calling-card or oh snap

Assistant editor Rebecca O’Connell of the fabulously fascinating Mental Floss invites up to check out the printing and developing services of a company called Ubersnap, who will not only expertly transform one’s images to animations, they will go one further and create pseudo-holographic prints that leap out of their frames. This would be a pretty keen thing to experiment with—and not just for one’s candid bursts of photographs but for other applications, like business cards and other promotional materials, as well.  Mental Floss has further details, so give it a try.

tatort oder der kommissar’s in town

Though truthfully I cannot say I consider myself a dedicated fan of the series—though I usually have it on in the background and make it a point to gyrate to the funky opening soundtrack—I think that I must give it another go after reading Dangerous Minds’ appreciation of Tatort, a crime-scene investigatory franchise that has regular parallel plot-lines in a dozen different cities within the German Sprachraum. The series has aired for four decades presently and its thousandth instalment is coming up soon. The tribute highlights some of the best episodes and offers a lucid explanation to the nonpareil format to outside audiences—however much we might already fancy ourselves forensics experts thanks to CSI and Law & Order. I have caught glimpses of familiar sights in the show’s extensive venues, especially Leipzig, beforehand—and although a recent chapter was filmed between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden, I was a little let down that Wiesbaden’s screen-presence was severely limited and confined to an underground carpark—though I could be reasonably certain I recognised it.

and the stars look very different today

The ever-discerning Kottke gives us a nice primer on the first confirmed, cautious measurement of gravitational waves, ripples echoing out across the Universe, only approaching a vanishingly small but just detectable undulation from what would seem to be the most violently explosive of events—the dangerous waltz and collision of a black hole and its dance partner.
This kind of carnage of the dance-floor, after indirect sightings and a needful component of the Theory of General Relativity was first proffered a century ago (there’s a nice vintage newspaper clipping at the link above) that although some measure of confidence was withheld and no one knew whether we might have to return to the drawing-board, produced an explosion so powerful as to be felt across space and time by a pair of super-sensitive seismographs. One possible inference of this space-quake is the existence of a heretofore hypothetical massless particle called provisionally the graviton. The particle responsible for imparting mass is thought to have none itself because gravity appears to have an infinite range, and objects tug on each other no matter how far apart.  What do gravitational waves mean to you?  The Universe is bumping us apart and pushing us together with these wave fronts all the time but we cannot experience them as our frame of reference is compressed and expanded to an equal degree.

olympic-class

Messy Nessy Chic furnishes us with an update on the anticipated maiden voyage of the Titanic II in 2018, a meticulous replica of the original announced by an ambitious Australian mining tycoon first back in 2012, on the centenary of the cruise-liner’s tragic sinking. The project has suffered some setbacks, and one does have to wonder about the wisdom or folly of tempting fate and declaiming another unsinkable behemoth, but the berthing and christening are being planned and the attention to detail in below deck is absolutely astounding. Please sure to visit the link for a large gallery of images of the new cabins, dining halls, gymnasia and grand reception area in comparison to the original historic photographs.