Sonifiying Everything, A Stained-Glass Space Shuttle, And The “False Banana” Considered As A Superfood

I bring you the finest web-reading in my weekly “Linkfest”

The finch, rendered in Lego letterpress by Ray Scholten

Normally I’m here on Monday, congratulating you for getting through that miserable first day.

But whoa, this time we’re already halfway through the week!

No matter. It’s always time to kick back and dork around online.

So here’s my offering to help with that task …

1) 🐦 Letterpress birds designed using Lego bricks

The designer Roy Scholten has released this gorgeous project: A collection of 50 bird images crafted by assembling Lego bricks into the profile of the bird, and then mashing them down sideways onto paper, letterpress-style.

As Colossal writes …

Creating a design starts with establishing the outline, the total shape, and posture of the bird in question. Once that puzzle is solved, that construction is then divided up again into three to six different “lego stamps”, one for each color. Each stamp gets printed in the right order so that the combination results in the finished design.

You can see more at Scholten’s Instagram feed or at his personal site, where you can also buy prints.

2) 🔊 Turning a sunset into music with the “sonification tookit”

A group at MIT just released something very cool: The “sonification toolkit”. It’s a set of easy-to-use web tools that let you take various forms of data and turn them into music, so you can try to hear patterns in the information.

That audio file above? That’s the sound of the sunsets and sunrises for one location over the year …

Using the new sonification toolkit, senior Moises Trejo converted the annual times of sunrises and sunsets in one location into music. The…