Bicycle Built for 2,000 (2009)

Without Flash: https://vimeo.com/3571124

There's something... poignant? about how this sounds so dreary, and is the end result of mturk workers getting paid pennies to record their voices.

This brings to mind the work of composer Paul Lansky, who has been playing with voices to similar effect (albeit with a different process) since the 1980s.

Here's a brief description of one piece, "Notjustmoreidlechatter:" http://acousmata.com/post/104620348/notjustmoreidlechatter

His work can also be heard on Radiohead's Kid A: http://paul.mycpanel.princeton.edu/radiohead.ml.html

Perfect injection of surrealism into my day

When I visited the US a few years back I brought a recently-purchased recumbent tricycle with me and made a cycling tour of it as well as speaking at the conference I had come for; I had been looking into things like duty tariffs simply to assure myself that it was fine to take with me and bring back without needing to worry about it, and I observed interesting specific items in the list of duty tariffs. First of all, understand that the legal definition of bicycle in Australia is something along the lines of “a primarily human-propelled vehicle with at least two wheels and a seat for each passenger”.

One item in the duty tariff list was a bicycle with seven wheels and five seats or something very much like that (it was a few years ago, can’t remember precisely). I presume that, for such an item to have got on the list (in 2003, I think it was added) someone had imported an item matching that description.

Still more fun was that when I mentioned it to someone (might have been the bike shop I got the recumbent tricycle, or Greenspeed themselves; can’t remember) they fancied they knew the vehicle in question (and wasn’t particularly impressed with its efficiency, being fairly shoddily made).

So I was all psyched up for an article about a bicycle built for 2,000, imagining something like the Greenspeed Anura, a delta trike where you can remove the front wheel and hitch it to the back of another Anura—so that you could, if you really wanted to, have an utterly unworkable articulated trike built for 2,000. (I fancy it wouldn’t corner very well, but I’d be fascinated to see how it’d work.)

If you have never watched Aaron Koblin's TED[0] talk about visualizing humanity with crowdsourced data I cannot recommend it enough.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_koblin

Interesting how many people went flat.

Only the voices should be different; why are the background instruments also out of sync?

It's 2113 and all those voices are now dead