July 16, 2012
Different studies show animal prostitution exists among species such as Adélie Penguins, chimpanzees, and crab-eating macaque. Penguins use stones for building their nests. A shortage of stones led female Adélie Penguins to trade sex for stones. The female penguins, even when in a committed relationship, will exchange sexual favors with strange males for the pebbles they need to build their nests. Prostitution is also observed among chimpanzees, who trade food for sex.
The first documented case of prostitution in animals was reported in 1998 by Fiona Hunter and Lloyd Davis, who had spent five years observing the mating behavior of penguins. The study was conducted as part of an Antarctica New Zealand program on the Ross Island, approximately 800 miles from the South Pole. The female penguins observed under the study were coupled with males. The females will go outside alone to collect pebbles, but the males did not suspect their female partners. According to the observations and analysis made by Hunter, the prostitute penguins targeted single males, because if instead they picked a male penguin with a partner, the male penguin’s current partner will come in conflict with the prostitute female.
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July 11, 2012
The Bran Flakes are a sound collage pop group with members in the United States and Canada who specialize in creating music from pre-existing sources. The group’s members include Otis Fodder, Mildred Pitt, Susan DeLint, and The GRDNR. Along with other bands such as Negativland and Evolution Control Committee, the Bran Flakes make extensive use of sampling, recontextualizing the samples into new works. The group scours thrift shops for obscure and quirky LPs; some of their songs also make use of recognizably famous basslines, television shows, and soundtracks from video games. The unauthorized nature of much of their output has precluded wide commercial release.
Following the 1998 release of ‘I Remember When I Break Down’ on Ovenguard Music, on which Otis Fodder was sole writer, the group’s first album as a duo (Otis Fodder and Mildred Pitt) was in 1999, with ‘Hey Won’t Somebody Come and Play’ on Ovenguard Music. 2001 saw the release of ‘I Don’t Have a Friend’ on Lomo Records. Their 2002 album ‘Bounces!’ was released on the band’s own Happi Tyme Records, and contained one of their most popular songs; ‘Good Times a Goo Goo’, which sampled extensively from Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear’s performance of ‘Moving Right Along’ from ‘The Muppet Movie.’ In 2008 the band signed with the label Illegal Art, known for such acts as Girl Talk and Steinski.
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July 7, 2012
Me at the zoo is the first video ever to be uploaded to YouTube. It was uploaded at 8:27 pm on Saturday, April 23, 2005 by Jawed Karim, one of the co-founders of the site, under the username ‘jawed.’ Described by ‘The Observer’ as ‘poor-quality,’ the video was shot by Yakov Lapitsky at the San Diego Zoo; it features Karim in front of the elephants, explaining how interesting their ‘really, really, really long trunks’ are, and is 19 seconds long.
‘The Los Angeles Times’ states: ‘as the first video uploaded to YouTube, it played a pivotal role in fundamentally altering how people consumed media and helped usher in a golden era of the 60-second video.’
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July 3, 2012
A Video Synthesizer is a device that electronically creates a video signal. A video synthesizer is able to generate a variety of visual material without camera input through the use of internal video pattern generators. It can also accept and ‘clean up and enhance’ or ‘distort’ live television. Video pattern generators may produce static or moving or evolving imagery. Examples include geometric patterns ( in 2D or 3D ), subtitle text characters in a particular font, or weather maps.
The history of video synthesis is tied in to a ‘real time performance’ ethic. The equipment is usually expected to function on input camera signals the machine has never seen before, delivering a processed signal continuously and with a minimum of delay in response to the ever changing live video inputs.
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July 3, 2012
Allegro Non Troppo is a 1976 Italian animated film directed by Bruno Bozzetto. Featuring six pieces of classical music, the film is a parody of Disney’s ‘Fantasia,’ two of its episodes being arguably derived from the earlier film. The classical pieces are set to color animation, ranging from comedy to deep tragedy. At the beginning, in between the animation, and at the end are black and white live-action sequences, displaying the fictional animator, orchestra, conductor and filmmaker, with many humorous scenes about the fictional production of the film.
Some of these sections mix animation and live action. In music, an instruction of ‘allegro ma non troppo’ means to play ‘fast, but not overly so.’ In the context of this film, and without the ‘ma,’ it means ‘Not So Fast!’, an interjection meaning ‘slow down’ or ‘think before you act.’ The common meaning of ‘allegro’ in Italian is ‘joyful.’ The title reveals therefore a catch with the dual meaning of ‘allegro,’ and can also be read as ‘joyful, but not so much’ or ‘not overly joyful.’
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June 11, 2012
The slit-scan photography technique is a photographic and cinematographic process where a moveable slide, into which a slit has been cut, is inserted between the camera and the subject to be photographed. Originally used in static photography to achieve blurriness or deformity, the slit-scan technique was perfected for the creation of spectacular animations. It enables the cinematographer to create a psychedelic flow of colors.
