As i am in the iLab these days i am confronted with all kinds of visualization techniques and also applications. I just stumbled upon this nice vis video by Clemens Kogler covering the biggies of all questions: why, how, and what? It has been inspired by Jessica Hagy’s blog. Very cool.

Will the bees leave us alone on this planet? The recent phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder suggests that bees are not necessarily here to stay. While the definite cause for the CCD has not been found exzessive employment of pesticides and genetically modified crops are counted as some possible causes.

Albert Einstein once said: “If honey bees become extinct, human society will follow in four years.” Apart from that sweet honey all those busy bees produce, they are essential for a lot of food we eat, as they undertake the job of pollination.

via Ente

I am already three weeks here in Calgary with the Ente and we have been to a concert in an alternative music pub, an independent short film festival, a ralley promoting Canada’s commitment to Kyoto, a self-organized cafe and book store … There are several ways to get to know what is happening in the city. This is a quick run down of a few approaches towards pastime fulfillment, which can be applied to any city.

Peers

At first, there are your immediate contemporaries in the contexts where you’re living and working. In our case, this constitutes the friendly iLab and Ente’s flatmates. This way you usually also have a crowd of potential people accompanying you to a place/event.

Local press/media

Then you can consult local news papers covering cultural events. Here in Calgary the most authoritative ones are FFW (standing for fast forward, be aware bad website) and BeatRoute. Furthermore there are those poster walls in special areas (e.g. Kensington and 17th Avenue) advertising concerts, theater plays, movie screenings and much more.

The interwebs

And of course you can also consult the Internet near you. There are several Web sites covering regular meetings (Meetup) and all sorts of events (Upcoming, Eventful). All these sites offer an RSS feed and an iCal link to subscribe future events either using a feed reader or a calendar application. Of course, the ideal way would be a decentralized* approach. Here comes the microformat hCalendar into play, which can than be accessed by a search engine (of your choice some day).

Got any other options, dear reader? Please add them as a comment.

* Did i mention that decentralization really rocks? Well, i think i did.

In the time of fully 3d animated movies i think stop motion videos constitute a very distinctively charming alternative. It’s mind boggling what people do with thousands of photo stills stringed together to stop motion goodness. Regardless if they do it with drawings, clay figures, or with photos from the ‘real world’. Some of these you probably already know. Here is a quick write down of those who kept me from doing more important things the last days.

Graphical and drawn

• Minilogue/hitchhikers choice
• Post-It
• NO Boundaries

‘Real world’

• Tony vs. Paul
• The Last Laugh
• My Animated World
• antihero699

Reenacting vintage computer games

• Retro Games in Stop Motion
• Using teelights
• Space Invaders crowd

Clay and other material

• Bathroom Bob
• Eyeheadman and the Self-Portrait
• Eigendynamik
• My Chair
• Retro Games in Stop Motion

Not to mention the countless Wallace & Gromit clips on YouTube…

I just stumbled upon this song again by the Argentine/US-american singer Kevin Johansen:

There’s also a live recording of a concert in Madrid on YouTube.

The song is about a guy who falls in love with a girl that is both beautiful and intellectual. When he asks her to dance, she prefers to talk about Jung, Freud and Lacan. Nice melody and rhythm. It reminds me of Santiago de Chile where i heard it occasionally on the radio. Sigh..

Im Blogspiel vom 17.2.07 (im MP3 ab 17:35) wird gefragt, warum viele grosze deutsche NGOs sich mit Blogs, Podcasts und Wikis noch ein wenig schwertun. Besonders interessant fand ich die Feststellung, dass Greenpeace, Amnesty, Attac & Co. schon so professionelle PR machen, die vielleicht mit den unkonventionellen Methoden des Web 2.0 nicht so kompatibel ist. Interessant.

In a conversation with the Ente and a fellow student of her i said that libraries are actually kind of cool in many aspects. They are all about egalitarian access to information which is indeed very cool. Furthermore, now with the Internet and everything libraries undergo actually a huge transformation. Apart from going into this now any further i’d like to point to this neat merchandise shirt for the web comic Questionable Content. Even though it doesn’t reflect my emotional relation towards librarians, i do like it a lot.