Random Flashes of Color: Street Photos

November 06, 2009

By Joanna Burgess

Martin Sobey, a NYC based photographer and artist, spends a lot of time walking the streets trying to find the perfect spot to place his work. Whether it stays up 10 minutes or 10 months doesn't much matter; Martin's main purpose it to fill up a crack in the sidewalk, a hole in the wall or an empty space looking for purpose. Using only a point and shoot camera and light manipulation, his photos, which he then turns into both sculptures and street art in his SoHo studio, have a 1980's ethereal air about them--bright, colorful, and sparkly.

Check out more of Martin's work here.

How to Defeat This Optical Illusion: Grab it!

November 04, 2009

This week's guest blogger is John Pavlus, a science writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. You can follow him on Twitter @xjparker.

Everyone's seen this visual trick (known to nerds and academics as the Müller-Lyer illusion):

You perceive the top line as being longer than the bottom line -- even though both are exactly the same length. Ho hum.

But here's the interesting part. If you reach out to "grasp" the line -- that is, if you spread your thumb and index finger apart as if trying to pick it up by touching the tips -- your hand is not fooled. You'll likely spread your finger and thumb the same length to "grab" either line, even though you're literally seeing them as being different lengths.

Why? How can you be consciously perceiving one thing -- the illusion -- while your hand is "perceiving" another, and more accurately at that?

Using Lynx to Scrape a Weather Report

November 03, 2009

Lynx As A Simple HTML Parser

One great and often-overlooked feature of Lynx is its --dump option.

lynx --dump <url> dumps the text content of the Web page at URL, followed by a numbered list of URLs that were referenced in that page.

7 Tips and Tricks to Help Spruce Up Your Designs

November 02, 2009

By David Caputo

As a designer I get a fair number of requests from friends asking for help designing their web pages, posters, and other little pieces. For a lot of these projects I find that with a few nudges or suggestions they would probably be able to handle the job on their own and produce a passable piece of design. I have decided to compile some tips and tricks that I have often suggested to people who want to start designing for themselves. Now please note that these are general suggestions and there are a lot of philosophies on what "good design" is.

Top 10 Witches

October 29, 2009

By Joanna Burgess

Baba Yaga from the Slavik tales of yore is our top pick. She flies around on a scary broomstick (or a mortar depending on the tale) and eats small kids. Best of all she lives in a house that stands on chicken legs and walks around.

Python's SimpleHTTPServer: the World's Smallest Web Server?

October 27, 2009

When last we posted about tiny Web servers built with Ruby, Face-book friend Michael Cottingham immediately protested that Gary Robinson has blogged about a Python Web server that is in fact even smaller.

And the Python version seems to be more featureful than the Ruby version as well. For instance it is a bit more secure (and much more intuitive), in that "server root" defaults to the directory where SimpleHTTPServer was invoked. By contrast, the Ruby version blindly serves up everything in the root of the drive where it was invoked.

Revolutionary War Reenactment: The Battle of Brooklyn

October 26, 2009

By Joanna Burgess

The Battle of Brooklyn also known as the Battle of Long Island, was fought on August 27, 1776. It was the first and bloodiest battle of the Revolutionary War. The Patriots got their butts whooped pretty soundly but the rest, as they say, is history. Every year, on the anniversary of the battle, Revolutionary war re-enactors from around the country, along with members of Brooklyn's local historical societies, gather together in Green-Wood Cemetery to pay tribute to this little known but important battle.

Click on the picture for short, short video on revolutionary fashion statements.

Click on the picture for a short, short video on the Battle of Brooklyn.

Our photo gallery of the day's events.