Submitted by SynthGear on August 8, 2010 Here’s a great DIY method to copy a vinyl record, making a copy that you can actually play on a turntable. The German website Zeit.de had this article up in German, however it’s now unavailable, and only available via archive.org. Here it is in it’s full form, translated into English: Step 1 Nail together four 36.5cm-pieces of wood to create a frame and put it on a glass plate. Seal off the edges using caulking, and make sure everything is completely airtight. Step 2 Take the record that you want to copy and put it into the box, making sure that the side that you want to copy is facing upwards. Squeeze in some caulking or insert a dowel to mark where the hole in the record is. Step 3 Mix silicone rubber (Smooth On OOMOO 30 or OOMOO 25) for about 3 minutes.. Step 4 Pour the silicone rubber mixture into the mold. start from one corner, and fill the mold until it is about 5mm deep. Make sure the that surface is even, and let it dry overnight. Step 5 Peel off the silicone from the cast and cut off the excess. Step 6 Pour on some casting resin (eg Smooth On Task #4) on top of the silicone cast. Step 7 Make sure that you don’t have anything spill over the round form. You can also brush off any air bubbles that might occur. Step 8 Carefully loosen the plate from the silicone form. Using a drill press, bore a hole through the center of the plate (this doesn’t need to be done if you used the appropriate sized dowel). Finished. You can keep using the silicone form and make multiple copies. Definitely a darn fun DIY project.
Submitted by SynthGear on February 17, 2010 Chris Supranowitz is a researcher at The Insitute of Optics at the University of Rochester. Along with a number of other spectacular studies (such as quantum optics, trapping of atoms, dark states and entanglement), Chris has decided to look at the relatively boring grooves of a vinyl record using the institute’s electron microscope. Well, not boring for me.
From what I read, it’s not just a simple matter of sticking a record under a fancy microscope, as there is a lot of preparation (such as gold-sputtering the surface) and post-processing to be done. Having said that, the results are very cool:
Here is a shot of a number of record grooves (the dark bits are the top of the grooves, i.e. the uncut vinyl) Here’s the grooves closer up – the little bumps are dust on the record: And here’s a single groove even closer still, magnified 1000 times: Chris also did the pits in a CD – here’s what they look like, just for contrast: Chris decided to take the whole electron microscope image one step further, and created a blue/red 3-dimensional image of the record groove! So, if you have a pair of 3D glasses (sorry, the ones you got from watching Avatar won’t work – you need red on the left, blue on the right), throw them on and take a look at this amazing picture:
"-Punk is ,the personal expression of uniqueness that comes from the experiences of growing up in touch with our human ability to reason and ask questions. -Punk is a movement that serves to refute social attitudes that have been perpetuated through willful ignorance of human nature. -Punk is, a process of questioning and commitment to understanding that results in self-progress, and through repetition, flowers into social evolution. -Punk is, a belief that this world is what we make of it, truth comes from our understanding of the way things are, not from the blind adherence to prescriptions about the way things should be. -Punk is, the constant struggle against fear of social repercussions"
Punk Manifesto(PHD.Greg Graffin, Bad religion´s front man)
Police shave mohawks off punks at Indonesia concert
BANDA ACEH, INDONESIA—Police in Indonesia’s most conservative province raided a punk-rock concert and detained 65 fans, buzzing off their spiky mohawks and stripping away body piercings because of the perceived threat to Islamic values.
Dog-collar necklaces and chains also were taken from the youths before they were thrown in pools of water for “spiritual” cleansing, local police chief Iskandar Hasan said Wednesday.
After replacing their “disgusting” clothes, he handed each a toothbrush and barked “use it.”
The crackdown marked the latest effort by authorities to promote strict moral values in Aceh, the only province in this secular but predominantly Muslim nation of 240 millikn to have imposed Islamic laws.
Here, adultery is punishable by stoning to death. Homosexuals have been thrown in jail or lashed in public with rattan canes. Women are forced to wear head scarves and told, please, no tight pants.
It’s not clear why police decided to hone in on punks.
Though pierced and tattooed teens have complained for months about harassment, Saturday’s roundup at a concert attended by more than 100 people was by far the biggest and most dramatic bust yet.
Baton)wielding police scattered fans, many of whom had travelled from other parts of the sprawling archipelagic nation to attend the show.
Hasan said 59 young men and five women were loaded into vans and brought to a police detention centre 30 miles (60 kilometres) from the provincial capital, Banda Aceh.
