For everything but its core search engine, Google has been at the forefront of the participatory web, i.e., Web 2.0, with products like YouTube, Picasa, and more. But its core search engine has for over a decade been sacrosanct, with a minimalist aesthetic: logo, search box, and a so-called 28-word rule that limits the words […]
SCOTUSblog reports that the Supreme Court today unveiled a revamped website, which will now be hosted in-house rather than by the Government Printing Office (press release here). The new site is much cleaner and makes finding information much easier. Considering the popularity of Supreme Court bobbleheads (as reported in yesterday’s New York Times), maybe the […]
Today is March 14, Pi Day, celebrating the mysterious ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The number is irrational, so there is no end to its number of digits. Go to 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com (or here) for Pi to a million digits. Or just listen to this Pi rap.
In celebration of Pi Day, here are ten uses of Pi having nothing to do with math:
Wired reports on Katie King’s excellent video Galactica: Sabotage, a kind of mash-up/homage to Spike Jones’ video for the Beastie Boys’ song Sabotage. The new video substitutes clips from the recently ended Battlestar Galactica series, but in a way that almost perfectly tracks the images from Jones’ original video.
Below is a side-by-side comparison of the original and new video.
I’m glad to see that nothing (yet) has been done to try to take down the video. The video also makes me wonder about what we mean when we use the term “mash-up.” As far as mash-ups go, Galactica: Sabotage is dissimilar to Danger Mouse’s mash-up classic Grey Album, which juxtaposed music samples from the Beatles’ White Album with vocals from Jay-Z’s Black Album. In such a mash-up, you simultaneously hear portions from both sources. It’s music with music.
However in form (but perhaps not function), Galactica: Sabotage is different. Same music, but new video clips substituted for the original. Perhaps such mash-ups by substitution are more like “smash-ups,” i.e., substitution + mash-up. Like the Grey Album, there’s still juxtaposition, but the juxtaposition is provided by what’s absent rather than by what’s present.
