February 13, 2012
Kitsch [kich] (loanword from German) is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that are unoriginal.
Kitsch also refers to the types of art that are aesthetically deficient (whether or not being sentimental, glamorous, theatrical, or creative) and that make creative gestures which merely imitate the superficial appearances of art through repeated conventions and formulae. Excessive sentimentality often is associated with the term.
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February 13, 2012
Paul Sturgess is an English-born basketball player for the Harlem Globetrotters. At 7 ft 7.82 in (2.3322 m) and 320 lb (150 kg), Sturgess was the tallest ever college basketball player in the US, is the tallest professional basketball player in the world, and is taller than any basketballer ever to play for the NBA. He joined the team in 2011 with fellow rookie, Jonte ‘Too Tall’ Hall, who at 5 ft 2 in (1.57 m) is the shortest ever player and is 2.5 ft (77 cm) shorter than Sturgess.
Sturgess wears a size 21 shoe. Examinations as a teenager revealed that his growth is healthy and not the result of disorder, rather he possesses familial tall stature, that is to say his height is genetic. His biological father is 6 ft 9 in (2.06 m) and there are other tall members in his family although his mother is 5 ft 5 in (1.65 m) and his younger sister is 5 ft 6 in (1.68 m). Sturgess was always tall but a growth spurt between the ages of 16-17 resulted in a foot (30 cm) of height added within a single year. Sturgess enjoys playing many other sports and before concentrating on basketball also played golf and soccer.
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February 12, 2012
Myrmecia, often called bull ants, is a genus of ants found almost exclusively in Australia. These ants are well-known for their aggressive behavior and powerful stings. The venom of these ants has the potential to induce anaphylactic shock in allergic sting victims. As with most severe allergic reactions, if left untreated the reaction may be lethal. Bull ants eat small insects, honeydew (a sweet, sticky liquid found on leaves, deposited from various insects), seeds, fruit, fungi, gums, and nectar. They have larger eyes, and hence better vision, than most ants.
The bull ant famously appears in the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s major work, ‘The World as Will and Representation,’ as a paradigmatic example of strife and constant destruction endemic to the ‘will to live.’ ‘But the bulldog-ant of Australia affords us the most extraordinary example of this kind; for if it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head seizes the tail in its teeth, and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head: the battle may last for half an hour, until they die or are dragged away by other ants. This contest takes place every time the experiment is tried.’
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February 12, 2012
Rolling shutter (also known as line scan) is a method of image acquisition in which each frame is recorded not from a snapshot of a single point in time, but rather by scanning across the frame either vertically or horizontally. In other words, not all parts of the image are recorded at exactly the same time, even though the whole frame is displayed at the same time during playback.
This is in contrast with global shutter in which the entire frame is exposed for the same time window. This produces predictable distortions of fast-moving objects or when the sensor captures rapid flashes of light.
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February 10, 2012
Nero is a British electronic music act consisting of Daniel Stephens and Joe Ray with Alana Watson a vocalist, who are best known for producing drum and bass, dubstep and house. Daniel Stephens and Joe Ray were both born in 1984 and spent their childhood in suburban Northwood, London.
Ray played classical guitar and Stephen, encouraged by his jazz-loving father, played cello. By the time a mutual friend introduced them at the age of 15, Stephens was attending the specialist music school at Pimlico. Outside school both were making electronic music on home computers. They began working together at 17, setting up a studio in Stephens’ bedroom.
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February 10, 2012
‘Stevenote‘ is a colloquial term for the keynote speeches given by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs at events such as the Worldwide Developers Conference and previously the Macworld and Apple Expos. Jobs’ vibrant speaking style and manner of exciting the crowd was legendary. Because most Apple product releases were first revealed to the public in these keynotes, ‘Stevenotes’ often caused substantial swings in Apple’s stock price.
In late 1996, Apple purchased NeXT, and Steve Jobs returned to Apple after a 12-year hiatus following his forced resignation from the company in 1985. In mid-1997, he gave a keynote address in which he presented a detailed report on the company’s status. The keynote featured an appearance by Microsoft CEO Bill Gates by satellite. Jobs announced a partnership with Microsoft comprising several key agreements that, according to Jobs, would benefit Apple and allow it to recover from its prolonged decline during the early and mid 1990s.
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February 10, 2012
Reality distortion field (RDF) is a term coined by Bud Tribble (who still works at Apple) at Apple Computer in 1981, to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs’ charisma and its effects on the developers working on the Mac project. Tribble claimed that the term came from ‘Star Trek.’ Later the term has also been used to refer to perceptions of his keynote speeches (or ‘Stevenotes’) by observers and devoted users of Apple computers and products.
