Everything can be a Ukulele

Playing the Ukulele is something I have always intended to do. I have so far miserably failed at this. The first step away from utter failure and towards success at anything these days is a good google. So here is Etsy's answer to my shortcoming.

Does ukuleleing get better than this?

How cool are these!??
http://www.etsy.com/shop/celentanowoodworks is the shop. Paul Celentano is the mad genius. He says
"What Would Your Dream Instrument Look Like? All designs can be made into a ukulele,guitar,bass,mandolin,and more. Contact me for estimate."

Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul

Last month I touted some books that will save filmmakers tons of scratch.
It seems that Jon Reiss, author of "Thinking Outside The Boxoffice" has a new book on that devil distribution coming out.

Looks very useful. 

From the description on YouTube:
"SELLING YOUR FILM WITHOUT SELLING YOUR SOUL is the first book to strip away the mythology surrounding independent film, providing real data and results of the techniques filmmakers have employed to connect films with audiences. 

The book presents revenue models, marketing strategies, distribution spends, crowdfunding, community building and detailed ancillary and digital distribution numbers for the following films: Ride The Divide, The Cosmonaut, The Best and The Brightest, Sita Sings the Blues, Note by Note, Bass Ackwards, Adventures of Power, American: The Bill Hicks Story, Undertow, For the Bible Tells Me So, Violet Tendencies and the webseries PioneerOne.

SELLING YOUR FILM WITHOUT SELLING YOUR SOUL peers behind the curtain of secrecy surrounding distribution, and celebrates the spirit independent of groundbreaking filmmakers who take matters into their filmmaking destinies into their own hands."

Huckelberry Finn: Robotic Edition mentioned in the NY Times Magazine!!!

Guess what Batman! Our project Replacing the "N-word" with "Robot" in Huck Finn was mentioned in this great New York Times Magazine article about Kickstarter. They mention a bunch of other very cool projects and it's a neat look into how Kickstarter works.

Here is the article by Rob Walker http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/magazine/the-trivialities-and-transcendence-of-kickstarter.html

If you HAVE to have this book we will soon be selling it on our website http://DianiDevine.com.

Thanks NY Times Magazine! 

A Robot That Flies Like A Bird- TED

Are you ready to see something amazing?

Markus Fischer and the rest of those crazy kids at Festo have built this SmartBird. It's modeled on the noble seagull, but flaps it's wings to fly instead of slurping gross stuff off the sidewalk.

Here is the TED talk where you get to see this super cool robot in flight and work on your German accent.



I don't know what kind of pressure this guy is feeling these days. But it has to be intense.

 http://burrowburrow.com/robots.html 

Month At The Museum 2

So the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is doing a second year of their incredible Month at The Museum project. One lucky person gets to live at MSI for a month. The lovely Kate McGroarty did it last year and it looks like she had an amazing time.

I couldn't not apply.

The museum requested that people post their application videos on YouTube and a most wonderful time suck was born. You can just plop "Month at the Museum 2" into the search bar and all kinds of awesome people will show up for 1 minute.

Here is my one minute application video. It is possible that I kiss a dog in this video. So if you're easily shocked please turn away.



There are so many videos, but here are some of my favorites so far.





















This is a collection of awesome people. I'm so impressed with all the excitement and brain power this project is pulling out of the wood work. 

Must Watch TED Talk- Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

If you are remotely interested in: education, the third world, economic disparity, human rights, children, the brain, social development, the origins of society, problem solving, computers or anything at all you have to watch this TED talk.

Not just because Sugata Mitra is adorable, but because his experiments in giving children unguided and uninstructed access to the internet will blow your mind.

BOOM. Mind blown. You should also watch it because he's adorable.



"Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching." ted.com

Snakes are cute.

I think it's important to remind people once in awhile that snakes are cute.



We're all very mammal centric on the internet with our cute cats and bunnies. Don't get me wrong, kitties and bunnies are cute. But so are snakes.

See! 

Awwww!!!

You know you love them. 

Herp, herp, horray!!!