Ted talk by Arthur Ganson:

Sculptor and engineer Arthur Ganson talks about his work -- kinetic art that explores deep philosophical ideas and is gee-whiz fun to look at.

Via Wohba!.

Posted by Marcus Estes to WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

The Scene was a television show aired in Detroit on WGPR, the first black-owned TV station in America. From 1975 to 1987 the show served as black culture's reinvention of the "dance show" format - and looking back on these amazing tapes now it hurts to understand why it remained a purely local phenomenon.

While white America was up to god knows what on American Bandstand aired Saturday mornings across America, The Scene was publicizing and helping give birth to Detroit Techno

Check the clip.

YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation.

More specifically, YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.

Via Justin

Clay Shirky:

Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV

Transcript here, video here.

Via Daring Fireball and Warren Ellis.

Posted by Listener Kliph Nesteroff to WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

Well, it's time to cast those ballots again with this relic of early TV: The Hoot Gibson Show. It "stars" an aging B-movie western figure of the same name. The real meat of this program lies in its sponsor. At the 6:50 mark the sponsor appears in the flesh, a Chinchilla salesman who could not deliver a line of script to save his life.

The BBC is in trouble, political and economic. So what do they do? Make huge cuts in personnel and spending. Problem is that nearly everyone agrees that the reason they are in trouble is the quality of their programs are not where they should be, and of course the cuts are going to doom them. Some are standing up and shouting, is anyone listening?

We have had a series of cuts which will make it impossible to do what we have done up to now if they continue in the way they are continuing... And we are told there is going to be another massive cut over the next five years. The problem is, the BBC is in a whole range of things, it has many television channels, many radio stations, an internet presence and the rest of it. Maybe we are at a time when strategic judgments need to be made. If money has to be spent on the whole digital switchover for example, and building office blocks in Salford and all the rest of it, then maybe instead of cutting everything salami-sliced, then maybe we need to make judgments about the sort of things that we do, and maybe that does involve saying, reluctantly, and I hate to say this because it has been a wonderful institution, maybe we need to say perhaps we should be doing less better.

Via cityofsound.

No, there are no speakers.

Via Beyond the Beyond.

Ok I hate Ze Frank, but he hits the mood of public perception about this strike about spot on.

Via Gruber at Daring Fireball.

Flash website :argh: so I won’t quote from it, but the gist is:

The skulls belong all to us. I wanted to bring a catacomb from the near future to the present, to show people that the tragedy of pollution is happening right now. I try to remind people of things they are trying to forget.

Via MAKE: Blog.

Via Beyond the Beyond. Check the researchers website for more info.

Via Bacon and Monty Phan at Wired News. See the news story for context if you don't get it.

Some excerpts from "When I Sold My Soul to the Machine" a documentary on the dutch electro/techno scene around Bunker Records in The Hague during the 90's

part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5

See also Slices dvdmag on Legowelt and Guy Tavares:
part 1
part 2

Via Leyburn at someplace special.

Some hick gets his hands on a Rock-afire Explosion kit, and programs it to perform Huey - Pop, Lock, and Drop It.

For more check his other videos particularly Programming details, or those of fechter1.

Posted by Station Manager Ken to WFMU’s Beware of the Blog.

Not that William Shatner needs any help re-inventing himself musically or otherwise, but here’s a remix of him cruising along in his racecar at 160 MPH, and discussing it with Conan O’Brien

Why Do You Think You Are Nuts?

How To Properly Mic An Esophagus

I wish the production values had been a little higher, as this could have been amazing, rather than just cool.

Via MAKE: Blog.

A 5min bit on BBC's The World, reporting on the [corporate] censorship of Jonathan Hexner's video art piece "I Like America and America Likes Me" which was to be displayed on the Axel Springer building in Berlin. You can view the video piece on The World's website (you might want to download that and play in quicktime unless you have a browser window wider than 2016px).

Via David Post at Volokh.

Thomas Fehlmann shakes his cute German booty during a live dub set: one, two.
One of the best shows of my life, the energy he brought was great.

The whole Decibel weekend was awesome, check out more videos by basicsounds here, or his blog post where he says Decibel was better then Mutek (he is Canadian even!).

Make sure to watch the Ryoichi Kurokawa videos one, two. That shit blew my mind.

Also Andreas Tilliander at the after-party Sunday morning. I felt like I was back in Berlin, Seattle still partying at 7am? This was regarded as the best set of the weekend but I was too fucking dog tired to enjoy it.

Posted by Bill to Gibson Blog.

Treadmills!

Via Gibson Blog.