You see them on street corners, at gas stations, at shopping malls. You see them at blowout sales and grand openings of all kinds. Their wacky faces hover over us, and then fall down to meet us, and then rise up again. Their bodies flop. They flail.
They are men. Men made of tubes. Tubes full of air.
[An “AirDancer” from LookOurWay. Credit: Sam Greenspan]
Depending upon your tastes, they are either full of ridiculous joyful exuberance, or the tackiest thing in the world.
A number of cities across the US have actually banned the use of tube guys. An ordinance in Houston enacted in 2008 proclaims that dancing a tube guy “contributes to urban visual clutter and blight and adversely affects the aesthetic environment.”
Some may seem them as visual clutter now, but they have ancestry in stunning works of Caribbean art.
The tube guy origin story begins with celebrated artist and “mas man” Peter Minshall. He made a name for himself in Trinidad & Tobago (and beyond) for his Carnival bands, featuring larger than life puppets which dance through the street to the beat of Calypso music.
In the early 1990s, Peter Minshall had gained fans among members of the planning committee for the Olympics and in 1995, he found himself in a stadium in Los Angeles working with a bunch of different artists, trying out different ideas for the opening ceremonies for the Atlanta Games the following year.
As Minshall tells it, he was was trying to do something using inflatable tubes, but it wasn’t working. And then Minshall realized that if they were made to look like people, they would dance just like people did back home in Trinidad & Tobago—limpid, loose, and gracefully...
After the Olympics, Doron Gazit applied for a patent for “apparatus and method for providing inflated undulating figures,” in 2001. He then began licensing its use through his company, Air Dimensional Designs.
This became a point of tension between Gazit and Minshall; Minshall had been unaware of Gazit’s intention to patent and monetize the inflatable figure. Gazit, for his part, says that he applied for a patent because he put a lot of research and development into making the “flyguys” (as Gazit calls them), and he was already starting to see other people people rip off his efforts...
However, Gazit’s company, Air Dimensional Designs, does continue to license its patent to various companies that manufacture and sell vertical inflatables. One such company is LookOurWay, which in addition to making “AirDancers,” also sells “Air Rangers.”
Turns out that vertical inflatables also make for good scarecrows. Farmer Gary Long, who helped develop the Air Rangers, says that bird damage in his orchard of honeycrisp apples went from 20,000 pounds a year—to zero...
To read the full piece or listen to the podcast - http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/inflatable-men/
Riding a space elevator up from Mars. Trekking across the ice fields of Europa. Soaring in wing suits above the clouds of Titan. Base jumping on Miranda. Wanderers is a science-inspired short film imagining human exploration of our solar system that leaves me giddy and excited for a future we could one day experience.
Top image: Base jumping off Verona Rupes, the highest cliff in the solar system. Credit: Erik Wernquist
Set to Carl Sagan reading from Pale Blue Dot, this inspired future borrows heavily from the futuristic visions of NASA, Kim Stanley Robinson, Arthur C. Clarke, Chesley Bonestell, and many more. The film's creator, Erik Wernquist, sees the film as "a glimpse of the fantastic and beautiful nature that surrounds us on our neighboring worlds - and above all, how it might appear to us if we were there.
To read more - http://space.io9.com/this-is-a-stunning-vision-of-humans-basking-in-our-sola-1664676360/1664858837/
What if the Black Plague had killed off almost all Europeans? Then the Reconquistanever happens. Spain and Portugal don't kickstart Europe's colonization of other continents. And this is what Africa might have looked like.
The map – upside down, to skew our traditional eurocentric point of view – shows an Africa dominated by Islamic states, and native kingdoms and federations. All have at least some basis in history, linguistics or ethnography. None of their borders is concurrent with any of the straight lines imposed on the continent by European powers, during the 1884-85 Berlin Conference and in the subsequent Scramble for Africa. By 1914, Europeans controlled 90% of Africa's land mass. Only the Abyssinian Empire (modern-day Ethiopia) and Liberia (founded in 1847 as a haven for freed African-American slaves) remained independent.
This map is the result of an entirely different course of history. The continent depicted here isn't even called Africa [1] but Alkebu-Lan, supposedly Arabic for 'Land of the Blacks' [2]. That name is sometimes used by those who reject even the name 'Africa' as a European imposition. It is therefore an ideal title for this thought experiment by Swedish artist Nikolaj Cyon. Essentially, it formulates a cartographic answer to the question: What would Africa have looked like if Europe hadn't become a colonizing power?
To arrive at this map, Cyon constructed an alternative timeline. Its difference from our own starts in the mid-14th century. The point of divergence: the deadliness of the Plague. In our own timeline, over the course of the half dozen years from 1346 to 1353, the Black Death [3] wiped out between 30 and 60% of Europe's population. It would take the continent more than a century to reach pre-Plague population levels. That was terrible enough. But what if Europe had suffered an even more catastrophic extermination – one from which it could not recover?
To read more - http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/africa-uncolonized
The 66-year-old singer-songwriter, musician, actor, and producer, who once reinvented himself as a gender-bending extraterrestrial rock star named Ziggy Stardust, as well as an emotionless Aryan superman named The Thin White Duke, then looked through the couple’s refigerator and, noted they still had a jar of Mario Batali pasta sauce and a “pretty full” box of lasagna noodles in the cupboard...
Here’s a neat image of a record and a stylus at 1000x magnification. It’s pretty incredible to see the etched grooves on the record up close and how they interact with the needle. I’ve always known how record players worked, but seeing the process magnified like this is way cool.
The photos come from Microscopic Images on Twitter.
