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/
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.
The Ouija board is so simple and iconic that it looks like it comes from another time, or maybe another realm. The game is not as ancient as it was designed to look, but those two arched rows of letters have been spooking people for over 125 years. Actually, the roots of the board go back even farther, according to Ouija historian Robert Murch. To understand where Ouija boards (generically called “talking boards”) come from, you have to go back to middle of the 1800s, to three sisters in New York.
[The Fox Sisters, Credit: Wikimedia Commons]
The Fox Sisters claimed to be mediums to the spirit world. In public demonstrations, they would ask questions of the spirits and receive audible knocks back on the wall, which they would translate into letters of the alphabet. The sisters popularized the growing movement known as Spiritualism,which held that the living could contact the spirits of the dead, who had secret knowledge to impart.
During and after the Civil War, people who had lost loved ones became enchanted with the idea of communicating with the dead, and came up with all different ways to contact the spirit world. In 1886 the fledgling Associated Press ran an article in papers all over the country about these new “talking boards” coming out of the spiritualist movement in Ohio. A few years later in 1890, a businessman named Charles Kennard pulled together a small group of investors and formed the Kennard Novelty Company to exclusively make and market talking boards...
Ouija, it turned out, was also a great thing to do on a date. The original Ouija board was placed on your lap, so your knees would be touching your partner’s knees. Your fingers would be touching your partner’s on the planchette. You might be playing by candle light. However romantic Ouija may have been, it was still innocent enough for Normal Rockwell, who made a painting of a Ouija-playing young couple that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post.
As of 2013, there’s a new version of the Ouija board, which has been redesigned to look even older than the classic board. “They’ve really gone for the older look,” says Ouija historian Robert Murch, “which is cool because people assume these boards have been around for thousands of years, which we know isn’t true, but belief is important to the Ouija board.”
Belief is very important to the Ouija board, especially subconscious belief. Which brings us finally, to how these things work. In 1852, an English physician and researcher named William Carpenter was studying Spiritualist phenomena, and coined the term “ideomotor effect.” The ideomotor effect describes what happens when subconscious thoughts guide muscular movements.
According to Professor Chris French, of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmith’s University of London, the ideometer effect can explain why, on the Ouija board, the planchette seems to be moving on its own. In truth, the players are guiding its movement subconsciously.
Some researchers have even tried to study the subconscious using Ouija boards.
To read the full article - http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/o-u-i-j-a/
R.E.M.’s Out of Time is the most politically significant album in the history of the United States. Because of its packaging.
In 1985, the pop charts were full of Prince and Sheena Easton and the youth of America were being corrupted. Tipper Gore and other elite women of Washington formed the “Parents Music Resource Center” (PMRC) to put pressure on the creators and distributors of “objectionable” music.
There were Senate hearings, and eventually those little black and white Parental Advisory stickers started appearing on albums.
This set off a wave of censorship across the country.
I recently came to work with two large tote bags filled with compact discs and dumped them out on a table in the middle of the office. To me, they were garbage. But for the vultures that are my fellow NPR Music producers, it was like finding a mountain of free money. They shuffled through the pile, grabbing everything that caught their eye. At one point, Stephen Thompson held up my discarded copy of Radiohead's OK Computer and incredulously asked, "Why would you get rid of this?"
For about a year now, I've been slowly purging my once-proud CD collection. Twenty-five years' worth of music, from the first disc I ever bought (Pink Floyd'sThe Wall) in 1984, to more recent releases.
Of course, I'm not really getting rid of them. I'm ripping everything to a massive hard drive hooked up to what has become my stereo: my computer...
But I'm also purging my CDs because I believe they're a dying format. There's never been a more obvious trend. CD sales continue to plummet at a breathless — and, if you're one of the big labels, alarming — rate. Meanwhile, digital download sales continue to climb...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2008/04/rip_the_compact_disc_19822008_1.html
