More reasons why Powerpoint rocks out.
This reminds me a little of that old nerd parlor game where you take a famous speech and use Word’s Autosummarize feature to generate these awesomely surreal fifty word 0r less summaries — perhaps the most entertaining example of which is the Bill of Rights.
Other awesome ones include The Ten Commandments and Beowulf.
Art from business applications = pretty awesome.
Came upon this post recently that does a textual analysis of keynotes given by Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell, comparing them point for point with (kinda arbitrary but still interesting) measurements of the hard words, lexical density, and Gunning Fog indices. It also comes with a cool lil’ tag cloud analysis.
What’s interesting is that the calculations seem to square pretty well with people’s general perception of the three. Jobs speaks in short, simple sentences that usually feature lots of superlative sales adjectives, like “cool,” “awesome,” “amazing,” and “unbelievable.”
Gates speaks with almost twice as many words per sentence as Jobs. He uses the words “terabyte,” “hardware,” and “server” enough times that they show up on his tag cloud. (They don’t for Jobs)
And, best of all you can do it for your own bodies of text. Tagline generator here and here, and text statistics calculator here.
For instance, Lucy Caldwell’s “Rushing to Rape” vs. the Sartre’s Existentialism is Humanism, after the jump
Tesla Coils make noise when they are on and generally at a frequency that humans can’t hear however with a little geekery (read: voodoo electronics) tesla coils can be made to emit modulated tones and with enough work music .
Here is the first video I found which has a great jam and the some recognizable themes.
Notice the neon lights at the bottom which are powered by the coil itself.
The themes seem to break off here and one group from Austin came out with some specific performances of Super Mario as a duet and Escape from New York!
There is a lot involved here since the actual frequency emitted is well beyond human hearing capabilities. But by modulating the the power state of the tesla coil they can make it emit tones which humans can hear. A really really in depth explanation was recorded by the Geek Group.
Just saw this on Wikipedia, using the lifetimes of various notable indie bands as a means of tracing development of the genre from Velvet Underground protopunk into some of the various genres of indie and noise that we see today. PRETTY COOL.
I think the only thing they’re missing is placing Baroque Pop and the New Weird America subgenre threads into the cosmology.
Sam recently brought this to my attention. Educational AND awesome. You get to play a dirty politician denying people their voting rights by redrawing district lines. What could be better???
this sticker used to be really funny (especially given its location) however now one could presumably place it on every phone in America. Go AT&T!
