In short form, income to the top 1% is significantly influenced by capital gains. Remember, the tax reporting is not clean here: rising equity and bond markets help all those private equity and hedge fund professionals, who are able to get capital gains treatment for what ought to be labor income. But the paper also stresses that the lower orders were hit hard in the aftermath of the global financial crisis than in the dot-bomb era, which also saw a big drop in capital gains. That isn’t as hard to understand. The collapse of the dot-com mania didn’t impair the real economy overmuch because it was not fueled in a meaningful way by borrowings. By contrast, the housing bubble, and more important (in terms of damage to the financial system) the much housing exposure created synthetically by CDOs that consisted entirely or mainly of credit default swaps was highly geared, hence when it collapsed, it took credit providers down with it.
Yes, Virginia, the Rich Continue to Get Richer: the Top 1% Got 121% of Income Gains Since 2009 [Yves Smith/Naked Capitalism]
[This looks pretty amazing. -egg]
– –
Gestrument, Shaping Music with Kinect, Touch, and Acoustic Ensembles [Videos]: 
Swiping through clouds of timbre and melody, using Gestrument is an experience of a different musical animal. Jesper Nordin and Kymatica / Jonatan Liljedahl created the iPad version, available now for ten bucks. But it’s worth looking at that side by side with Gestrument for Kinect, as the same metaphors can translate across input methods. Both employ a kind of meta-composition – instrument as conductor of musical structures, more than an object for exclusively solo expression.
What’s especially nice is hearing these digital, synthesized environments meld with acoustic instruments. The solution may not convince everyone yet, but there’s clearly potential for these digital instruments to join up with conventional chamber ensembles and acoustic instruments. (See the video below, a live concert with Trio Trespassing. Christophe Lebreton from GRAME in Lyon, France contributed to the development.)
And at the very least, Jesper Nordin’s development work and compositional experiments have earned him attention; the City of Stockholm has even recognized the app.
First, the iOS app:
And here’s a performance of the Kinect version, combined with an ensemble. (I’m curious, readers: sold one one more than the other? Neither?)
All reviews can be read on our Facebook page –
www.facebook.com/gestrument
Feature set of the iOS app include various options for control, sharing and collaboration, and support for file import/export, AudioCopy, MIDI, and now AudioBus:
• Play and compose music with the swipe of your finger
• Generate music within defined scales and rhythms
• Improvise freely within a fully controlled musical framework
• Use the internal GM sound bank or your favorite MIDI synthesizer, or load your own sf2 soundfonts.
• Use Gestrument to control other iOS apps or external MIDI programs through a MIDI interface ([Apple] Core MIDI enabled) or Network MIDI
• Virtual MIDI with MIDI clock in and out lets you sync with sequencers and DAWs
• Create and save your own presets and share with your friends or download new presets from www.gestrument.com
• Record what you play to audio and MIDI file
• Export recordings to AudioShare – audio document manager
• Copy recordings with AudioCopy
• Play back previous recordings, optionally looping
• Use Gestrument as a source synth in Audiobus
• Allow mixing with other apps, for example play a track in the
Music app and play along with it in Gestrument.
The idea is, you surf around scales and rhythms that are pre-mapped to the layout. Korg’s Kaossilator popularized some of these sorts of ideas in hardware; here, you have various other ways of setting up those kinds of layouts. The idea isn’t new: the traditional Autoharp has long allowed folk musicians easy access to harmonies simply by strumming. (Frets are a more complex solution to the same idea.)
You are a bit restricted in sound set, but with MIDI out, there’s room for growth.
More on the app:
okcebooks – “In which a bunch of earnest dudes try to chat…: 
okcebooks – “In which a bunch of earnest dudes try to chat up notorious twitter robot “Horse_ebooks”, via Dan W.
[Hot damn. -egg]
– –
Projecting the Lorax on a blizzard:
As readers of Pirate Cinema will know, I love pointing powerful projectors at distant, public objects, because there’s something awesome about watching YouTube videos against the side of an office-building opposite one’s 15th-storey hotel room. But I never suspected how wondrous the results would be if I shone the movie-light into a blizzard, as Redditor bmaffitt did three days ago.
Projector Snow [Flickr]
(via Hacker News)
When I first started to get serious about making money I ran into this book written in 1978 by a hippy-hacker living in Arizona. His advice was aimed at “craft and technical” types who wanted to create a small business “doing their thing” whether that was creating ceramic pots, designing outdoor gear, or writing computer code. He talked about doing a starting up before that term was subverted by the implication that your start up would take over the world. Instead the author preached one-person self-employment that made you a living. The concept of entrepreneurism as a small-time life-style has evaporated from the culture, and now entrepreneur and start-up means “get big fast.”
That did not appeal to me then, or now. But making a living doing what I was passionate about did. I learned how to earn a self-employed living from this book, which was mostly about what not to do. (I have been self-employed now for most of my adult life.) A lot of Don Lancaster’s specific examples are now terribly dated, but his core principles still stand and are worth listening to particularly if you are starting out. (If you are already successfully self-employed this book won’t help you much.) His idea that you should aim for a business that grows organically (income > expenses), is a total life-style approach (your business is you), and is dependent on your own value-added rather than market domination is as potent as ever.
If I had to sum up this book in my own words it would be; “If you are willing to build your business on expertise, you can make a living instead of making a fortune — and occasionally the fortune comes anyway.”
Best of all, unlike any other “make-money” book I know of, this one is free. You can read the author’s PDF version of the original paper book.
— KK
Incredible Secret Money Making Machine
Don Lancaster
PDF, Free
Available from The Guru’s Lair
Sample Excerpts:
Getting filthy rich should be nowhere in your plans. So long as you can continue doing what you like in the direction you want to go, that’s all that should matter. The great irony of your incredible secret money machine is that the less you strive for income, the more of it will come your way, and, more importantly, the more you will be able to do with what you already have. Any time or effort spent directly toward making money is time not available for your main trip. This is wasted time and energy that eventually hurts you rather than helps.
*
As a ferinstance, let’s talk about an ordinary piece of typing paper. If you are running an office supply store, you can make a penny on th…
