Archive for February, 2016
T – Block re-defines time through an original quality timepiece and has a very futuristic look. It boasts a robust design that’s unlike any other watch you’ve seen. Clear, LEDs are embedded in a tough polyurethane case and seamless matching strap. When the watch is in sleep mode, the LEDS are dim, but if you want to know the time or date, just hit one of the buttons and the lights appear, revealing the time and day.
Despite the similarities to Rihanna’s new hit ‘Work’, the Fifth Harmony track ‘Work From Home’ is a very different animal all together. Check the method below.
Nielly Francoise has been prominently featured on this blog more than once, and the work continues to speak for itself. Check out a new 2016 collection.
Everyone loves exciting movie trailers before a film, and with movie previews being released onto the internet before they even hit theaters, people are watching them with a frenzied frequency. But what happens when trailers reveal TOO much about a film? Mr. Sunday Movies, (1 half of the Weekly Planet podcast, of which I am a massive fan) delves into how over revealing plot information can destroy the way people walk into a film, and furthermore, 6 disastrous examples of when a trailer has put too much on display about a film.
Check out Mr. Sunday Movies youtube channel here.
Crossover Watch is a contemporary design modeled after the game “pick up stix”. Its elegant hands, that appear to be precariously balanced, rotate around the dial. Crossover Black is a modern watch with tapered white, gray and yellow hands. The second hand is yellow, the minute hand is white and the hour hand is gray. There is also have the Crossover Steel a contemporary, yet elegant and modern watch with tapered black, gray and red hands. The second hand is red, the minute hand is white and the hour hand is black. Like the Black Crossover follow the pointed ends for the time. The Crossover Watch has thin hands that are slightly askew to the center giving this timepiece elegant stature.The sleek lines and positioning of the hands give this watch a unique modern feel that is perfect for both men and women. There is also one in brass.
The first serious look at Daredevil was released a few days ago, however, the first set of reviews for the entire season are starting pour in… Much to no one’s surprise, they seem to be exceedingly positive. That said, from the sounds of things some of the pacing issues and jarring tonal shifts that became an issue during the Man Without Fear’s first TV outing are also present – but for the most part these initial reactions are very positive.
As expected, Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle/The Punisher seems to have emerged as a highlight, with his take on the vicious vigilante being hailed as a brilliantly complex antagonist the same vein as Wilson Fisk. Another new character we haven’t seen as much of is Elektra, so fans should be very happy to hear that Elodie Yung is highly praised for her incarnation of the seductively skilled warrior in every review so far.
Marynn Illustration, (out of France) has created a stunning set of illustrations titled ‘Head Turner’. The collection features some rather impressive hair designs elegantly illustrated in pencil. Check out some words from Marynn, and the rest of the photos afterwards.
When you cross a girl the street you ask yourself for one second if you should turn back to see her face again. This was one second too late , she has passed and you only have her back , her perfume and a taste of regret.
No animal quite captures our imagination like sharks. In Journey From the Source: Episode III we visit Jupiter, Florida, to meet a shark diver who swims, cage-free, with the ocean’s top predator every day. His advice? Never turn your back on a shark.
The average beach-goer in the US is about 10 times more likely to get struck by lightning than attacked by a shark. Let that sink in for a minute.
It’s a stat that doesn’t reflect the fears of the beach-going public. In Florida, for example, where a quarter of the year is spent in thunderstorms, no one blinks an eye when lightning strikes. But if a shark is spotted in the bay, you can pretty much guarantee pandemonium.
It’s fair to say – and how much blame you want to place on Jaws is up to you – that sharks terrify us. But the animal, and its threat, are so wrapped up in mythology and fear it’s hard to separate fact from fiction. Because if sharks are the merciless man-eaters we have been told, how can someone like South Florida-based captain Bryce Rohrer swim with them every day? Without a cage. And never get bitten.
Determined to understand more about sharks – many species of which are endangered due to finning and overfishing – we headed to Jupiter, a little town two hours north of Miami, to meet Bryce and witness his shark-o-philia firsthand. Within two hours of arriving at U-Tiki Marina, where Bryce keeps his diving boat, I’ve already heard him described affectionately by a fellow captain as a ‘mad scientist’.
