Scottunder

Google storytelling II

After I posted my previous item, I realized I'd left off a brilliant earlier effort by Google, using comic art to tell the story of Google Chrome, its new browser (I'm soaking in it now). The art is by Scott McCloud, who worked with and portrayed Google engineers and designers in order to deliver this very clear explanation of the technical works beneath the browser.

McCloud is more famous for his works about comics than his own stories -- Understanding Comics and Making Comics are must-read books -- but this is the prime example I know of using this medium to tell a difficult story. Comics are especially adept at this, and I'm not sure it could be done better any other way.

 

Google storytelling

These Search Stories from Google are an excellent example of storytelling without relying on clichéd elements like narration or captions. Yes, they're ads for Google, but they're a little more complex than that, with embedded ads for other companies, blogs, and services. Each one is also uplifting, aspirational, and memorable, and that's pretty hard in less than a minute just using Google results pages. (These may remind you of the brilliant Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us from a couple years ago, which certainly inspired these stories.)

The first one I saw, Parisian Love, is my favorite, but look for stories involving The National and Jack Kerouac, too.   

Here's another example of using Google to tell a story: Mr. Plimpton's Revenge: A Google Maps Essay, in Which George Plimpton Delivers My Belated and Well-Deserved Comeuppance, this time a charming incident in the life of writer and teacher Dinty W. Moore.

 

Strange Worlds of Matthew Albanese

Matthew Albanese creates and photographs tiny landscapes made of ordinary objects. The photo below uses moss, ground cover clippings, and bottle brushes for the foliage, blue canvas for the sky and a water glass patio table for the lake. (Found on Boing Boing.)

 

The Weekly Rocket

Here's a random fact I picked up from the Astronomy Picture of the Day site:

In 2009, rockets bound for space were launched from somewhere on Earth about once a week. That's pretty amazing. The schedule for 2010 is here.

In July, 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Sometime following that (maybe Apollo 12 in November), my elementary school called all classes into the cafeteria so we could watch a rocket launch on a black and white TV up on stage. I would have been in the 3rd grade.

Above is a launch picture of the Space Shuttle Atlantis lifting off to visit the International Space Station in 2001. Below is the video of that launch and the return to earth of the solid-fuel booster rockets.

Richard Barnes's Starlings

Richard Barnes is a photographer who captured the fascinating flight-flocks of European starlings. In the US, starlings are an invasive species, a bird-weed that is remarkably successful. Barnes shot this series of photos -- called Murmur -- in a suburb of Rome, where huge flocks gather each spring. 

 

I've sometimes seen smaller cloudlike formations of birds like these in the Bay Area, especially when I used to cross the Dumbarton Bridge daily. I don't know if those birds were starlings or swifts or swallows or what, but I'd practically drive off the highway watching the morphing patterns, as if they were connected to an unseen sheet and carried away by the wind.

(from the always excellent Very Short List.)

The Loudness War

Music is getting louder and it's all due to compression. In music recording, compression refers to a process of reducing the loud bits and increasing the quiet bits till everything's pretty much the same. This fools our ears into perceiving a song as sounding louder, even though its peak volume is no louder than the loudest sound on an uncompressed song. This is the reason TV commercials sound louder than the shows they interrupt -- a compressed audio track makes it seem to "jump out" of the TV.

This recent tendency is known as the Loudness War, and it's been decried by artists, producers, and engineers for years. The trend started in the '60s, as record companies sought to make their singles just a little louder than the other ones (and thus louder on the jukebox or the DJ's turntable), but the practice increased with the advent of the CD. 

Early CDs just quickly remastered vinyl albums for the new medium, and they don't sound very good. It wasn't until CDs really took off in the late '80s that the compression escalation began. This animation, found on the Wikipedia pages, shows the waveform of a single song, "Something" from The Beatles' Abbey Road, that gets increasingly louder as it's remastered and rereleased four times since 1983.

NPR recently ran an 8-min piece in which they discussed this phenomenon, and why the music industry has slowly turned up the volume. First, watch this short YouTube video, then listen to the radio piece.

The NPR website also includes this infographic poster showing increasing volume levels in specific songs over the last thirty years. (I'm sure this poster is very effective at full size, but it's difficult to read on a computer screen.)

I can't say that I hear a lot of this stuff. As much of a music fan as I am, I'm no audiophile, and the subtleties of bad engineering are often lost on me. It took me a while to realize that I was hearing digital artifacts in quiet classical music MP3s with low bitrates, but since changing to a 192 kbps bitrate I've been perfectly happy with the result. But then, I was always spending my money on used vinyl, because I didn't mind the pops and clicks so much and I could buy more albums.

Gifts!

Susan and I started our own tradition of exchanging presents on New Year's Eve, thus eschewing Those Other Holidays (at least between ourselves) and taking advantage of post-Xmas sales. Woo-hoo! So here's the books and DVDs I got and gave this year. First, what I gave:

To my nephew Brian:

The Knowledge Book: Everything You Need to Know to Get by in the 21st Century by National Geographic: a sort of illustrated world encyclopedia for the MTV generation. I was given a copy and enjoyed it well enough to buy another.

To my niece Lauren, who loves dance:

The Red Shoes: Moira Shearer in Michael Powell's amazing technicolor adaptation of a Hans Christian Anderson story. The preparations for the ballet is of the most exciting sequences I've ever watched.

Shall We Dance: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers

Singing in the Rain: Gene Kelley, Donald O'Connor

To son Ryan:

Viruses, Plagues, and History: Past, Present and Future by Michael Oldstone: looks like an updated version of the thoroughly entertaining Rats, Lice, and History, with more science to please the scientist.

To Susan:

Creature ABC by Andrew Zuckerman: gorgeous animal photos, almost no content. I want to get his Bird book as well. (He's really great -- go visit his website now.)

The Key Muscles of Yoga and The Key Poses of Yoga by Ray Long: beautifully made books, with illustrations that color-code the stretched and contracted muscles in each pose. This is like a more pleasant version of the Body Worlds exhibition.

The Little Book of Hindu Deities by Sanjay Patel: beautiful cartoon illustrations and stories, from a Pixar animator. (Reminds me of Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues -- a lot! -- but she says she'd only learned of his work later.) Check out his work at his website, especially his doodles. He has a version of the Ramayana called Ramayana: Divine Loophole coming out soon.

Hindu Altars: A Pop-up Gallery of Traditional Art and Wisdom: we also have a tradition (and now a filled shelf) of buying pop-up books.

What I got:

The Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-66) by Jules Feiffer: gosh, I love this. I realize now that as a kid I was as influenced by my mom's Feiffer books (Sick, Sick, Sick and Passionella) as by Mad magazine. Plus, he illustrated The Phantom Tollbooth, my favorite book as a kid, so I was pretty immersed in his view of the world from a young age.

Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl: I never read it; Susan used to read it to her first-graders. (I loved the movie.)

The Discworld Graphic Novels: The Colour of Magic & The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett et al.: apparently, I've been slow to dive into Pratchett's huge pile of Discworld books, so I get this strong hint I should start.

Monty Python's Flying Circus: The Complete 16-Ton Megaset: amazingly, the still have the ability to make me laugh, though not as much as when I first saw them. As John Cleese says in one of the extra features, there's no way anyone can see them fresh anymore, and forty years after they first aired what once seemed absurd and chaotic seems almost quaint.