cartoon life

Usually on Friday’s I work on the cartoon for the next weeks Londoner. This week an early deadline to allow for the Canada Day holiday obliged me to have very little to do today, so I caught up on some TED talks.

Wade Davis: Cultures at the far edge of the world
Wade Davis: The worldwide web of belief and ritual
Phil Borges: Documenting our endangered cultures
Stephen Petranek: 10 ways the world could end

Where the Hell is Matt?

Thank you, Cheryl.

Pete Seeger: Garbage From The Chawed Rosin. Pete sings about garbage…

… in light of Toronto trash trucks crashing up the highways. Read the rest of this entry »

FrameByFrame is a cool little app that will allow you to make stop-motion animation’s with any connected webcam, and it’s free.

Boinx iStopMotion will do time lapse. They offer a free five day demo, and it does lots of very useful things with all kinds of different settings. It’s also $50.00 US

FrameByFrame isn’t scriptable, though iStopMotion is. 

Apple’s Automator is a great little wrapper for a lot of system functions. The Loop action affects only the connected action, not the whole workflow, and the Watch Me Do is tediously slow.  I didn’t bust a nut trying to get a very simple workflow working which was supposed to launch FrameByFrame, click the Capture menu item, pause and repeat. This shouldn’t be this hard. Read the rest of this entry »

The Forest City Lovers are a Toronto based band consisting of four friends, two rats and eight arms who don’t have a play date in London, The Creative City, The Forest City!

The bands MySpace page.

Strap on the wings and fly. From Scientific American Video.

“A Swiss man stuns onlookers by flying a jet propelled wing for nearly ten minutes at a peak speed of 300 km/h (186 mph).”

Longer story at Yahoo.

Found off of Karmacino, this post is a link to a Google video of a BBC Dispatches episode about Tibet. And this post from Asian Window covers an article from The Daily Mail.

 FLIR Creative
Free Public Domain Movies

The Amazons Dance from Colossus and the Amazon Queen: A shipload of men is captured by the Amazons. You might think that’s a perfect relationship, but the cooking and cleaning get you down after a while. It’s a great farce and great Saturday afternoon movie. The perfect chic flick.

plotsummary and usercomments at IMDB
HAJI MAJI
Iamnotastalker’s Weblog

Yes, it’s from BoingBoing and many thanks for discovering it. Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight. We all can do it. We don’t need to have a stroke.

First, Richard Dawkins here, is explaining a model of understanding relationship, the scale of things, about why we as human animals exist at the scale we do.

Sunyata is difficult to grasp. It isn’t empty, like a glass with no water, but it is more, rather, like the glass as it moves through time and space, from particles of sand to particles of sand (and that is only a small portion of its presence) containing and not containing, empty and full, and rather like the dune that Dawkins describes at about ten minutes into this video.

Dawkins would probably lambaste me for turning this lecture into a Dharma talk, for reading some kind of spirituality into the examples he gives here, but he also touches so closely on Sunyata, I think it is difficult to not do so.

His story of the Pentagon General trying to walk through the wall - after all they are both made of atoms and are empty, explains the Middle World scale of our existence, but also parodies the deep misunderstanding of emptiness as something physical.

Rather, the story of the dune, a wave of sand blown across the desert asks when, where, and how is this thing actually separate from the world? Only in it’s name. Only in our mind. Just as the dune is made of sand, of compound things, so is Self, piling up, blown over, moving, only a series of moments in relationship with another series of moments.

And he says practically that in his closing comment that we “swim in a social world”, that modelling thinking on a ‘needs driven’ organism is a useful model. Sounds like Dukkha to me.

At TED in 2006, Sir Ken Robinson makes a profound case for an education system that nurtures creativity. We educate from the waist up [to the head] then off to one side.

Some interesting TED talks I’ve found recently; George Dyson talking about Project Orion; Jaime Lerner on Urban Design; Frank Gehry: Ted Gallo on deep sea creatures; Vilayanur Ramachandran.

Ramachandran talks about how brain damage gives clues to how the mind works, in three examples; understanding Imposter syndrome, curing phantom limb pain, and Synesthesia’s high frequency amongst poets and artists - although Synesthesia isn’t strictly brain damage. 

The first example is about broken visual sensory connections, the second about dissolving a false sensory somatic connection with visual retraining, and the third about blended non-differentated sensory brain connections and metaphor.

I find Synesthesia quite magical. I do not have it - but we all have it. We inherit it. The parts of the brain which specialize in number and colour are quite proximate, as are the areas for musical tone and colour. Our brain, as it grows in the womb differentiates the areas. Apparently the whole brain, as it begins, is suffused with connections throughout, connecting everything to everything else. As it grows, these suffused connections drop away and specialize. Sometimes they don’t completely separate from adjacent areas.

This, to a degree, is the state of each of our individualized brains, our ‘each to it’s own’  3 lb. mass of jelly which just is not in any kind of fixed, perfect or finished state, more or less similar to others, more specialized or differentiated here or there, maybe a bit “broken” or knotted in another place.

Now, don’t let me get all mystical and inarticulate on you, but metaphor is - and non-discriminating awareness is what we do before we decide what is and what is not.

 Update: Some great discussion off that TED site and a link to lectures from BBC 

Here is another version of The Great Compassion Mantra running 6:37 minutes.

Racism has met its match…here comes Anti-Racism GirlSee also: The Reals