Embarrassing Pothole Caricatures of Politicians Spur Action to Fix the Streets in Russia

Embarrassing Pothole Caricatures of Politicians Spur Action to Fix the Streets in Russia:
Embarrassing Pothole Caricatures of Politicians Spur Action to Fix the Streets in Russia street art Russia graffiti
Embarrassing Pothole Caricatures of Politicians Spur Action to Fix the Streets in Russia street art Russia graffiti
Embarrassing Pothole Caricatures of Politicians Spur Action to Fix the Streets in Russia street art Russia graffiti
Embarrassing Pothole Caricatures of Politicians Spur Action to Fix the Streets in Russia street art Russia graffiti
Embarrassing Pothole Caricatures of Politicians Spur Action to Fix the Streets in Russia street art Russia graffiti

I can’t speak from personal experience about the political climate in Yekaterinburg, Russia but if we take this video from the ad agency Voskhod at face value it appears the powers that be neglected the city’s infrastructure one day too long. After repeatedly commenting and complaining about the pockmarked streets of Yekaterinburg, local blog URA.RU turned to Voskhod to create a brilliant campaign: under the cover of night they would paint the faces of local politicians around the most unsightly potholes and potentially shame them into action. The response? It worked! Via Ads of the World:

Quality of roads is the eternal problem of Yekaterinburg – the fourth largest city of Russia. The local site URA.RU, which writes about life in the city, decided to remind politicians that it is their duty to repair the roads. The problem is – our politicians don’t care about potholes. Their only worry is their own public image. We associated road holes with the images of certain politicians. In the night, on three potholes in city center, we drew faces of the governor, the mayor and the vice-mayor. The news about caricatures became a sensation. With this intense PR the politicians were no longer able to sit idle. The holes were fixed. The news about the action was released in more than 300 media venues, the website traffic on URA.ru doubled. The officials at last started to do their jobs.

Gotta love it when art and politics come together to create something positive, hopefully they don’t have to paint a face next to every pothole in the city. See much more over on Red Hot Russia.

Gorgeous Bird Paintings by Adam S. Doyle

Gorgeous Bird Paintings by Adam S. Doyle:
Gorgeous Bird Paintings by Adam S. Doyle painting birds
Gorgeous Bird Paintings by Adam S. Doyle painting birds
Gorgeous Bird Paintings by Adam S. Doyle painting birds
Gorgeous Bird Paintings by Adam S. Doyle painting birds
Gorgeous Bird Paintings by Adam S. Doyle painting birds
Gorgeous Bird Paintings by Adam S. Doyle painting birds
Artist Adam S. Doyle who recently relocated to Hong Kong creates beautiful gestural paintings of birds, where the seemingly incomplete brushstrokes form the feathers and other details of the animal. In some strange way it reminds me of the story of the Renaissance painter Giotto who is rumored to have been able to draw a perfect circle without the aid of a compass, as if Doyle just picks up a dripping paint brush and in a few seconds paints a perfect bird. In reality his work demonstrates a profound control of the paintbrush and careful understanding of the mediums he works with. Via email he tells me:

Yes, what you see is what it appears to be—strokes of paint. I’ve always loved unfinished paintings because you could see the alchemic process of surface and paint transforming into a living person. With my paintings, it does take quite a bit of working and reworking to arrive at the place where every brush stroke fits into a fluidly flowing whole. It’s important to me to find a balance between an elegance of form that holds both visible marks of paint and a representation of ‘energy within’. I’ll just add that the painterly craft of my images, which I consider secondary to investigating ideas and concepts, came about after a lifetime of expressive image-making, followed by doggedly exploring the aforementioned transformation in grad school. I realized during that same formative period that I was also captivated by trying to visualize energy, which I was quite familiar with having grown up with a dad who practiced Eastern medicine.

Doyle most recently had a show at Skylight Gallery in 2011 and is now currently working on a new body of work in Hong Kong. You can see much more of his work on his website.

