HACK YOUR OWN BOOK

There's more than one way to write a book.

Electronic Popables is from MIT's Hi-Low Tech group at the Media Lab. Here's what its creators have to say about their electrotactile creation:

"Electronic Popables is an interactive pop-up book that sparkles, sings, and moves. The book integrates traditional pop-up mechanisms with thin, flexible, paper-based electronics and the result is a book that looks and functions much like an ordinary pop-up with the added element of dynamic interactivity. Electronic Popables was built by Jie Qi, with assistance from Leah Buechley and Tshen Chew."

 

The Hi-Low Tech group sounds like an interesting place to explore boundless creativity.

"[the] group integrates high and low technological materials, processes, and cultures. Our primary aim is to engage diverse audiences in designing and building their own technologies by situating computation in new cultural and material contexts, and by developing tools that democratize engineering. We believe that the future of technology will be largely determined by end-users who will design, build, and hack their own devices, and our goal is to inspire, shape, support, and study these communities. To this end, we explore the intersection of computation, physical materials, manufacturing processes, traditional crafts, and design."

I like the idea of democratizing engineering.

Wordless Wednesday: Mom Sees All

That's all I'm saying, "Mom sees all." Happy WW!

MERMAIDS, PART 1

My recent post, Sunday Poetry: "Postscript," of Seamus Heaney's poem included the much-beloved photograph shot by Toni Frissell. A friend told me it was also the cover of the 1963 album by Bill Evans and Jim Hall called Undercurent. And here it is.

 

Well, that set me adrift and I found the photo was also the album cover for the 1988 Tears in Rain by This Ascension.

And for Osvaldo Golijov's Oceana.

And for The Beauvilles Whispering Sin.

But wait. The image was also colorized and used as a cover for the Kindle version of the novel Tethered by Amy MacKinnon.

I imagine one of the reasons this photograph is so popular (aside from it being gorgeous) is that it's in the public domain. So that got me started on Toni Frissell (1907-1988), whose portfolio was bequeathed to the Library of Congress upon her death. Here are a few of my favorites:

Frissell obviously liked to shoot around and even underwater. Wikipedia says she was a fashion photographer before WWII, the  official photographer of the Women's Army Corps during WWII, and the first woman on the staff of Sports Illustrated in 1953.

Her much-used image of the woman afloat just under the surface is called Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida. And there's where it was shot in 1947, the first year the springs opened as a tourist attraction, complete with underwater performances by "mermaids." The place became one of those legendary roadside attractions of mid-20th-century America. Here's one of Weeki Wachee's 1950s mermaids.

It turns out that the British band Supergrass shot a music video at Weeki Wachee Springs in 2005, which conveys a history of the place in and around the band playing to the mermaids (and proves that Hans Christian Andersen had it wrong and mermaids, though lovely underwater, can't sing).

The Mermaid (1911) by Edmund Dulac captures the vulnerability of a beached water being... something most of us can probably relate to.

"... The little mermaid swallowed the bitter, fiery draught, and it was as if a two-edged sword struck through her frail body. She swooned away, and lay there as if she were dead. When the sun rose over the sea she awoke and felt a flash of pain, but directly in front of her stood the handsome young Prince, gazing at her with his coal-black eyes. Lowering her gaze, she saw that her fish tail was gone, and that she had the loveliest pair of white legs any young maid could hope to have. But she was naked, so she clothed herself in her own long hair."

-Hans Christian Andersen

The Little Mermaid

Translated by Jean Hersholt

Which brings me back to one of my favorite painters, the Pre-Raphaelite, John William Waterhouse, and his A Mermaid (1901).

This mermaid was clever enough to keep both her tail and her tongue.

St. Eve Kids Pink Cozy Giveaway

Just in time for Valentine's Day! What's the color that you think of when you hear Valentine's Day and robes? Well I hope it was pink since that's just what I'm giving away to one lucky reader. With all these snowstorms I think some of you could really use this, I know it has been taking turns around my house.

The St.Eve's (pink) cozy is "super soft" and feels really comfortable, not to mention

A Morning at Wonderlab

A few weeks ago we went down to Indiana in the hopes to get some advertisments, real estate ads, etc for our future home out there. I like to get a feel for an area I want to live in so it was a must. How many of you have moved and hated the place once you got there? Now how many of you, if you had went out there and visited surrounding towns may have moved to one of them and loved your stay?

UNDER BERMUDA

A serene microjourney into the deep, courtesy of Nat Geo's YouTube channel.

IFST Snowball Throwing Giveaway

Yes, I know it is cold outside and snow is everywhere so this is actually the perfect time to announce a contest that deals with snowball throwing. I mean who doesn't want to toss a few snowballs right? I think it should be mandatory to toss a few snowballs every time the snow falls. I'll never forget our first year here and the expressions of each children. Now how could I ever say I hate the