Kevin Kelly's True Films 2.0

As a contributor to The Whole Earth Catalog in the early seventies, and as founding editor of WIRED Magazine, Kevin Kelly has been a collector of the cool and the esoteric. We continue to glean precious nuggets from his current on-line catalog, Cool Tools.

True Films 2.0 is the second version of Kevin's reviews of the best documentaries and "factuals" available. This time he reviews 150 of the best true films and list two dozen others which he deems only "good."

For each film Kevin presents 4 or 5 screen shots, and captions, snagged from the film to give you some idea of their texture.

Kevin designed the book in color, but you can buy a black and white softcover version from Lulu.com, where it is the cheapest, or for a bit more from Amazon, where it is the easiest to order. Or you can buy a luxurious 156-page full color softcover version from Lulu. Or you can buy a dirt cheap color version as a PDF download, and get it instantly. In a few weeks you'll be able to get versions for e-book readers and PDAs.

• PDF Download [ $2 via PayPal | $1.88 via Lulu ]
• Black and white softcover book: $10 [ via Lulu ]
• Color softcover book: $30 [ via Lulu ]
  

Visit the official True Films website to see all of Kevin Kelly's reviews at www.truefilms.com.

From Kevin Kelly:

Now here is the thing. In each mode, I make exactly the same profit: $1.50 per book. In an experiment in new publishing I have priced each version $1.50 above my costs. So the different prices merely reflect the different costs of that venue. This means I don't care which edition you choose! Whether you buy the $2 PDF version, or the $30 color Lulu print version, or order from Amazon, I make exactly the same $1.50 per book. As I add other options for purchase the same process will apply: my total markup will be $1.50 above my costs.
Do I need to mention there is the free website version? Not as handy as a book, but updated with my latest additional reviews. However, I'm partial to the book version. It is a great browse, very concentrated and accessible and as it says on the cover "Perfect for Netflix."

-- KK

Best Small Art Gallery: moxie DaDA

Pittsburgh - Best Small Art Gallery: moxie DaDA - Main Feature - Main Feature Extra - Pittsburgh City Paper

BY BILL O'DRISCOLL

Conventional wisdom says the blank canvas is every artist's nightmare. For an art-gallery owner, though, it might be another story.

Christine Whispell, at least, seems right at home in the tabula rasa space where she and her colleagues are preparing to transplant moxie DaDA, their 2-year-old gallery.

The new venue is located in The Firehouse Ceramics Studios, an actual old North Side firehouse. And on the gallery's half of the first floor, beneath the high ceilings and fluorescent lights, three big wooden frames -- painted white and hung by chains on the bare brick wall -- suggest naked canvas.

The Arch Street gallery's grand re-opening, on Jan. 6, will be the latest chapter in a story that began when Whispell, a native of upstate New York, moved here in 1994 to attend The Art Institute of Pittsburgh. In 2004, after seven years as a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review news artist, Whispell left to combine her love of art with a long-held desire to run a community space.

No Gift Baskets, Please.

Last year, the NYC office of Z Plus Partners in DUMBO (located down under the Brooklyn Bridge) was inundated with holiday gift baskets.

While they definitely enjoyed the treats, it got them thinking-- there is a lot of cost associated with sending these items -- money that could be more meaningfully spent.

So they came up with a website for the holiday season that offers up some gift alternatives: NoBasketsPlease.com.

The site includes items chosen to promote sustainability and social responsibility:

For your literary friends... Worldchanging: a Users Guide for the 21st Century
For the chocoholic in your life... greenandblacks.com
For those who want to green the earth... self.org
For communities across the globe... heifer.org
And if you must send a gift basket, why not send one to support our troops in Iraq... ecarepackage.com

Z Plus also commisioned a song for the season, specially written by official Pop!Tech bard, Ethan Lipton, aptly titled "Gift Basket". You can download it for free from the Z+ Blog.

Z + Partners > Weblog > Some Gifts That Keep On Giving

Sterling Spime and the Golden Rooster

In his 2002 book, Tomorrow Now, Bruce Sterling dedicates a rollicking chapter to the evolution of modern narco-terrorism that morphs as the connected economy meets the societal dissolution of former empires.

Here is a dispatch from closer to home in the US. Of course, we still kick it Old School, Capone-style, along the Mexican-American border. But, come on! Killing cock-crowing crooners?

How Not to Be a Border-Crossing Pop Star

It's not like pop-stars don't get shot when they've got ties to the drug trade. Gangsta rappers get shot with grim regularity. Even Bob Marley got winged once. But the "Golden Rooster" here -- he and his two top posse henchmen were wiped out, in their car, in a hail of *armor-piercing bullets.* Ay de mi. [read original article]

~ from Beyond the Beyond

As an ex-pat science fiction writer living in Belgrade--the capital of Eastern Europe's least favored, gansta-governed, Serbia--Sterling is fascinated with the methods and madness of almost-failed states.

His blog on WIRED covers the colorful chaos of blackmarket worlds, the economic mash-ups of the drug-addled digerati, and the Bollywoodification of the emerging world.

His recent little work of non-fiction,Shaping Things, he defines the emerging neologisms of intelligent object mediascape filled with spime and blobjects.

From When Blobjects Rule the Earth:

A Blobject is commonly defined as "an object with a curvilinear, flowing design, such as the Apple iMac computer and the Volkswagen Beetle." But computers and cars are just end products, they're not the process. The truth about a blobject is that is a physical object that has suffered a remake through computer graphics. It was designed on a screen with a graphics program. A blobject is what a standard 20th century industrial product, a consumer item, looks like after your crowd has beaten it into shape with a mouse.