“I guess I just never fell for the mainstream hype on sharks, you know what I mean?” says Bryce, pulling ropes on deck ready for our dive. “Being out on the water you start seeing sharks for what they are, and it just becomes pretty natural to get in the water with them. All that fear and anxiety just kind of evaporates as soon as you see that shark.”
Bryce spends about 300 days a year on the water with sharks either in Jupiter, Florida, down on the Keys, or up in Nantucket, where he runs another charter. He’s got no desire to swap it for office life anytime soon. “I’ll definitely be involved with sharks for the rest of my life, without a doubt,” he says, revving up the boat for today’s dive. “I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m driving a boat when I’m 70. In some fashion or another, I will be involved with sharks and the ocean and conservation and bringing people out there to see sharks; whether it’s through film, whether it’s through a charter, anything to get people out to see these things and what they’re really all about.”
These baked french fries are so easy to make, and always a total hit! They’re loaded with awesome, cheesy pizza flavor and they’re healthy, too!
Roast ’em, Don’t Fry ’em – The first thing I had to do was just ditch the frying. Obvious, right?!? And totally easy! Roasting potatoes at a high heat in the oven produces a wonderful, crispy, golden-brown exterior and a fluffy interior. So much great flavor and texture without the frying!
Load ’em Up (the Right Way) – These Pizza Fries get a big wallop of flavor from antioxidant-rich spices. Yum! Tasty little antioxidants! And, dipping your fries in pizza sauce offers up even more layers of awesome pizza-y flavor, plus great lycopene from the cooked tomatoes.
One of the best ways to healthify practically anything is to start by looking for ways to add in more veggies. Colorful peppers and onions are fantastic additions, and you can add anything else you like, too – think mushrooms, tomatoes and olives. And sure, you can add some pepperoni or sausage if you’d like. Just be sure you go with reduced-fat options like turkey pepperoni, and try to focus more on the veggies than the meats!
Making the Cut – It’s really up to you how you’d like to cut your potatoes – have ’em your way, for sure! But if you start with jumbo (restaurant-sized) russets, or want to try thin shoestrings or round wafer fries … all of those things will affect your baking time slightly, so just keep an eye on your potatoes while they’re in the oven. For this recipe, we used standard-sized (not restaurant “jumbo”) russets, and cut each into 12 fries that were thin enough to offer lots of golden, crispy exterior, but thick enough (kind of like steak fries) to have satisfyingly fluffy insides, too. Here’s how we cut our potatoes:
Potato Equality – What’s most important when cutting your potatoes is ensuring that – whatever size and shape you decide on – you make all your potato pieces as similar in size and shape to each other as possible, so they all bake evenly in the oven.
Potatoes Like Their Space! – You know why potatoes are grown on big, spacious farms? Because they definitely like their real estate, especially when it comes to oven-baked taters! Another big key to Pizza Fry success (or success in roasting any veggie) is spreading your veggies out on the baking sheet. Our big 14×17″ baking sheet is at maximum capacity with about 1 1/2 pounds of potatoes, but you can see that there’s still just a little space between each french fry. That’s critical for good roasting.
If veggies are piled on top of each other or closely touching, they tend to steam more than roast, and you’ll miss out on that crispy-crunchy-golden exterior we’re going for here. If you feel like your baking sheet is too crowded or you want to make a double batch, just use two baking sheets instead of thinking you’ll be ok cruising by with only one.
Because really … would you want to skimp on this to save yourself digging out a second baking sheet:
In quite unpredictable fashion, Missy Misdemeanor Elliott, released a new song via the universally famous “Super Bowl Commercial” ad route. In a commercial with Alec Baldwin, and Dan Marino, Missy seemingly dropped her next hit. Check the commercial out below.
And if you want a seat at the ‘Pep Rally’ just check out the video below.
Everyone knows that the Super Bowl is rife with new trailers, and exciting premieres, already we’ve seen ‘The Jungle Book’ and ‘Jason Bourne’ debut trailers, but the most exciting trailer by far of a film we’ve already seen a glimpse of, was ‘Captain America: Civil War’. Filled with new looks at characters, and an ominous overtone, the ONLY thing wrong with this trailer is that there’s still no view of Spider-man. (However, I’d rather wait until the actual movie to be surprised, so I’m not too upset by it.)
