It's a good thing that we recently acquired item #M5243 of the Archie McPhee catalog - you know, those cardboard 3D glasses with the red and blue lenses, all the rage in movie-watching days long gone. We've optimized, so to speak, our viewing pleasure of Mark's Counter-Rotating Spirals Illusion, a Java applet with... well, with dimensions to it. Mark clearly likes anaglyphs, 3D stereo images that pop out of the screen when you're wearing the right shades. His site offers quite a number of jump-out-at-you images, twisting, turning, spinning and generally nauseating Java thingies that have caused a lingering wooziness that still exists as we write this sentence. Back in a minute after an aspirin. Enjoy what we like to think of as the original VRML. Welcome to this week's Picks.
In other news, AOL Disks: A Modest Proposal is the latest in that long line of ideas of what to do with the frequent floppies that continue to insinuate themselves into our lives through the mail, through magazines, and the mail, and other magazines, and finally through the mail, and through even more other magazines. This idea, by Michael Lambert, has a touch of style to it. A collection of AOL Disk Art. Our favorite is Gallery 4, where we mulled over such creations as Cole Slaw, Puzzle and the lovable Mr. Potato Disk. Swamped by a steady supply of raw materials, it's amazing what one can do with a Dremel tool.
We'd like to believe it's the kind of thing you might very well enjoy at American Kaleidoscope, a new exhibit from the National Museum of American Art subtitled, "Themes and Perspectives in Recent Art." Here you will be introduced to a group of artists and their work reflecting the tremendous variety and diversity within American culture. Even if AOL Disk Sculpture is not the kind of thing you'd see here, we still think you should visit: it's worth the trip.
Speaking of trips, back in 1969 Lowell Boileau rode his 50cc Suzuki motorcycle from Manzini to Mbabane, in Swaziland, and recorded the journey in a series of photographs. You can view his beautiful images of the southern African countryside at Swaziland: A Journey Into the Past. The site is a work in progress; next will be a feature titled "Faces of Swaziland." In the meantime, take the trip east from Manzini, turn north on the road to Ekukanyeni, and enjoy the view.
From Africa to Made in China, a digital journey through the culture, history and geography of the land that brought you paper, pistols and parachutes. Follow Candide and his team of explorers as they make their way through the country - five cities in five weeks - covering a wide range of material, from culinary history to social policy, from calligraphy to opera and a whole smattering of fascinating stuff in between. The site is updated with dispatches for the duration of the trip (through November 13 of this year) and, amongst other things, you can subscribe to related mailing lists and join weekly live chats.
Not your cup of tea? You'd rather solve an integral at The Integrator. Fine. Go ahead. It's all part of the equation. There's no formula here. We can go off on a tangent. Clearly you're aware that: "If the curved boundary of a plane region can be described in terms of functions, then the area enclosed by the figure and its perimeter can be expressed in terms of integrals." Duh. Like we needed to be so obvious.
If we all agree that "integration can also be used to determine the mass of a body where the density of the matter inside it is allowed to vary from place to place", we'd like to suggest this: apparently, Elvis Ain't Dead. This site, in its own words, "was built for those people who really believe that Elvis Presley did not die on August 16, 1977... that in fact, his death and funeral were all a hoax carried out by Elvis himself and those who loved him." And so: tell 'em what you think, tell 'em what you've seen. That's all they ask. Oh, and read previous postings.
Hey, it's either that or qualify as a Field Investigator for the International Society for UFO Research. Up to you. Take your pick(s).