Some people know a Rube Goldberg by the game Mousetrap but the idea is how can you take a simple action like turning on a lamp or closing a door and make it the most complicated elaborate and complex action posible where you still only do one human action and momentum takes care of the rest. Countless diagrams and art pieces have been made with that idea or goal in mind but what if you took it into the 21st century and made nothing touch from start to finish but used magents, RFID & fans to get the job done. Then you would have this:

Nearness from timo on Vimeo.

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It is unknown when exactly the hack was added but on Monday 4/27 it was discovered that entering the Konami cheat code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, enter) at the official ESPN Web site made glittery pink unicorns with rainbow manes and tails pop up all over the site. And more clicks led to more unicorns.

In addition to this visitors also got their headlines in hot pink and the Comic Sans font (every designers fav font).

We at Bad at Sports want to officially deny any rummer that Duncan MacKenzie was behind this in any way whatsoever. Yes we may be horrible at everything ESPN reports on and yes we all love some glitter loaded unicorns but that by no means implicates Mr. MacKenzie in this act. As for the mountain of MySQL & Javascript training books that were found at his residence after tracing an IP address to his billing address we have been informed to say “No Comment” and hope this suffices.

The hack has since been removed but Cnet caught a screenshot of it before the takedown.

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Yes it’s an official LG video, and yes it is a joke/viral campaign but imagine an engineers meeting where they would try to quantify “cuteness”.

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Portal – Still Alive typography from Trickster on VimeoTake one of the most originally passive aggressively humorous songs ever written for pop culture let alone video games and the set it to contemporary typography arrangements and you get something truly interesting.

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From the website of the artist Ranjit Bhatnagar:

“Simple automatic instruments are constructed from local materials and objects on site. The system learns the sounds it can make by trying out its instruments, and then uses its range of sounds to try to reproduce the rhythmic and melodic qualities of sounds such as the voices of visitors. It then loops and alters these imitative sequences into improvised compositions. (That last part’s not done yet, so you won’t see it in the video.)

In this example, the source audio is a bit of the soundtrack from the movie Citizen Kane, and the noisemakers are a set of found object percussion machines and an electromagnetically fretted electric guitar.”

The tech is pretty basic and the conversion to music is largely straight forward but the presentation of the idea is pretty sharp. I would love to see how well the system works with a high noise to signal ratio. Can it only make “music” in a relatively quiet room of two people talking or can it eliminate some white noise to find the melody of a large conversation.

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