The day before Beyoncé takes the stage during the Coldplay-headlined Super Bowl 50 halftime show, the singer dropped her surprise new single “Formation,” her first new song since her Beyoncé: Platinum Edition was released in November 2014. “Formation” is available to stream n beyonce.com
After a largely quiet 2015, this is Beyoncé’s second new video in as many weeks: Coldplay recently unveiled the Holi-inspired clip for their collaborative A Head Full of Dreams track “Hymn for the Weekend.”
Beyoncé was reportedly rehearsing “Formation” during the halftime show preparations leading up to Super Bowl 50. However, it remains unconfirmed whether she’ll debut the song live Sunday at Santa Clara, California’s Levi’s Stadium. Bruno Mars, another previous Super Bowl halftime show headliner, will also appear during Coldplay’s set.
The Wu Tang Clan legend stopped by Philly’s Profond Music N Art to snag some choice vinyl while in town for The FADER and Goose Island’s Analog Migration show. In December, hip-hop legend GZA headlined The FADER and Goose Island’s Analog Migration show in Philadelphia. During GZA’s stay, he stopped by Philly’s Profond Music N Art to dig deep into the store’s soul, R&B, and classic hip-hop collection. Watching him sort through the vinyl of his youth (he says he hadn’t bought a record since 1976 before now), like Al Green, Bill Withers, and Smokey Robinson, while talking about Biggie and Nas and the golden age of hip-hop is a thrill. Check out the video above to see the choice LPs that GZA snagged, including a strange Wu Tang Clan versus The Beatles mashup record.
Gibbs Farm is an unusual setting for a sculpture collection. The North Auckland property is dominated by the Kaipara Harbour, the largest harbour in the Southern hemisphere. Walking the land visitors can appreciate how each artist has come to terms in their own way with the gravitational pull that is exerted on everything as the mountains roll into hills and slide into gullies and slope down towards the wide flat expanse of the Kaipara harbour.
After nearly twenty years Gibbs Farm includes major works by Graham Bennett, Chris Booth, Daniel Buren, Bill Culbert, Neil Dawson, Marijke de Goey, Andy Goldsworthy, Ralph Hotere, Anish Kapoor, Sol LeWitt, Len Lye, Russell Moses, Peter Nicholls, Eric Orr, Tony Oursler, George Rickey, Peter Roche, Richard Serra, Kenneth Snelson, Richard Thompson, Leon van den Eijkel and Zhan Wang.
What happens when Sigga Heimis from Labland pairs up with the team at Corning Glasses GlassLab? You end up with human organs laying all around the room, but thankfully, they are made from glass not human tissue. The GlassLab is the design and production arm of the Corning Museum of Glass. Their collaboration with Sigga Heimis produced a series of human organs including kidneys, stomach, heart, lungs, eyes, intestines, the human brain, and magic. The translucent organs are amazingly details reproductions of human organs carefully blown and stitched together by the glass artisans at the GlassLab. Many pieces required the team work of 3 to 4 glass artisans working in unison to rotate, hold, and position the pieces as molten glass was added.
As promised, here is volume 2. of the Marvel Hip Hop Variant cover series. If you (somehow) missed the first collection, just click here for the full story. And to save on space, we found a new way of demonstrating the cover art. If you want to get a close look at these covers, and many more Marvel will give away a 32-page comic book that features 14 of the variant covers. Check the method.
The first time I watched the movie iRobot, I was transfixed on the concept of an injured person receiving a prosthetic that the rest of the world couldn’t detect. (Spoiler Alert: Will Smith gets his arm ripped off by a robot in a car crash, but if you haven’t seen the movie already, you probably never will, so I just saved you $4.99). The first and fundamental steps in developing a prosthesis like this is already out in the real world. Soldiers, and civilians alike can have prosthetic limbs fashioned for them, and it’s no longer necessarily considered a miracle of science. These prosthesis however are primarily for mobility only, they can’t feed the wearer any information about the surrounding environment.
