Humphrelia

This week I’ve uncovered a new genre of movies posted to YouTube: speed painting. Skilled artists (at least the few I watched were skilled) record themselves painting something from scratch using Photoshop and then speed it up. The result is a hyper-speed movie that shows how the artist creates a painting, from beginning to end, in only three minutes (give or take).

I discovered these thanks to my friend Jason. On his blog, he referenced and linked to an artist’s blog. His post was about the “Steampunk Star Wars” paintings that this guy had done. I was impressed and checked out some other stuff on this artist’s blog. I then uncovered a link to a movie he had recorded of himself speed-painting:

From there you can navigate to all sorts of other speed-painting movies, many of which are quite impressive. I liked this one:

I was a big fan of the Halo video game and found that the background music to this one took me back a few years…

On a completely different and unrelated vein, my co-worker John Cooper has returned from several months in Ireland. Today he informed me about the New York Times recent misadventure in scientific journalism. It seems that they printed a rather conspicuous typo. When discussing the Large Hadron Collider, they accidentally printed Large Hardon Collider. If you google the latter you’ll likely find the same juvenile websites, making fun of the incident with a flurry of immature innuendos and inappropriate diagrams of how this machine might work. Unfortunately, I could not find any legitimate report of the mistake online (though, admittedly, I spent very little time trying…). Interestingly enough, the subject of the New York Times article was about the safety of the project and the slight possibility that it could create all sorts of blow-your-mind phenomenon capable of destroying our planet – or worse. My friend Jason has even written on his blog with some of the very same concerns – though he spelled it properly, “Hadron”, instead of the more amusing variation “Hard-on”…

Yet another unrelated subject: I hooked up my only remaining tape deck (as in cassette tapes, from yesteryear) to my computer to move some recorded music into digital form. The music consists of original compositions by yours truly, recorded to tape through various means. Some tracks were recorded using a nice four-track mixer that belonged to my neighbor and friend Keith Groover, others using my current tape deck and an inexpensive microphone, and still others that were recorded using a cheap, crummy handheld voice recorder. The quality of the recordings is as varied as the means by which they came to be on tape. Once I clean them up a little (probably not much since Audacity’s noice removal plug-in doesn’t seem to be that great) I’ll post the better ones here.