Eternal Sunset

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of my favorite movies. With that in mind, I offer you Eternal Sunsets. This site shows you the sunset from a bunch of different locations, wherever the sun happens to be setting at the time that you happen to check the site.
Its real pretty.

Batman and Punishment

In case you haven't gotten around to reading Crime and Punishment yet, here's a shorter, more Batman friendly version. Because who doesn't like Batman? Or Dostoyevsky?

Bird's-Eye View

I found this animal planet video that shows a real "bird's-eye view" of what it is like to fly. I thought that this was particularly interesting because it seems like one of the closest things that we can get to virtual reality these days, and it is just cool video in general. It beats those mini cams that they put on the front of Nascar drivers' helmets, anyway.

News of Note

CNN is entering Second Life, to report on the news of import there and find out what matters to the residents.

"The thing we most hope to gain by having a CNN presence in Second Life is to learn about virtual worlds and understand what news is most interesting and valuable to their residents," said Susan Grant, executive vice president of CNN News Services.

When Second Life residents observe an in-world event they deem newsworthy, they can take snapshots, shoot video, or write a report about the event and submit to CNN.

You can read the rest of the article here.

I wonder if their news is going to be full of murders, robberies, and traffic reports like the news here is.

Da Vinci in My Underwear

A note I put on a class discussion board, that I am posting here for the benefit of those not in my class. Because I know you are oh-so-interested...

Talk about breaking down the boundaries between visual and digital space. Now I can finally view the great works of Da Vinci, in detail, while I'm sitting at home in my underwear eating chocolate ice cream. The link I've posted here shows how, "thanks to yet another happy by-product of the Internet age, Leonardo Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" is available as a special digital image that lets you get (virtually) closer to its surface than you ever could in real life." (Real life in this instance being a church in Milan where reservations sell out months in advance.)
http://www.haltadefinizione.com/en/

The detail here is incredible. I wonder how this trend towards rendering will break down the boundaries between face-to-face images and those virtual ones; will we begin to devalue the real in favor of the virtual? Mitchell claims that pictures want to be looked at, and nothing at all. I think that some pictures, namely, ones hanging in an art gallery famous around the world, want to be looked at in person or not at all. We claim a badge of honor when we have seen The Last Supper "in real life," and then we take a picture with our Kodak digital camera to prove that we were there. Well how does this new rendering shape our beliefs about art? I propose that trends such as this will continue to de-idologize "high" art and make it more accessible to the "common" man (or woman). Yet will this change the art world? Will we no longer revere certain pieces because they have moved from the unattainable to the everyday? Can Da Vinci ever really be "everyday"?