"Brain cells glow with different colours under UV light in this image of the brainstem of a "Brainbow" mouse.
The trick is to add a piece of DNA containing the genes for several different fluorescent proteins to a mouse, along with a mechanism that randomly cuts out some of these genes when activated in brain cells. As a result, different brain cells produce different mixtures of fluorescent proteins, creating a kaleidoscope of colours. " THIS IS SO PRETTY!
This post is to celebrate my Brian Cox video having over 1,000 views!
I made the video a few months ago, before the Wonders series had even finished. I heard the Owl City song and just got this UNCONTROLLABLE urge to make this video. Which is always the best kind of urge when undertaking an editing project. I scoured the internet to find a way of making iplayer downloads editable, a process which I will NOT be revealing here.... Suffice to say it is very complicated. I used two of the episodes, and edited it right down to the most artyfarty pretty shots - Of which there are MANY because the cameraman is clearly in love with Brian. (who isn't?) So it's had 1,100 views today. I have been watching the views go up almost obsessively. I especially enjoy the 'discovery' tab which shows me how people are finding the video... Now the yellow bits are where my video has been on 'featured video' which is totally cool! But I get a lot of views from people looking for that bloody 'Brian Cox Spoof' video because mine is a response to it. Yes its funny, but it got 131,158 views in the same time that mine got 1,000 and that pisses me off. Because mine had ten times the work go into it. *sulk* But on a positive note, the video has gone down very well, with a bunch of people favouriting it and one guy even stole it and uploaded it seperately! ...I chased him up and made him take it down. Turns out they're hankering for a better quality upload, which turns out to be trickier than anticipated. As for whether Brian himself has seen it, who can tell, but I sent it to him a gadzillion times so lets hope so. :)
They're all bursting with really really interesting stuff, the sort of stuff that's a little bit hard to make yourself watch without checking your facebook in the middle but its worth it, really. (the internet has definitely shortened my attention span...)
Here are a few choice articles and videos that I've enjoyed the most:
British Amputee Cat First to Get Bone-Grafter Exoprosthetic Paws
this is so cute.. and, frankly, should have been done years ago. I caught a program about pioneering vetenary surgery on pets that is using artificial knee joints and stuff, but they were saying how been doing it to humans for decades, why not animals?e.g. RACEHORSES?
(I'm leaving out the whole ethical business here but in terms of pushing boundaries its all hunkydory)
Chatroulette Plans Penis-Recognition Algorithm to Block Pervy Users
so so so funny. This is best appreciated if you have spent an evening on chatroulette, where you will discover that 3 out of 4 people just turn out to be a guy having a wank. Penis recognition software?? seriously? I loved the comment of one guy who said
"Why do I get the impression that these same wierdos will start to dress up their penis in odd costumes to bypass the software?"
Incidentally the picture is from possibly the best south park episode ever, which deserves a blog in itself.
Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world
this is a good'un, its about all the faffing we do on the internet in our spare time and what it can be used for. It's also interesting because he basically explains how we are more generous in a social contract than in a monetary one. It's nice to hear people talking positively about the internet for a change. He says how all our new technology has revealed how generous we are as a race and how much we enjoy sharing.
Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?
This one really got me thinking. Its basically about how we have two types of happiness, synthesised and natural, and how in society we PERCEIVE synthesised happiness to be inferior to natural - BUT IT ISN'T!!! Because when we 'make do' we are actually happier than when we get what we 'want'... I found it really relaxing cos it was like, you'll be happy no matter what happens to you.. But sabine said it made her all nervous like if you understand this video you will be happy
Jonathan Harris: the Web's secret stories
Last one from TED. Another corker about the internet. It's not that great but what I love about it is the visualisation of information, which is something cropping up an awful lot at the moment with google maps and iphones and stuff.
Time Lords discovered in California
OKAY so it's not really about time lords, its about synaesthesia and I LOVE SYNAESTHESIA, I do kind of wish I had it.. I'm always on the look out for new combinations of senses to check whether I have any of my own wacky little eccentricities.. 'even numbers ARE warm coloured!!!' and so on So these people see time, mostly in circular shapes like one woman has a calendar thats a circle around her body. I get that, because in my head the yearly calendar is like a clock layed flat. But anyway imagine being able to see time!? reminds me of Donnie Darko with the tube coming out of his stomach.
There's tonnes of other stuff but to be honest the best place to find this sorta thing is on Derren Brown's blog or his twitter - sounds mental but he is ridiculously busy finding interesting articles, I can't keep up with him. I'm going to sleep now, got a horrible cold but a day off tomorrow and its set to be a scorcher. Toodles!