The RDF was said by Andy Hertzfeld (member of the original Apple team) to be Steve Jobs’ ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement, and persistence. RDF was said to distort an audience’s sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and made them believe that the task at hand was possible. While RDF has been criticized as anti-reality, those close to Jobs have also illustrated numerous instances in which creating the sense that the seemingly impossible was possible led to the impossible being accomplished. Similarly, the optimism which Jobs sowed in those around him contributed to the loyalty of his colleagues and fans.
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February 10, 2012
Stippling [stip-uhl-ing] is the creation of a pattern simulating varying degrees of solidity or shading by using small dots. Such a pattern may occur in nature and these effects are frequently emulated by artists. In a drawing or painting, the dots are made of pigment of a single color, applied with a pen or brush; the denser the dots, the darker the apparent shade—or lighter, if the pigment is lighter than the surface. This is similar to—but distinct from—pointillism, which uses dots of different colors to simulate blended colors.
In printmaking, dots may be carved out of a surface to which ink will be applied, to produce either a greater or lesser density of ink depending on the printing technique. Stippling may also be used in engraving or sculpting an object even when there is no ink or paint involved, either to change the texture of the object, or to produce the appearance of light or dark shading depending on the reflective properties of the surface; for instance, stipple engraving on glass produces areas that appear brighter than the surrounding glass.
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February 9, 2012
Divisionism [dih-vizh-uh-niz-uhm] (also called Chromoluminarism) was the characteristic style in Neo-Impressionist painting defined by the separation of colors into individual dots or patches which interacted optically. By requiring the viewer to combine the colors optically instead of physically mixing pigments, divisionists believed they were achieving the maximum luminosity scientifically possible.
Georges Seurat founded the style around 1884 as chromoluminarism, drawing from his understanding of the scientific theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and Charles Blanc, among others. Divisionism developed along with another style, pointillism, which is defined specifically by the use of dots of paint and does not necessarily focus on the separation of colors.
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February 9, 2012
Dan Reisinger (b. 1934) is an Israeli designer of graphics, exhibitions, and stage sets. He was born in Serbia, into a family of painters and decorators active in Austria-Hungary and the Balkans. Most family members died in the Holocaust, including his father. He immigrated to Israel in 1949. Reisinger initially lived in a transit camp and then worked as a house painter. In 1950 at age 16, he was accepted as a student—its youngest at the time—at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.
He graduated in 1954 and was inducted into the Israeli military for mandatory service. He was the art director for the Air Force’s books and other publications. While there, he attended a class on postage-stamp design taught by Abram Games, who became his mentor and friend. Subsequently, he traveled, studied, and worked in Europe: from 1957 in Brussels and then onto London where, 1964–66, studied stage and three-dimensional design at the Central School of Art and Design (today the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design), designed posters for Britain’s Royal Mail. Then in 1966, he returned permanently to Israel and established a studio.
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February 9, 2012
Ben Frost is an Australian visual artist who places common iconic images from advertising, entertainment, and politics into juxtapositions that are often confrontational and controversial. The collaborative exhibition ‘Colossus’ with Roderick Bunter in 2000 at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane featured a 12m x 2.4m mural by the artists, called ‘Where Do You Want To Go Today?’
Containing controversial imagery, including masturbating cartoon characters among a pastiche of advertising icons, the work was a statement on society’s continuing loss of innocence. In the final week of the exhibition, a disgruntled viewer entered the gallery and slashed one of the paintings with a knife.’ In 2005 he started the online art store and blog portal ‘Stupid Krap,’ which continues to support and represent a number of notable Australian emerging artists.
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February 9, 2012
An illegal number is a number that represents information which is illegal to possess, utter or propagate. Any information that can be represented in binary format is representable as a number, and therefore if the information itself is illegal in some way, the pure number itself may be illegal. An illegal number may represent some type of classified information or trade secret, legal to possess only by certain authorized persons. An AACS encryption key that came to prominence in 2007 is an example of a number claimed to be a secret, and whose publication or inappropriate possession is claimed to be illegal in the United States. It allegedly assists in the decryption of any Blu-ray Disc.
As a protest of the DeCSS case, many people created ‘steganographic’ (hidden) versions of the illegal information. Dave Touretzky of Carnegie Mellon University created a ‘Gallery of DeCSS descramblers.’ In the AACS encryption key controversy, a ‘free speech flag’ was created. The illegal number was so short that a simple flag could be created by using the numbers as red-green-blue colors. The argument is that if short numbers can be made illegal, then anything based on those numbers also becomes illegal, like simple patterns of colors, etc.
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