Acetio | Blogma

I hadn't heard of this, but apparently our very own Decatur, Georgia had a moment in the media Sun a few weeks ago when a local kid named Moey dressed up as a voting booth and essentially polled the neighborhood, taking candy in lieu of ballots.

Sometimes it's weird when a parent gets so involved in a child's costume (I'm guessing this wasn't Moey's idea) but the kid seems to be having fun.

Pop-up books have changed a lot since I was a kid.
Maybe it's because the ones I saw were from the library and were already all torn to pieces, but I had no idea that pop-up books had gotten as elaborate as they are now.

There is one 'paper artist' named Matthew Reinhart who has created a retelling of the traditional Cinderella tale.

About 8 years ago, a colleague of mine, Alex Goldman, mentioned a phrase. I don't recall whether he came up with it himself or exactly how he described it, but the explanation had something to do with the potential ambiguity of spoken phrases.

The phrase is, "Ed had edited it", which, if spoken quickly but not unnaturally fast, sounds more like a sound effect than a phrase.

I don't think there is a name for such a phrase; one that is so potentially unclear when spoken - one that must be spoken slowly and deliberately to be understood.

I don't own an iPhone. It seems pretty cool, but I don't think I would actually use it very often. Of course, that's what I said about email in 1991 or so.

MP3 players are now so cheap and ubiquitous that they are given away for free by banks with promotional audio files in them. It's not hard to delete the bank's files and upload my own, and I prefer using a cheap-as-free device, especially when there is a significant risk of losing it.

I appreciate miniaturization, but the iPods I've seen are just too small. If I had one, I know that I would drop it in the recycling and lose it forever.

But iPod gripes aside, the iPhone seems like something I might actually want.

One thing I like is when a product is designed to be hacked or augmented, and it seems the iPhone designers had this in mind.

This video demonstrates one particular 3rd-party application, Smule's Ocarina that uses the microphone input to sense the force of someone's breath and turns the device into a kind of flute.

As of today (November 18 2008), Belgian InBev has completed its takeover of Anheuser-Busch (A-B), one of the oldest and most iconic American brands, becoming the largest brewer and fifth-largest "consumer-products" company on the world.

This has resulted in a windfall for Senator John McCain's wife, Cindy.

After greatly enjoying (years after the fact) the original (BBC) "The Office" I looked around for other projects by the same people and found that the writer and star, Ricky Gervais, had done another show called, "Extras".
It was a more polished show, although more bitter in tone. Both shows seemed to aspire toward making the audience cringe, which seemed like a new kind of storytelling, at least to me.

Mike Chiaramonte and I have been talking about creating a console game together, something that combines Rube Goldberg devices and algorithmic music, where the device is a physical (or at least visual) representation of the algorithm. Imagine the boardgame Mousetrap, but with each of the components having an aural aspect, and some parts repeating to create rhythm.

Below is a sketch. We (he) will code it for the XBox, at least initially...

The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona in Tucson has an impact effect calculator that gives estimates of what would happen if a extraterrestrial body were to strike the earth. You need to know lots of information in order to use the calculator, such as the size, velocity, and density of the object, but the results are quite specific, such as how likely it would be that trees within 1,000 miles of the impact would ignite.

Xombie is a post-apocalypse Flash animation series with surprisingly good animation and narrative quality - good enough for TV, which isn't saying much, but TV in general has a higher bar than the Web, which has none.