Bicycle Built for 2,000

Why 2,088 people are singing Stanley Kubrick’s praises for $0.06 each.

Here’s a blast from the Brain Pickings past — remember Amazon’s Mechanical Turk? What about data artist extraordinaire Aaron Koblin? After his brilliant Sheep Market project, Koblin is back with another fantastic crowdsourced art effort.

Bicycle Built for 2,000 is an audio-visual collage of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Mechanical Turk. Each person is asked to listen to a tiny sound clip, then imitate what they heard, without any knowledge of the full context of the clip. The voices are stitched together to sing “Daisy Bell” — a symbolic choice, as this is the first example of musical speech synthesis in history. (It also happens to be the song HAL is singing at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

You can click on each note to view the waveform of its various iterations and hear how different people “sang” it.

Participants came from 71 different countries. Each singer was paid $0.06 — not quite the Broadway gig, but we find it utterly MoMA-worthy, so it more than pays in street cred.

The Sky in Motion: 7,000 NASA Images in a Mesmerizing Timelapse

The Earth, the Moon, the stars, and the joys of geekdom.

This being the International Year of Astronomy and all, we thought it would be kind of nice to swap the daily screen stare for a wide look at the open skies. Granted, we can’t really do that, but we can try to do both.

The Sky in Motion is a fascinating, hypnotic project featuring several time-lapse videos, each composed of over 7,000 images revealing the richness of our skies. Featured in NASA‘s Astronomy Picture of the Day, this video blends the romantic obsession over the Moon, the Sun and the stars with the scientific awe of meteors, satellites, and crepuscular rays — all framed by the wonder of Earth’s own rotation. 

Seems like NASA has come a long way from those laughable times we shall not speak of again.

Thanks, @guykawasaki.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Geek Wednesdays: The Ephemeral Web

A modern time machine for data and what we can learn about the web from Victorian toys.

With the constant proliferation of data and its spread across the social web, we’re closer than we think to what Kevin Kelly has dubbed the One Machine. The final leap in information systems lies not in accumulating more and more data, but it in making sense of the information that does exist — which, of course, is increasingly hard the more of it there is out there.

That’s why we’re digging Zoetrope, a breakthrough development by four University of Washington students in partnership with Adobe Systems. It’s a revolutionary visualization system that allows interaction with the evolution of data as it changes across the ephemeral web — a set of operations that analyze content stream and extract temporal data.

And when you think about it, that’s pretty damn novel — after all, we’re used to looking at web pages that are nothing but static snapshots that stay a certain way for a given period of time, then update into another static snapshot.

Zoetrope lets you create a “lens” — a dynamic filter that tracks something you’re interested in as it fluctuates over time.

You can set up a lens for a specific topic, bind two lenses together to explore the correlation between two topics, anchor a lens to a specific portion of a web page and track how it changes over time, or even create a lens for the price point of that shiny new gadget you’ve been dying to get your hands on so you can pick the best time to buy it.

Zoetrope is also brilliantly extensible and data extracted by it is usable in many other information services, like the wonderful Swivel (which we’ve featured before) and IBM’s Many Eyes — systems whose forte lies in representing data in slick ways, but not necessarily in tracking the information in the first place, which is where Zoetrope steps in.

The system’s name is an allusion to the Victorian zoetrope device — a cylinder that creates the illusion of action by spinning static images in rapid succession.

Ironic, since the web is actually the complete opposite — action taking place faster than we can process, forcing us to artificially create static safe spots so we can keep up.

No word yet on when we’re to expect Zoetrope in public beta, but something tells us this one won’t have trouble on the VC circuits.