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The Wisdom Of Butchery

“If you pursue, single-mindidly, and perfectly the motive for creating useful, utilitarian cuts, you will stumble upon the beauty.  And similarly if you cut it to be as beautiful as possible, you will stumble into utility. They can’t be separated.”

This clip is a bit long, but a great look at butchering a side of pork.  

On The Anatomy Of Thrift: Side Butchery from farmrun on Vimeo.

Visit Farmrun for more videos on butchery, farming, and design.  

(Thanks Cole!) 

The Snowman Revisited

One of my favorite Christmas films growing up was the Snowman.  

It is a beautifully animated film that is particularly awesome because it has no words (save this song) and an intro narrated by David Bowie. Here’s a clip with the song “Walking In The Air” by Peter Auty.  

Randomly, I came across this clip today. 

It is actually a remote control airplane some guy made to look like a lawnmower (you can see more here) - but the song gives it a ton of drama and made me very nostalgic.

As a fun experiment, watch the same video set to “Cotton Eye Joe”.  

Swarming Robots, Everywhere

I have started to see many scientists and artists experimenting with autonomous flying robots.  These robots are programmed to know where other robots are and maneuver in pre-programmed patterns as to not hit each other. 

I found this clip on NPR.

I love this technology and can’t help but see it as an extension of the amazing particle simulations VFX artists and video game makers have created over the past 10 years or so.  There are many more clips out there - it’s fun to think that technology created for entertainment can then lead to real world applications…

We’ve got a few technologies we’ve been trying to explore at work…maybe one of them will turn into flying robots.  

Christmas 2011 Bounty

I was very lucky this year and got to open Christmas presents on four separate occasions. Among the rad things I received were a number of books, which will now be added to my library.  

They say you aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover - or title, I suppose - but this one wins on both accounts.  I had never heard of Otto Neurath, but he is a philosopher and scientist who created the concept of isotypes and spread them around the world. Road signs are the easiest example of his contributions

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