Blobjects are blob-shaped objects, because of NURBS and meshes and splines and injection molding and CAD-CAM. They're highly curvilinear consumer items designed on workstations, and then they're generally blasted into being in a burst of injection-molded goo. ~from BoingBoing

Listen to Bruce Sterling describe the Internet of Things at this keynote address from the 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

Epic 2014

In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline, the Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? Watch this for a glimpse of the devolution of the mediascape into the Google grid, in which everyone creates and consumes.

Epic 2014 is a flash movie that was created in 2004 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson about a hypothesized future where the prevalence of public information from sources like Google and NewsBot come head to head with traditional news media like The New York Times.

Via Z + Partners - Weblog

One Laptop Per Child

After the coming holiday season, the US will have ostensibly reached the point of one iPod per child. It may be time to focus on the goal of One Laptop per Child.

The founder of OLPC is Nicholas Negroponte, a civil architect and computer scientist best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. (He is the younger brother of John Negroponte, United States Director of National Intelligence.)

Listen to a presentation by Negroponte from Pop!Tech 2005

Nicholas Negroponte wants to give every school child in the developing world a laptop computer. He has established the non-profit organization OLPC to design and produce $100 laptops for sale to governments in quantities of no less than 1 million machines on the condition that they are given to school children.

Negroponte feels the solution to any large world problem – peace, poverty, the environment, etc. – involves education, and he sees this as an education project that happens to use computers as a tool. The project is grounded in the studies of Seymour Papert, a pioneer in computing for children and the inventor of the Logo programming language. Negroponte and Papert have worked with computers in schools in developing nations since 1988.

At half the size of a conventional laptop PC (see photo), these machines are meant to serve those children who may live far from power stations and in often harsh climates. The rugged little computers have streamlined hardware, open source software and uses low-energy CPUs. Early estimates on UV lifetime of the LCD screens are encouraging and OLPC is now more confident that their target of 22K-hour lifetime can be achieved even under harsh conditions, such as the Libyan desert.

Founder of Worldchanging.com, Alex Steffan, got to unwrap one of these wind-up wonders for Thanksgiving. see article

From One Laptop per Child:

Introducing the children's laptop from One Laptop per Child—a potent learning tool created expressly for the world's poorest children living in its most remote environments. The laptop was designed collaboratively by experts from both academia and industry, bringing to bear both extraordinary talent and many decades of collective field experience in every aspect of this non-profit humanitarian project. The result is a unique harmony of form and function; a flexible, ultra low-cost, power-efficient, responsive, and durable machine with which nations of the emerging world can leapfrog decades of development—immediately transforming the content and quality of their children's learning.

technorati tags:technology, Negroponte, leapfrogging

Weird Al and JibJab's Love Child Creeps Me Out

Do I Creep You Out | Send To Friends | Funny Animations at JibJab

The boys from JibJab are back with a new paperdoll animation, Do I Creep You Out.

Departing from their right-on-target political musical satire genre, this collaboration with Weird Al Yankovic lampoons American Idol, Starbucks and the American tradition of stalker love.

Check out other classics--This Land, Second Term and Big Box Mart--at JibJab.com.

Saturn's Shadow

At Pop!Tech, when I asked Carolyn Porco, of NASA's Cassini Mission at the Space Science Institute, what I can do as a father to encourage my daughter to explore the sciences, she answered: "Show her the pictures!"

What she was refering to are the humbling and mysterious photos that her team is collecting of Saturn and his moons. Carolyn heads up Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS (CICLOPS) part of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

see slideshow: Saturn & Moons from the Cassini Probe

An article at Space.com reveals that Carolyn Porco was 13 years old when she experienced her first ‘cosmic connection’. She was on a rooftop in the Bronx, of all the unlikely places, peering through a friend’s telescope when she caught her first glimpse of Saturn.

Just this week, Porco sent out an excited dispatch: "Cassini has sighted on Saturn a phenomenon that has never before been seen on another planet: a wall of towering clouds that ring the eye of an immense hurricane-like vortex whirling around the planet's south pole."

I hope my daughter catches a bit of that excitement as well!

From the Cassini Mission's site, ciclops.org:

With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the Sun’s blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world.

This marvelous panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on Sept. 15, 2006. The full mosaic consists of three rows of nine wide-angle camera footprints; only a portion of the full mosaic is shown here. Color in the view was created by digitally compositing ultraviolet, infrared and clear filter images and was then adjusted to resemble natural color.

The mosaic images were acquired as the spacecraft drifted in the darkness of Saturn’s shadow for about 12 hours, allowing a multitude of unique observations of the microscopic particles that comprise Saturn’s faint rings.

Poodle... Sphinx... Milkshake, Yo!

Whew!

The election is over. We're still in Iraq, the sun still shines and my daughter still loves Polly Pockets.

So! Back to business. Monkey business, that is. Leah Silverman send us this link that makes as much sense as anything else going on in the media.

From Zap2It:

I always figured poodles were up to no good.

AdultSwim.com offers a sneak peek of this coiffed menace seen in the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie. The 90-second clip features Master Shake, Frylock and Meatwad "engaged in an epic battle that could well determine the very future of civilization."

Presumably, the "epic battle" is with the poodle since in the clip it's breathing fire and shooting laser beams from its eyes. Of course, this might be a red herring, but I'd like to think if that were the case, they'd literally be fighting off a giant herring with powers to teleport or maybe knit an afghan (the dog, not the blanket).

If, like Leah, you have a giant poodle in your life--or need to disguise your Dobberman like one--might I suggest a gander at an earlier post: A Wolf in Poodle's Clothing.