The Joy of Books: A Stop-Motion Rainbow Intervention

If you, like me, are a lover of books, you’ll find yourself enamored with this husband-and-wife duo’s imaginative stop-motion reconfiguration of the bookshelves in Toronto’s Type bookstore — the best thing since Spike Jonze’s stop-motion love story for book lovers.

Some of my favorite books make cameos in the film — French illustrator Blexbolex’s People, the vibrant PANTONE: The Twentieth Century in Color, Christoph Niemann’s relentlessly delightful I LEGO N.Y., Brooke Gladstone’s The Influencing Machine, a graphic novel guide to the media, and 1493, the untold story of how Columbus changed the world.

Last July, the duo warmed up by giving their home bookcase the stop-motion rainbow treatment:

(One thing that’s always drawn me to stop-motion as a storytelling medium, particularly such labor-intensive executions, is the peculiar, paradoxical way in which it bends our relationship with time, at once compressing its scale and making its passage all the more palpable.)

Where to next? Try some inspired bookshelf designs, or the bookcases of famous authors.

Thanks, Alex

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Network: The Secret Life of Your Personal Data, Animated

Disclosing 736 daily pieces of self, or what we talk about when we talk about privacy.

We’ve already explored the physical underbelly of the Internet, but what happens to the actual data that it digests? 28,000 MMS messages — multimedia pieces of communication like photos, videos, and voice communication — are sent into the world every second, and cell phone companies record much of the metadata that travels with them, like location, identity of the receiver, amount of data transferred, and the cost of the transmission. The average user has 736 pieces of this personal data collected every day, and different service providers retain this information for anywhere between 12 and 60 months. Network is a remarkably designed piece of motion graphics by graphic design student Michael Rigley exploring the secret life of our MMS data and the tradeoffs we inadvertently face as we choose convenience of communication over privacy and control of personal data.

…a third party, owning nearly four years of your life.”

Further reading: 7 essential books on the future of information and the Internet.

via Quipsologies

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Mathemagician Vi Hart Explains Spirals and Fibonacci Numbers in Doodles and Vegetables

What snuggled-up slug cats have to do with the math of cosmic wonder and simple beginnings.

You may recall mathemagician Vi Hart from her delightful stop-motion explanation of the Victorian novella Flatland on a Möbius strip and her ingenious illustrated unpacking of the science of sound, frequency, and pitch. Her latest doodletastic gem explores the mathematics of spirals and Fibonacci numbers through pine cones, cauliflower, pineapples, artichokes, and daisies.

It seems pretty cosmic and wondrous, but the cool thing about the Fibonacci series and spiral is not that it’s this big, complicated, mystical, magical supermath thing beyond the comprehension of our puny human minds that shows up mysteriously everywhere. We’ll find that these numbers aren’t weird at all — in fact, it would be weird if they weren’t there. The cool thing about it is that these incredibly intricate patterns can result from utterly simple beginnings.”

This is the first installment in Hart’s trilogy on the subject — keep an eye out for the two forthcoming parts.

For more on Fibonacci numbers, meet the man after whom they were named, a young Medieval mathematician who changed the very fabric of our lives — from our calendar to our business to the evolution of technology — when he wrote Liber Abbaci, Latin for Book of Calculation, in 1202. His story is one of the best science books of 2011 — riveting, important, and unmissable.

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