Video of the lecture Lessig gave at Harvard last Tuesday about Aaron Swartz.

In the wake of the tragic death of social activist Aaron Swartz, many, including some in Washington, are asking how the law should respond. In this lecture — radically personal, deeply non-disinterested — Professor Lessig reflects on the life and work of Aaron Swartz, and how that work might be honored.

It’s not uncommon to see an UFO fly through a home video. Sometimes there are telltale signs of forgery such as fishing lines holding up the ship. More recently computer graphics have removed those strings, but close examination can reveal the ruse — maybe the lighting is off just a little.

Enter Aristomenis “Meni” Tsirbas. Last year he uploaded a YouTube video with a standard CGI spaceship. Except in this case, the aliens think you are fake. Why? Because in Tsirbas’s video, everything is computer-generated:

Wired describes the video in further detail:

But while the highly detailed alien ships were obviously fake, the even more surprising thing about the clip is that nothing else was real either. Every single element in the 39-second clip was computer-generated, from the car the supposed cameraman is driving to the cloudy blue sky where the alien crafts appear.

They go on to quote Tsirbas on his intensions:

The point of the video was to prove that CGI can look natural and convincing,” Tsirbas told Wired. ”Everybody assumes the background and car are real, and that the UFOs are probably fake, especially the over-the-top mothership at the end. The general reaction is disbelief, so I usually have to prove it by showing a wireframe of the entire shot to prove that nothing is real.

Full Wired article at: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/02/ufo-video-fake-tsirbas/.

Last weekend Vanessa Vobis and I took a trip to California City, CA. Haven’t heard of it? You’re not alone. But it happens to be the 3rd largest city in California by area, causing confusion especially when considering other cities on the list include LA and San Jose. So, why isn’t California City as well known? Although an expansive grid was laid out in the 1950s, very few came, resulting in a small suburban core surrounded by 200+ square miles of uninhabited sprawl.

There are many stories and oddities from the trip that I’ll compile into a post for my Public Spaces series. Until then, below is an intermediate post consisting of the seven tweets from our trip, each annotated by an image. I’m hoping to provide an overview of our California City trip while at the same time trying out Twitter’s new “embed this tweet” feature.
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