"We want to create works of joy and beauty."

Jeanne-Claude, the collaborator with Christo on their environmental art projects for the past 51 years, died last week.

Visit their website for further information about their work.

Also, the VRC holds a number of videos about the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Images of their work can be found at AAEL VRC Images and through ARTstor.

Quote from interview with Jeanne-Claude and Christo, 2002. Image from their website.

Dynamic Tower, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

"Dr. David Fisher's Dynamic Tower is the first building in motion that will change its shape and add a fourth dimension to architecture: Time. The shape will be determined by each floor's direction of rotation, speed, acceleration and the timing; with timing meaning how each floor rotates compared to the other. The rotation speed will be between 60 minutes and 24 hours for one revolution."

At Font Capture you can create a font from your very own handwriting. There's no software to download and install, all you need is a printer and a scanner. Simply fill in the font template, scan and upload it to the website, and download your completed font. The fonts you create using Font Capture can be used on both Windows and Mac computers.

Google Image Labeler is a game in which you get an online partner who labels/tags the image along with you and both of you get points, depending on the specific labels you provide. The idea is that if two people come up with the same label, it is probably a good one and will make Google’s image search better.

"Each user who wants to participate will be paired randomly with a partner who's currently online and also using Google Image Labeler. Over a 90-second period, both participants will be shown the same set of images and asked to label each image based on what they see. They'll also be shown words that can't be used as labels. Both participants can add as many labels as they want until one of them matches a partner's label. After there's a match, they'll see a new image and continue the cycle, until time runs out. Contributors will also see points they've earned throughout the session."

via elliottback.com

You can enter your bibliographic records by hand, but you can also have Zotero extract them directly from online. It works with most library OPACs, with Google Scholar, and with some of the major article databases like ProQuest and JSTOR.

Zotero is useful to anyone who uses the Internet for research and needs a simple way to organize references. By emphasizing accurate citations and automating the process, Zotero helps students learn and adopt proper practices.

via EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative

Can you guess what this is?

via Derivative Image

Another excellent site with primary source material digitized for world use:

"The World Digital Library is a cooperative project of the Library of Congress, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and partner libraries, archives, and educational and cultural institutions from the United States and around the world. The project brings together on a single website rare and unique documents – books, journals, manuscripts, maps, prints and photographs, films, and sound recordings – that tell the story of the world’s cultures. The site is intended for general users, students, teachers, and scholars."

The home page presents a nifty multi-lingual search interface including a world map and a timeline.

Image of the Emir of Bukhara, 1911, by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Click here to see more photos by Prokudin-Gorskii in the World Digital Library.

Designer Paul Burgess created ColorSuckr, a color app that extracts the 12 most common colors from any images and displays each color on a new page with the HEX, RGB and web safe color. You can choose from one of the photos on the main page, search Flickr, or input the URL of any webpage to find source material.

Features:

* Easily extract colors from photos and create color schemes.
* View results in XML, RSS and JSON formats.
* Download schemes as Adobe .ASE swatch file.
* Firefox addon that makes color extraction even easier provided.
* Provides a permanent link to the color scheme.
* Option to switch between the dark/light backgrounds.
* Free, no sign up required.

via download squad

This map shows where people watch the most films (not including short films) at commercial screenings. Of the 7.6 billion films watched at cinemas, almost 3 billion viewings were recorded in one year in India.

Other "images of the day" can be found at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Wikimedia Commons, National Geographic, and The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

The following is NASA's description of the image illustrated above:

"In a break from its usual task of searching for distant cosmic explosions, NASA's Swift satellite acquired the highest-resolution view of a neighboring spiral galaxy ever attained in the ultraviolet. The galaxy, known as M31 in the constellation Andromeda, is the largest and closest spiral galaxy to our own. This mosaic of M31 merges 330 individual images taken by Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope. The image shows a region 200,000 light-years wide and 100,000 light-years high (100 arcminutes by 50 arcminutes)."

Image Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler (GSFC) and Erin Grand (UMCP)

Last August at SIGGRAPH, an international conference on computer graphics, a group presented an innovative system designed to analyze images of the sky. The SkyFinder (link opens .pdf file) system automatically extracts a set of sky attributes—such as category, layout, richness, horizon, or sun position—from each image in a collection. This enables users to search the collection interactively at the semantic level using text queries, like “a landscape at sunset with the sun at the bottom left”.

via Technology Review

Curious, by Maria Morrell, Ph.D. Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cell and Developmental Biology (Click on the image for a description of the image on the BioArtography site)