Common Paradox Tech Blog

These are not the biggerest of Lego spaceships nor an impossible balancing act. It’s just Lego Star Wars perfectly photographed using a very clever, and deceitfully simple technique. This is how the expert Finnish photographer Avanaut did it:

In his own words:

There’s been some questions about how I do the snowshots. I’ve given some verbal information about the technique, but I guess, a photograph about my setup is needed. So, I made the photos above and below (in the gallery) just for the occasion.

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The setup is simple really: All I use is an old transparent CD storage box, some water and my trusty old A4 lightbox for lighting. For the bottom of the box I have a piece of gray Lego baseplate cut in form and hotglued on a piece of acrylic sheet to give it some weight. Legos float because of all the air trapped inside individual pieces.

Anything I want to shoot is then easily mounted on the baseplate and inserted inside the CD box.

Photographing “snow” in this scale is difficult, and to amp up the challenge I wanted it to fly around. The answer was not to use faster shutterspeed but to slow the snow down.

I had a wacky idea to submerge everything in water, it slows down everything that moves. The water also causes light to reflect from solid surfaces in a way that sometimes helps hiding the miniature scale. This is an old concept I’ve been toying with for ages. For the snow I use ground plaster of Paris—reacted, not unused gypsum powder! It is a passive material that doesn’t stick to anything.

Lighting is done with the lightbox freehand as you can see from the photo below.

I shoot a lot of frames because the “snow” is impossible to control exactly. And then some Photoshopping is in order, but not always, sometimes none is needed.

Simply amazing. Check the rest of his awesome work in his Flickr page. [Avanaut in Flickr and Lego on Hoth]

The short gloves are off. Earlier today, both Google and Facebook got into the URL shortening game with goo.gl and fb.me. Google’s move in particular is a direct challenge to bit.ly, the rising independent standard among link shortening services. Bit.ly’s response is in effect to ask publishers and consumers who they trust with all their data: Google or the rest of the Web?

To that effect, it is rolling out a new service called bit.ly Pro, which allows Web publishers to bit.ly to send out short links with their own branded (short) domain names such as nyti.ms, 4sq.com, mee.bo, or tcrn.ch. Publishers in the beta include AOL, Bing, foursquare, Hot Potato, the Huffington Post, Meebo, MSN, the New York Times, the Onion, TechCrunch, and the Wall Street Journal. What bit.ly is offering these publishers (us included) is a way to use a branded, trusted short URL which is powered by bit.ly. Publishers also get an analytics dashboard which shows realtime stats like the total number of clicks, and their distribution by geography and referring sites. Pro accounts is where all the money is, although bit.ly is not yet charging.

Sometimes, famous people from the West go to Japan to act in weird, surreal ads. It’s not a big secret; after all, everyone has seen this video, and there’s a whole movie that revolves around the phenomenon.

Still, every time it happens, we’re in awe. Check out the ad (below), featuring Quentin Tarantino performing kung-fu to Star Wars Romeo & Juliet music, a real dog, a plastic dog-speaker and an angry women yelling at the telephone.

What’s happening here? What is Tarantino trying to do? What, exactly, are they selling? It’s all mostly a mystery, but it sure makes for one funny viral video, and that’s enough for us.

Tags: crazy Japanese ads, Quentin Tarantino

Every single day we oooh and aahhh over the latest design concepts, but right now, let’s focus on one of the minds behind such designs and smile in awe of her motivations and inspirations. Meet MIT designer, Neri Oxman.

Oxman went through medical school, but abandoned that career path for a “mishmash of design, architecture, art, and computer programming.”

She works out of MIT’s media lab and strives to bring about her vision of the future which consists of all objects living, breathing, and adapting as we interact with them. She imagines organic architecture designs, nanotube walls which change size, chairs that change shape as you sit, DNA-encoded clothing that grows with you. She explains that studying how human bones adjust, getting thicker when a woman is pregnant or thinner when individuals are in outer space, inspired that vision of hers.

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As with many other designs that we see, Oxman’s are stunning in their intricate plays with textures and materials, but to me the dreamy vision that pushes her to create them adds so much more to the way I view her works. I expect them to draw breath. Maybe we should start taking closer looks at the minds behind the eye-candy we so enjoy. Are there any objects, maybe even gadgets, that truly made you want to know how they were inspired? [Materialecology Blog via Materialecology via Esquire]

Think about your workspace and imagine if your furniture or your desk or cubicle could automatically reconfigure for different applications with a simple wave of the hand. Now check out the reality of Clemson’s Animated Work Environment (AWE).

Essentially, AWE is a programmable wall with varied displays that can switch between six configurations just by activating a proximity sensor. For example, when the wall is hanging overhead like a ceiling, the act of standing up triggers the sensor and instructs the wall to move out of the way. The project is in it’s infancy, but it is easy to see how future applications could lead to a whole range of dynamic, multi-functional furniture that automatically reacts to its environment. [AWE Project via IEEE Spectrum via BotJunkie]

Earlier this month TC writer MG Siegler wrote a post called The Speed of Share, where he noted that sharing content to Facebook wasn’t as good an experience as it was for many of the various Twitter services like Tweetmeme. Today, that balance changes a bit: Facebook has just launched a new version of Facebook Share, which includes such niceties as a live counter that tells you how many times an item has been shared. We’ve just rolled it out to TechCrunch as well. Try it out above!

Along with the improved look of the Share Button, Facebook Share now offers publishers detailed analytics, allowing you to see how many times a link has been shared, as well as actions that occur on Facebook itself, like the number of comments and Likes it’s received as well as the number of times people have clicked on the link back to your site.

For the last sixteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds I’ve been watching this video in absolute awe. It’s the story of John Kanzius who designed, built, and tested a machine (on himself), all in hopes of curing his leukemia.

Good God, I’m happy that this story is finally coming out, but it’s so heart wrenching to see Kanzius’ struggle, desperation, and utter drive to find a way to zap leukemia despite doctors’ cautions to the very end. [CBS via Make]

“I won’t be happy til the whole world hates me.” Not my words, for once, but those of Seth MacFarlane on stage last year at Carnegie Hall. The audience laughed, as well they might (“he was on the Internet and I’m in college”) , on the assumption that their hero was joking. And yet, and yet…

On November 8th at 8:30pm, viewers of Fox in the US will watch in horror as the network gives over thirty whole minutes of airtime to a Windows 7-sponsored episode of Family Guy.

Just take a moment to let the horror of that fact settle in your brain. Multi-millionaire Seth MacFarlane – who, by the way, uses a Mac – has decided to sell the soul of his flagship show to Redmond. For money.

With over 150 applications on Boxee we’ve seen a lot of creative apps, both visually and functionally, but today’s addition of Cliqset to Boxee has me in awe of how people are using Boxee’s platform.   Cliqset is a new startup focused on letting you share, discuss, and discover your life online.  It ties together 70 [...]

Toe, The writes “Gizmodo details the Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) (based on the P-791), a spyship from U.S Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command capable of hovering at 20,000 feet. Planned for deployment in Afghanistan, the ship can float for three weeks and carry well over a ton of payload, apparently surveillance equipment. The video on Gizmodo of the P-791 shows that these ships are a hybrid not only of both buoyancy and propulsive lift, but also of both awe and hilarity.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.