Musical Light Swings on the Streets of Montreal

[This is super, super cool, although I would have wanted to implement it acoustically with actual plucked strings. -egg]
Musical Light Swings on the Streets of Montreal:
Musical Light Swings on the Streets of Montreal swings Montréal instruments

Musical Light Swings on the Streets of Montreal swings Montréal instruments

Musical Light Swings on the Streets of Montreal swings Montréal instruments

Musical Light Swings on the Streets of Montreal swings Montréal instruments

Musical Light Swings on the Streets of Montreal swings Montréal instruments

Musical Light Swings on the Streets of Montreal swings Montréal instruments
21 Balançoires (21 Swings) is a recent project by Canadian design collective Daily Tous Les Jours, known for their wide variety of interactive public installations and experiences. Surrounded on both sides by a new music complex and science center, designers Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat chose to bridge the gap between the two by converting a narrow strip of land into an enormous interactive instrument. Pre-recorded sounds from a xylophone, piano, and other instruments were programmed into color-coded swings that when in use play various notes, however when swung in unison with careful cooperation, more complex melodies and harmonies arise. An additional “secret mode” was programmed to only play when all 21 swings were in use. What a fun idea.
Earlier this week a few blogs reported a photo from this series as being some type of swingset bus stop. According to Andraos, while the installation has close proximity to the street it does not actually serve the purpose of a bus stop. All photos courtesy Olivier Blouin.

The Orée Wireless Wooden Keyboard

[Want. -egg]

The Orée Wireless Wooden Keyboard:
The Orée Wireless Wooden Keyboard wood keyboards computers
The Orée Wireless Wooden Keyboard wood keyboards computers
The Orée Wireless Wooden Keyboard wood keyboards computers
The Orée Wireless Wooden Keyboard wood keyboards computers
The Orée Wireless Wooden Keyboard wood keyboards computers
The Orée Wireless Wooden Keyboard wood keyboards computers
French firm Orée recently launched a new keyboard made entirely from a single piece of maple or walnut. Every keyboard is made to order and is crafted, polished, oil-finished and assembled by hand in their workshop in southern France. Via their website:

Orée was born from our observation that modern technology products look very much alike, are highly impersonal, made out of eco-unfriendly materials and are designed for rapid obsolescence. We set out to do something different: create lasting & personal high performance technology objects primarily made of wood, the most natural, durable and renewable material on earth. Orée is about reconciling tradition & novelty to create exceptional products through an exclusive combination of timeless woodworking techniques and cutting-edge technologies. All our products are eco-designed, crafted and hand-finished in France.

The keyboard is bluetooth enabled and retails for about $163 (€125.00). On their website you can customize Mac/Windows options, US/UK/Canadian keyboard layouts, options for keyboard fonts, and even a special message. Gorgeous. (via designboom)

Bald eagle with 3D printed prosthetic beak

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Bald eagle with 3D printed prosthetic beak

A bald eagle named Beauty whose beak was shot off by poachers has been fitted with a 3D printed, prosthetic beak by her helpers at Birds of Prey Northwest. The prosthetic isn’t stable enough for a release back into the wild, but the bird can now feed and groom herself, rather than relying on humans.

But raptor specialist Jane Fink Cantwell, who dresses like Indiana Jones, refused to take “dead bald eagle” for an answer. She joined forces with mechanical engineer Nate Calvin of Kinetic Engineering Group, and together with other scientists, engineers, and even a dentist, they designed a nylon polymer beak that would perfectly replace Beauty’s lost upper mandible.

Calvin developed the new beak using a 3-D modeling program, then used a 3-D printer to fabricate it. After an arduous procedure to attach her prosthetic, Beauty was able to eat, drink, and preen herself on her own.

Injured bald eagle gets new 3-D printed beak

(via /.)


Tim Minchin explains evolution and genomics in an animated video

[This is pretty great 🙂 -egg]

Tim Minchin explains evolution and genomics in an animated video:

Tracy King sends us an “animated history of genetics from Nature to celebrate the release of ENCODE. Narrated by Tim Minchin and animated by the team who made Storm. Written by Adam Rutherford (Nature), Andrew Ellard (Red Dwarf, IT Crowd) and Tracy King (TAM London).

Ever since a monk called Mendel started breeding pea plants we’ve been learning about our genomes. In 1953, Watson, Crick and Franklin described the structure of the molecule that makes up our genomes: the DNA double helix. Then, in 2001, scientists wrote down the entire 3-billion letter code contained in the average human genome. Now they’re trying to interpret that code; to work out how it’s used to make different types of cells and different people. The ENCODE project, as it’s called, is the latest chapter in the story of you.

The Story of You: ENCODE and the human genome

(Thanks, Tracy!)


