mike the mountain

Dead frog with a webserver can be controlled over the net

Cory Doctorow: The Experiments in Galvanism frog floats in mineral oil, a webserver installed it its guts, with wires into its muscle groups. You can access the frog over the network and send it galvanic signals that get it to kick its limbs.

Experiments in Galvanism is the culmination of studio and gallery experiments in which a miniature computer is implanted into the dead body of a frog specimen. Akin to Damien Hirst’s bodies in formaldehyde, the frog is suspended in clear liquid contained in a glass cube, with a blue ethernet cable leading into its splayed abdomen. The computer stores a website that enables users to trigger physical movement in the corpse: the resulting movement can be seen in gallery, and through a live streaming webcamera.
– Risa Horowitz

Garnet Hertz has implanted a miniature webserver in the body of a frog specimen, which is suspended in a clear glass container of mineral oil, an inert liquid that does not conduct electricity. The frog is viewable on the Internet, and on the computer monitor across the room, through a webcam placed on the wall of the gallery. Through an Ethernet cable connected to the embedded webserver, remote viewers can trigger movement in either the right or left leg of the frog, thereby updating Luigi Galvani’s original 1786 experiment causing the legs of a dead frog to twitch simply by touching muscles and nerves with metal.

Experiments in Galvanism is both a reference to the origins of electricity, one of the earliest new media, and, through Galvani’s discovery that bioelectric forces exist within living tissue, a nod to what many theorists and practitioners consider to be the new new media: bio(tech) art.
– Sarah Cook and Steve Dietz

Link (Thanks, Stuart!)

Radio Free Burrito: The Mix tape, Volume 1

As long as I can remember, my friends and I made mix tapes for each other. We’d grab stuff off the radio, record each other talking, tape tracks from records, and even grab stuff off the television.

A few minutes on the Internets revealed that I was not unique at all in this activity, which is as unsurprising as it is totally awesome.

I found myself in an empty house this weekend, and I became inspired by a midnight viewing of Videodrome to audio hijack some dialog from the film, drop in some of the weird audio I’ve scraped off the tubes in the last couple of months, and put it all together just like I did with those magnetic tapes so many years ago.

The audio levels are not as equalized as I’d like, but that’s the way it was back then, too, so try to think of it as part of the charm, instead of an annoying technical failing on my part.

There aren’t any show notes for this one, because we didn’t bother to make show notes back in the old days. There are some titles embedded in the file, though, so you can imagine that they’re scrawled on the TDK cardboard insert in blue Bic pen.

This was fun as hell to make, and I hope you like it. If you can spare a mirror, I’d be most grateful, because the file is quite large to preserve the audio quality.

• Mirror (Thanks, herdivineshadow!)
• Mirror via MoronLife.com (Thanks, Clay!)
• Mirror on S3 (Thanks, Keith!)
• Mirror at Effluxity (Thanks, John!)

Download radio_free_burritos_mix_tape_volume_one.mp3

TRT: 32:30
Filesize: 29.6 MB (Yep, it’s all music, so it’s huge, even encoded at 128).

(Image via Make)

Tutorial: Learn how to give a good back massage

eHow has created a good tutorial on how to give a relaxing back massage, including a step by step how-to and accompanying video. As someone who frankly sucks at giving back massages, I was happy to find this.

I can guarantee that will you become quite the Popular Paula/Paul once other people learn that you know how to give good back massages. If you are already the master of massage, please share your best tips in the comments.

Bacon…burger? Baconburger!

Brilliance often comes in a flash, when we realize we have always had the answers to life’s questions right in front of us. To wit: the baconburger, produced by grinding a pound of bacon into loose meat, creating a patty, and frying the whole thing up.

God help me, that actually looks amazing.

Bacon Burger [Pepper And Smoke]

Bacon Vodka

Some say that the internet’s obsession with bacon is over, but I defy this on two counts: first, no one has yet been spotted cramming bacon into their anus, creating a Goatse-inspired BLT (Bacon Ligament Tearing); second, no one has yet made bacon-infused vodka.

Oh wait: Yes, they have. [BaconVodka.GooglePages.com] (Thanks, Brownlee!)

Bacon Salt: It’s Vegetarian!