Saturday, 3 July 2010
I'm sitting in bed next to a sleeping lois in whitechapel. shes knackered cos shes been working all day and then we went to gay pride in soho and got a bit tiddly and had chinese and ice cream. But i'm chronically nocturnal and I was lying looking at the stars from the massive open window and the steam rising from the hospital incinerator and my head was whirring so I started to type. I've played a lot of pokemon since I moved out of halls. (maybe its a clinging on to doing stupidly childish timewasting stuff leftover from furzedown) Sabine got me into it, so I blame her. basically what I didnt realise is that you can download a gameboy visualiser thing onto your laptop and then play loads of different gameboy games on it AND you dont even have to play it little, you can make it full screen if you like! The last time i played pokemon was when i was about 9, so it was familiar but i didnt know it back to front (like sabine haaar har) I got sapphire only cus it was the first that happened to work when i downloaded it. im actually finding it enjoyably challenging, but training up my pokemon in the long grass was a little monotonous. the game is pretty funny, I saved some screen shots of the bits that made me laugh: what's the obsession with the soil being 'soft and loamy'???anyway i had to stop because when i went to bed the trees outside my window looked like pokemon (a charizard and an abra to be precise) and then i had horrible swirly dreams about pokemon battles where i couldnt work out which types were most effective against each other. (cos its not logical right, fire is really effective against electric, but theyre all metal and stuff??)
im working on monday for two weeks and its a fine job but really mind numbingly boring sometimes so i need stuff to occupy my head with like, interesting things so if anyone has any cool thought provoking stuff i could do with it about now.all im going on at the moment is the TED lectures, ive watched one today - was about cognitive surplus, pretty much my area.. and it was about how people are really generous and enjoy sharing and we've not realised this as much as we have in the new digital world and stuff. http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_world.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2010-06-29&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email
Hokay so, I'm going to stop using this blog to write depressing rambles and start using it for all the shit that I post to facebook that nobody looks at. I am also a first class witterer and fast typist so those two skills should go together nicely..
I'll start with the Eurovision song contest. The final is tomorrow so with a bit (har har) of spare time on my hands I went through the contestants to see wot woz wot. Belgium isnt bad, it's a guy with a guitar basically which makes a nice change and is actually a pretty decent song. I hope they do well. But I want Serbia to win. I have had their song going around in my head all day, I kept singing it on the tube and probably sounded retarded
It takes a while to warm up so I recommend skipping to the middle. Anyway it turns out it was written by Goran Bregovic, who wrote the music for the film Arizona Dream which is fantastic, which explains why its good. The singers weird. And yes I realise that it is one of the cheesiest things ever, but that is precisely the point of Eurovision. Its really annoyingly catchy..
In other news I have decided that I really really need to see Shlomo and the Vocal Orchestra again. I was reminded of them when I listened to some Caravan Palace today, who also played at WOMAD 2009, making it one of the best years ever for discovering new amazing music. Here they are from when I saw them, the best bit is them singing Stevie Wonder.
they totally blew us away. I was stunned. I mean he actually conducts them like an orchestra, only its better than an orchestra because they can make ANY sound with those mouthses. I need to look into when they're next playing in London..
I missed the Elbow Room exhibition at college this evening to see my cousin perform in a play with the Orpheus Centre at the Royal Opera House, which was beautiful, but more on that later. Thankfully they were kind enough to put my film on for me in my absence, and for anyone who hasn't seen it yet here it is:
I'm really happy with it as an experiment, but I feel like a lot of my work for the past year or two has all been EXPERIMENTS and not FINAL PIECES..... It doesn't have a soul, its just me investigating a new technique. I presented it projected in the project space running off a DVD player. While it was running I filmed the projection a few times to get new things from it, like just the paint moving by itself. I inverted the colours and set a clip of it to music here:
Need to try get the paint to move on the beat though. My friend Louise also used the rotoscoping technique to do this, which is also being shown tonight:
I think its really lovely, she has more of the subject matter that I'm missing but I prefer my technique. I love the little flea playing the violin. Today on the tube with Sabine we were giggling at the nasal, high pitched sounds coming from a serious looking hairy man's earphones. I said it sounded like a flea playing a kazoo. It really did. I thought that could be interesting to use for an art piece somehow. Like, you could make a tiny blanket and tiny hat and make a fake flea and set it down on the floor on the underground and it could be a busking flea that noone hears over the noise.
Enough wittering for now. Might watch some classic Green Wing. (Im falling in love with it again) Toodles x p.s. you need an idea about html for blogging hey? takes me back to my myspace days..
This place is disgusting. I know student life is notoriously grubby but these halls really are the pits. If you were a clean freak, you could spend your entire waking life here spraying bleach and still there would be germs resiliant enough to infect you. I suspect the residents of Furzedown leave with not only a valuable experience of student parties and social benefits, but armed with an incredible immune system. Its not like these are radical thoughts, we regularly comment on the 'strange substance' in the kitchen, the 'unusual smell' that erupts from the cooker hob when used and the general stickyness of the place. From the viewpoint of 'tickling the old immune system' being beneficial, perhaps these are all good things. Maybe there should be a study on deaths and illnesses in later life of ex-habitants of Furzedown. I am beginning to long for the day when I will not have to, in preparing a meal, fish out a slimy fork from the bottom of a bin bag and 'wash' it with a cruddy scrubbing brush. Home is the clear winner when it comes to cleanliness (HOME HAS A DISHWASHER) but I hope my house in September will not have to suffer the neglect that our own cleaner Sonia inflicts upon our communal areas..
Incidentally the picture is from possibly the best south park episode ever, which deserves a blog in itself.