Magic: The Gathering is Turing complete

Magic: The Gathering is Turing complete:

Alex Churchill has posted a way to implement a Turing complete computer within a game of Magic: The Gathering (“Turing complete” is a way of classifying a calculating engine that is capable of general-purpose computation). The profound and interesting thing about the recurrence of Turing completeness in many unexpected places — such as page-layout descriptive engines — is that it suggests that there’s something foundational about the ability to do general computation. It also suggests that attempts to limit general computation will be complicated by the continued discovery of new potential computing engines. That is, even if you lock down all the PCs so that they only play restricted music formats and not Ogg, if you allow a sufficiently speedy and scriptable Magic: The Gathering program to exist, someone may implement the Ogg player using collectible card games.


A series of Ally tokens controlled by Alex represent the tape to the right of the current head: the creature one step to the right of the head is 1 toughness away from dying, the next one over is 2 toughness from dying, etc. A similar chain of Zombie tokens, also controlled by Alex, represent the tape to the left. The colour of each token represents the contents of that space on the tape.

The operation “move one step to the left” is represented in this machine by creating a new Ally token, growing all Allies by 1, and shrinking all Zombies by one. The details are as follows:

When the machine creates a new 2/2 Ally token under Alex’s control, four things trigger: Bob’s Noxious Ghoul, Cathy’s Aether Flash, Denzil’s Carnival of Souls, and Alex’s Kazuul Warlord. They go on the stack in that order, because it’s Bob’s turn; so they resolve in reverse order. The Kazuul Warlord adds +1/+1 counters to all Alex’s Allies, leaving them one step further away from dying, including making the new one 3/3. Then Carnival of Souls gives Denzil a white mana thanks to False Dawn (he doesn’t lose life because of his Platinum Emperion). Then Aether Flash deals 2 damage to the new token, leaving it 1 toughness from dying as desired. And then the Noxious Ghoul, which has been hacked with Artificial Evolution, gives all non-Allies -1/-1, which kills the smallest Zombie. Depending on whether the smallest Zombie was red, green or blue, a different event will trigger. The machine has moved one step to the left.

If the new token had been a Zombie rather than an Ally, a different Kazuul Warlord and a different Noxious Ghoul would have triggered, as well as the same Aether Flash. So the same would have happened except it would be all the Zombies that got +1/+1 and all the Allies that got -1/-1. This would effectively take us one step to the right.

Magic Turing Machine v4: Teysa / Chancellor of the Spires

(via /.)

(Image: Magic the Gathering, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 23601773@N02’s photostream)


An accountable algorithm for running a secure random checkpoint

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An accountable algorithm for running a secure random checkpoint

Ed Felten presents and argues for the idea of “accountable algorithms” for use in public life — that is, “output produced by a particular execution of the algorithm can be verified as correct after the fact by a skeptical member of the public.”

He gives a great example of how to run a securely random TSA checkpoint where, at the end of each day, the public can open a sealed envelope and verify that the TSA was using a truly fair random selection method, and not just picking people they didn’t like the look of:

Now we can create our accountable selection method. First thing in the morning, before the security checkpoint opens, the TSA picks a random value R and commits it. Now the TSA knows R but the public doesn’t. Immediately thereafter, TSA officials roll dice, in public view, to generate another random value S. Now the TSA adds R+S and makes that sum the key K for the day.

Now, when you arrive at the checkpoint, you announce your name N, and the TSA uses the selection function to compute S(K, N). The TSA announces the result, and if it’s “yes,” then you get searched. You can’t anticipate whether you’ll be searched, because that depends on the key K, which depends on the TSA’s secret value R, which you don’t know.

At the end of the day, the TSA opens its commitment to R. Now you can verify that the TSA followed the algorithm correctly in deciding whether to search you. You can add the now-public R to the already-public S, to get the day’s (previously) secret key K. You can then evaluate the selection function S(K,N) with your name N–replicating the computation that the TSA did in deciding whether to search you. If the result you get matches the result the TSA announced earlier, then you know that the TSA did their job correctly. If it doesn’t match, you know the TSA cheated–and when you announce that they cheated, anybody can verify that your accusation is correct.

This method prevents the TSA from creating a non-random result. The reason the TSA cannot do this is that the key K is based on result of die-rolling, which is definitely random. And the TSA cannot have chosen its secret value R in a way that neutralized the effect of the random die-rolls, because the TSA had to commit to its choice of R because the dice were rolled. So citizens know that if they were chosen, it was because of randomness and not any TSA bias.

Accountable Algorithms: An Example