From the “Bacon Salt Story” page:

It was then that Justin told Dave and another coworker named Kara about his idea for Bacon Salt(tm). Kara, who is a vegetarian, loved the idea. Dave, a card-carrying carnivore and Midwesterner, loved it even more. Even the waiter at the fancy restaurant loved it.

That’s right: a seasoning that makes everything taste like bacon. And salt, one would presume.

There’s actually something to this. Bacon is the Great Seasoner, something well known to anyone who has eaten Southern cooking, turning basic blanched green beans into a soupy morass of savory slop. While I doubt Bacon Salt will completely replace little cubes of fat back in my life, I can see using it to add bacon flavor to attempts at otherwise healthy cooking.

Plus it sounds a little like “Bacon Assault,” and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Product Page [BaconSalt.com via MeFi]

Bacon ice cream is an Udder Delight

Posted Aug 6th 2006 12:02PM by Nicole Weston

The Udder Delight Ice Cream House in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware makes some of the best ice cream you’ll find anywhere. In fact, their Peanut Butter and Jelly ice cream won the World Series of Ice Cream in 2004. To be sure, all of their flavors are very high quality – which is Udder Delight-speak for very high in butterfat – because they use dairy with extra-butterfat for all of their ice cream bases, and the best ingredients they can find as flavorings.

As you might guess from the Peanut Butter and Jelly ice cream, they offer some unusual ice cream flavors. They have Cappuccino Stout Beer, Cake Batter, Honey Fig and Pear Green Tea, and while they don’t have a super spicy flavor , they do have Memphis Barbecue and Bacon. That’s right, bacon. The bacon ice cream has small chunks of actual bacon in it, which puts some people off it entirely, but fans have likened the texture to pecans.

Bacon ice cream probably won’t catch on any more than bacon cereal will, but if nothing else, it is worth a taste when you stop by to sample their other excellent flavors.

Weekend Project: Gigantic whiteboards on a budget

Make a ginormous white board on an itsy-bitsy budget with this simple how-to from chrismetcalf.net.

All you need is some showerboard, plywood, and some liquid nails – all available from your local hardware store. Other than allowing everything to harden up overnight, this project takes very little time and the finished project is just as good as the boards that sell for literally hundreds of dollars.

Backup Utilities: Save your weblog with Blogger Backup

Windows only: Save a local copy of your entire Blogger blog using the new Blogger Backup utility (currently in beta). Weblog Digital Inspiration reports:

With Blogger Backup, you can backup your blog posts into a single file or one blog post per file or multiple posts per file. The future versions may even save your blog posts into PDF files that you can distribute as eBooks.

Blogger backup can download everything or you can do incremental backups meaning backup just the new posts since your last backup or download blog posts posted between any two given dates.
Being Blogger blog-less, I haven’t given Blogger Backup a spin, but it sounds way more user-friendly than using DownThemAll! or other web site copiers. Blogger Backup beta is a free download for Windows only.

Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Unofficial Gmail Apps and Add-ons

Gmail’s huge success owes itself in large part to the wide range of applications, browser add-ons, styles, scripts and bookmarklets that work with it. From the get-go Google’s stayed out of developers’ way and turned a blind eye to unofficial Gmail add-ons, even ones that may very well violate its terms of service. Smart move: Google’s high tolerance for third-party apps have only helped Gmail win the hearts of power users and tweakers everywhere. To celebrate, today we’ve got our top 10 list of unauthorized and unofficial but hella-useful apps that make Gmail that much better.

World’s Best/Worst Videogame Endings

Unlike the Mortal Kombat 4 video we’ve got after the jump, this ending from Neo Contra is clearly tongue-in-cheek. That doesn’t make it any less great, however; I think I’ll watch it every morning to prepare to face the day.

The MK4 ending is just trash, though. What a joke of a series.

Debunking Canadian "piracy" claims – video from Michael Geist

Cory Doctorow: Copyfighting law prof Michael Geist and filmmaker Daniel Albahary have put together a great short film called “Putting Canadian ‘Piracy’ in Perspective.” It’s a great, systematic debunking of of the claims that Canada is a haven for piracy, demonstrating that these claims are just scare-tactics from American corporate and government interests looking to change Canadian law to favor American firms to the detriment of the Canadian public. Link (Thanks, Robbo!)