They would spend 10 days getting rehabilitation, training in military-style discipline and religious classes, including Qur’an recitation, he said.!20Afterward, they’ll be sent home.
Twenty-year-old punker, Fauzan, was mortified.
“Why? Why my hair?!” he said, pointing to his cleanly shaven head. “We didn’t hurt anyone. This is how we’ve chosen to express ourselves. Why are they treating us like criminals?”
The women, some in tears, were given short, blunt bobs.
Hasan insisted he’d done nothing wrong.
“We’re not torturing anyone,” the police chief said. “We’re not violating human rights. We’re just trying to put them back on the right moral path.”
However, Nur Kholis, a national human commissioner, deplored the detentions, saying police have to explain what kinds of criminal laws have been broken.
“Otherwise, they violated people’s right of gathering and expression,” Kholis said, promising to investigate.
Aceh — where Islam first arrived in Indonesia from Saudi Arabia centuries ago — enjoys semiautonomy from the central government.
That was part of a peace deal negotiated after the 2004 tsunami that killed 170,000 people in the province convinced both separatist rebels and the army to lay down their arms. Neither side wanted to add to people’s suffering.
Some local governments in other parts of the country — which has seen tremendous changes with lighting-speed economic growth and modernization since the ouster of longtime dictator Suharto one decade ago — also have tried to ban “immoral” behaviour, like drinking alcohol, gambling and kissing in public.
They’ve met with limited success, however, largely because most of the country’s 200 million Muslims practice moderate forms of the faith.
The Celebrated Filmmaker and Designer Olympia Le-Tan Co-create a Tale to Pierce the Heart
Designer Olympia Le-Tan's embroidered clutch-bags spring to life in director Spike Jonze’s tragicomic stop-motion animation Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side). On a shelf in famed Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company, the star-crossed love story of a klutzy skeleton and his flame-haired amour plays out amidst Le-Tan’s illustrations of iconic first-edition book covers. "It's such a beautiful and romantic place,” offers Le-Tan of the antiquarian bookstore. "The perfect setting for our story!” The project started after Jonze asked for a Catcher in the Rye embroidery to put on his wall and the plucky Le-Tan asked for a film in return. Enlisting French filmmaker Simon Cahn to co-direct, the team wrote the script between Los Angeles and Paris over a six month period, before working night and day animating the 3,000 pieces of felt Le-Tan had cut by hand. “I love getting performances from, telling stories about and humanizing things that aren’t human,” said Jonze of working with Le-Tan’s characters. After spending five years adapting Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, Jonze’s recent shorts include robot love story I’m Here and an inspired G.I. Joe-starring video for The Beastie Boys. “A short is like a sketch,” he says. “You can have an idea or a feeling and just go and do it.” Here the iconic director reveals his creative process to writer Maryam L'Ange.
How did the film come about? I met Olympia in Paris through friends of mine. She was just starting to make the bags for her friends. She had a bunch of the scraps in her bag, all of the cut-out pieces of felt. I just loved it. I loved all the artwork she picked, the texture of it, the stitching of the felt. We joked about making a film and just went for it. It was this thing with no schedule, no pressure and no real reason to be—other than just that we thought it would be fun.
Did you write the story together? Yeah we did. We would look at all the artwork over lunch whenever we would be in the same city, noting any ideas that would just make us smile. It was done like that, with no real plans.
What’s your creative process? You just start with what the feeling is. For this one the feeling definitely started with the handmade aesthetic and charm of Olympia’s work. Instantly I had the idea of doing it in a bookstore after-hours, imagining the lights coming down and these guys off their books. Me and Olympia both wanted to make a love story, and it was fun to do it with these characters. It evolved naturally and it all just started with the feeling. From there you entertain yourself with ideas that excite you.
Do you go with your gut instinct? If it cracks me up. We were talking about the skeleton coming off his book and the girl in the Dracula book waving at him. Olympia is someone who is just absurd, she’s used to just saying anything. She just started making the blowjob gesture as a joke to make us laugh but I was like, “We’ve got to do that.” It’s about taking things that could just be a joke while brainstorming and actually going for it and using it.
What inspires you? People inspire me. Humberto Leon and Carol Lim [from Opening Ceremony] and the confidence and creativity in how they run their business. Pixar’s really inspiring, they make films in the best possible way. They’re always focused on story. I could list a million people that inspire me all the time. David Bowie’s music, Charlie Kauffman, David Russell. A lot of people that I work with too, just conversations I have with them about what we want to do.
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