Simply put before you step on something hot, you can feel it in the bottom of your feet. This is a functionality that the great folks over at Stanford are trying to bring to prosthetics, much like the skin surrounding our own limbs. Artificial skin created in a lab can “feel” similar to the way a fingertip senses pressure. The stretchy, flexible skin is made of a synthetic rubber that has been designed, to have micron-scale pyramid like structures that make it especially sensitive to pressure, sort of like mini internal mattress springs.
Stanford scientists sprinkled the pressure-sensitive rubber with carbon nanotubes— microscopic cylinders of carbon that are highly conductive to electricity — so that, when the material was touched, a series of pulses is generated from the sensor. The series of pulses is then sent to brain cells in a way that resembles how touch receptors in human skin send sensations to the brain. “We were able to create [a system] very similar to biological mechanical receptors,” said Benjamin Tee, lead author of the paper and a scientist at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore.
To test whether the skin could create electric pulses that brain cells could respond to, the scientists connected the synthetic skin to a circuit connected to a blue LED light. When the skin was touched, the sensor sent electric pulses to the LED which pulsed in response. The sensors translated that pressure pulse into an electric pulses. When the sensors in the skin sent the electrical pulse to the LED (very much like touch receptors in real-life skin sending touch-sensation signals to the brain) a blue light flashed. The higher the pressure, the faster the LED flashed.
Scientists added channelrhodopsin, a special protein that causes brain cells to react to blue light, to the mouse brain cells. The channelrhodopsin let the LED light act like receptor cells in the skin. When the light flashed it sent a signal to the brain cells that the artificial skin had been touched. The experiment showed that, when the artificial skin was touched, the brain cells would react in the same way as brains react to real skin being touched, the researchers said in the study, published Oct. 16 in the journal Science.
Using light to stimulate brain cells is a fairly recent area of study called optogenetics, in which scientists add special proteins to brain cells that let them react to light and shows scientists how different parts of the brain work. The advantage of using optogenetics over other technologies that directly stimulate neurons, such as electrodes directly attached to brain tissue, is that higher frequencies can be used, Lee said. Having a technology that can stimulate the cells at higher frequencies is important because it more accurately recreates the way that receptor cells send signals to our brains.
The testing is still in the early phases, and the skin hasn’t been tested with human neurons as of yet. Tee said to Live Science – “We actually did connect [the sensors] to a robotic hand and a computer,” adding that they were able to record the pulse spikes. However, these experiments were designed primarily to prove that the technology was able to send a signal that could be registered by the same robotics technologies used in advanced prosthetic technologies. “The natural next step would be to test [the skin] in higher primates,” Tee said. “The eventual goal is to have the skin stimulate real human brains.”
It’s been a few years since I’ve been on radio (consistently), and That Hot New Dope radio show, was the perfect place to jump back in. AllDayPlay.fm, Young Chizle, Honey Faced Bee, and myself have been anxiously awaiting season two of #HND, and today is the day.
Every Wednesday, at 3pm, use your phone or your computer to tune into www.adp.fm, and all you have to do is click ‘Listen Live’. That Hot New Dope is dedicated every week to bringing you both the hottest music from the artists you know, and the newest Hip Hop tracks from upcoming artists from the Bay. Click ANY of the photos to take a listen when the time is right.
Marvel Comics, has been knocking pretty much anything they do out of the park over recent years, be it movies, comic re-telling, and now marketing. It would be a bit difficult to conceive of Marvel heroes crossing into the rap game, but Axel Alonso, editor in chief of Marvel, and his team of artists conceived of variant covers in order to generate buzz for over fifty No.1 issues that Marvel started releasing last month. These cover take popular and iconic hip hop covers, and give them a Marvel twist. Check the method, and NOTE: The collection is so vast, we had to split this up into two posts.
No. It’s not sorcery. The Verdure (brilliantly designed by Seoyeonjin Choi) is most definitely an automatic herb planter. Just place the seeds in the appropriate place and fill the water reservoir, and it’ll grow on its own, water itself, even give itself sunlight.
The auto-planter makes use of capillary action to water itself. This allows the soil to suck in water from a reservoir whenever it goes dry. The Halogen lamp is strong enough to enable photosynthesis, and the reflector in front of it multiplies the light. Another awesome feature is the collector basin and scissors that enable you to cut and pick the herbs/leaves whenever you need them for cooking. Fresh from the source.
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