Though this type of effect is now often created through computer animation, slit-scan is a mechanical technique. It was adapted for film by Douglas Trumbull during the production of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and used extensively in the ‘stargate’ sequence. It requires an imposing machine, capable of moving the camera and its support.
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June 6, 2012
The Neo Geo is an arcade system board and home video game console released in 1990 by Japanese game company SNK. The MVS (Multi Video System), as the Neo Geo was known to the coin-operated arcade game industry, offered arcade operators the ability to put up to six different arcade titles into a single cabinet, a key economic consideration for operators with limited floorspace.
With its games stored on self-contained cartridges, a game-cabinet could be exchanged for a different game-title by swapping the game’s ROM-cartridge and cabinet artwork. Several popular franchise-series, including ‘Fatal Fury,’ ‘The King of Fighters,’ ‘Metal Slug,’ and ‘Samurai Shodown,’ were released for the platform. The Neo Geo system was also marketed as a very costly home console, commonly referred to today as the AES (Advanced Entertainment System).
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June 3, 2012
A wobbulator is an electronic device primarily used for the alignment of receiver or transmitter intermediate frequency strips. It is usually used in conjunction with an oscilloscope, to enable a visual representation of a receivers passband to be seen, hence, simplifying alignment; it was used to tune early consumer AM radios. The term ‘wobbulator’ is a portmanteau of wobble and oscillator. A ‘wobbulator’ (without capitalization) is a generic term a frequency-modulated RF oscillator, also called a ‘sweep generator.’
A wobulator was used in some old microwave signal generators to create what amounted to frequency modulation. When capitalized ‘Wobbulator’ refers to the trade name of a specific brand of RF/IF alignment generator. The Wobbulator was made by a company known as TIC (Tel-Instrument Company). The Wobbulator generator, designated model 1200A, when connected to an oscilloscope and television receiver under test, would display a representation of the receiver’s RF/IF response curves with ‘markers’ defining critical frequency reference points as a response curve on the oscilloscope screen. Such an amplitude-versus-frequency graph is also often referred to as a Bode (pronounced ‘bodee’) plot.
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May 28, 2012
Chromaroma is a London-based game using players’ public transport passes (Oyster cards and Barclays Cycle Hire accounts). Points are awarded depending on the stations and journeys users complete on the London Underground and London Buses, as well as using ‘Boris bikes.’
It is described by its creators, Mudlark, as ‘location-based top trumps,’ and encourages competition through leaderboards. (Top Trumps is a card game. Each card contains a list of numerical data, and the aim of the game is to compare these values in order to try to trump and win an opponent’s card. A wide variety of different packs of Top Trumps have been published).
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May 11, 2012
Himanshu Kumar Suri aka Heems is an American rapper from Queens best known for being part of the alternative hip hop group Das Racist. Suri is also the founder of Greedhead Entertainment, an independent record label. In 2012, he released his first solo mixtape, ‘Nehru Jackets’ on his Greedhead imprint and in conjunction with SEVA NY, a community-based organization from Queens of which Suri is a board member. Suri has also written about music and all things South Asian for the ‘Village Voice,’ ‘Death and Taxes’ magazine, ‘Fuse,’ ‘Stereogum,’ and ‘Alternet.’ Suri graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 2003, where he was vice president when the September 11 attacks happened two blocks away. Suri then attended Wesleyan University where he studied economics.
In 2008, Suri formed Das Racist with his college friend Victor Vazquez. Shortly thereafter, Suri’s high school friend Ashok Kondabolu joined as their hype man. Das Racist first found success on the internet with their 2008 song ‘Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,’ and then quickly established themselves within the underground rap scene with their 2010 mixtapes ‘Shut Up, Dude’ and ‘Sit Down, Man,’ both of which earned them critical acclaim.
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May 4, 2012
Malice in Wonderland is a 1982 American independent short film directed by Vince Collins, and with graphic design by Miwako. It is loosely based on the Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ displaying surreal images and an aggressive animation style.
It is 4 minutes long. A jet-propelled white rabbit flies through the vulva of a supine woman into a wonderland where people and objects turn inside out, changing shapes and identities at warp speed. Events roughly follow Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ The Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, and the Queen of Hearts make appearances, as does Alice. Images and symbols are often sexual. At the end, Alice says, ‘Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream.’
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May 4, 2012
In computer security, the dancing pigs problem (also known as the dancing bunnies problem) is a statement on user attitudes to computer security: that users primarily desire features without considering security, and so security must be designed in without the computer having to ask a technically ignorant user.
The term has its origin in a remark by computer scientists Edward Felten and Gary McGraw: ‘Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time.’
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