Archive for May 15th, 2007

Funniest 911 call ever?

Warning: the subject of the 911 call is marijuana. “I think we’re dead… Time is going by really, really, really slow.” LiveLink (via DangerRoom).

Update: The entire call – even funnier!

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Scientists Map Dark Matter.

Today scientists announced that they had mapped a ring of dark matter around a galaxy cluster utilizing gravitational distortions observed in photographs taken by the Hubble space telescope.

This is a groundbreaking discovery, since for decades scientists had theorized that the bulk of the Universe is held together by dark matter, and that this matter could not be observed since it neither emits nor reflects light.

Read more at the Bad Astronomy Blog.

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Plupon.

Plupon is an addictive math game. You get big points by combining three numbers to total ten or twenty. Smaller points if you go under, and you can combine small numbers to make a bigger number. Minus points if you go over. Unused numbers count against your time. Link -via Metafilter

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Volcanic Eruption on Io.

Tvashtar is a volcano on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. The New Horizons space probe captured five frames of an eruption, which became the first “movie” of an otherworldly eruption. The plume in the image reaches 200 miles above the surface. Link -via Metafilter

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Prague Marathon: Embeddable Panorama.

Mouse over image to start rotating. Click and drag to turn the image any way you like. Use mouse wheel to zoom.

Not just any panorama – it’s an embeddable panorama! How cool is that? You can view high resolution panorama on Prague 360 – Thanks Jeff!

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Vintage Camera Museum

Living Image Vintage Camera Museum has got a wonderful collection with lots of information about old cameras. For most of the models they’ve even included samples of photos taken with the camera.

Link – via Coudal Partners

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Eating Bugs at Growabrain.

Our pal Hanan’s blog growabrain is a fantastic resource of neat and weird links on all sorts of topics.

Here’s one such topic: entomophagy (that’s eating insects for us cretins), featuring things like scorpion soup, cockroaches for dinner, Portuguese snail recipe. Yum!

For example:

In Nigeria’s far north-eastern Borno State, man is biting back against the desert locust. Swarms of migrating locusts seasonally strip the semi-arid region of its scanty vegetation and crops.

But Gambo Ibrahim, 27, a locust hunter, says the people of Borno have found a way of converting the desert locust’s assault into an annual banquet.

They eat the locusts which they call Desert shrimps

Link – Thanks David R!

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Caveman’s Crib.

The Caveman’s Crib is a Flash website where you can snoop around the posh penthouse apartment of auto insurance company GEICO’s pitchmen [wiki].

Supposedly, a TV series featuring the Neanderthals is in the works.

Link [Flash] – Thanks Tiffany!

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Scratch: Programming Language for Kids.

Scratch is a new programming language created by Mitchel Resnick and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab. The software lets kids program interactive creations by "snapping" together snippets of code much like LEGO bricks!

Links: BBC Article (with video) | MIT Press Release | Scratch Website – Thanks Andrew H!

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Fetal Art.

One rarely thinks of the human fetus as the subject of artistic treatment, but Carolyn Tate and Gordon Bendersky make a good case in Olmec Sculptures of the Human Fetus that this is exactly what one set of very peculiar looking ancient Mesoamerican sculptures are — realistic renderings of fetuses at various stages of development. They write:

Olmec sculptures of fetuses are extremely naturalistic. For example, on
the sculpture below, note the careful attention to the swelling and
folds around the eyes, the chin, the bony protrusion of the clavicle,
the subtle shapes of muscles in the upper arms and legs, and the
rendering of cuticles and fingernails.

Tate and Bendersky provide more supportive evidence for their theory in the article cited. They also speculate as to the symbolic meaning of the figures:

Most Olmec stone figurines represent humans in a state of physical or
spiritual transformation. The metamorphosis evident in the developing
fetus, from a tadpole or fish-like form to a human one, makes it a
potent symbol for such a process. In fact, among the Mixe, contemporary
descendants of the Olmecs, the female supernatural power that controls
bodies of water also controls human childbirth and fishing. It is as if
one "fishes" for children, or as if fish were placed in the womb in
order to be "cooked" into human infants, as the Mixe say. Similarly,
the fetus parallels the life cycle of maize, the quintessential
Mesoamerican symbol of the miracle of life. Both undergo dramatic
transformation, the fetus apparently from "lower" to "higher" animal
and the maize from seed to gloriously upright fruiting plant to seed
again.

The photo of the jade figurine is from Wikipedia

The drawing is from Tate and Bendersky, captioned:  Seated fetus effigy with arms clutching knees, from Catemaco, Veracruz area. Basalt. Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution. Drawing: G. Bendersky

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Russian Tractor

Necessity is the Mother of Invention, or so the saying goes. This, however, is the mutant offspring of Necessity, Too Much Time, and Way Too Much Vodka…

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The World Fatness Chart.

This chart was created by blogger Wellington Grey, it’s based on recent obesity statistics. A larger version of the chart can be viewed here. As seen on Japan Probe.

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European Queen.

Who knew there was a European version to Billy Ocean’s wildly successful hit Caribbean Queen [wiki]?

Click play or go to Link [YouTube].

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Terror on Wall Street.

New York City’s deadliest terror attack before 9/11 took place at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway on September 16, 1920, when a horse-drawn wagon was abandoned by its driver.

A bomb consisting of one hundred pounds of dynamite packed with five hundred pounds of cast-iron slugs violently vomited red-hot shrapnel and destruction in every direction. A number of passers-by were instantly vaporized by the extreme heat and pressure. The blast sent a nearby automobile careening through the air as countless jagged iron fragments ripped through the crowd.

Damn Interesting, where you often find history you’ve never heard, has the story. Warning: gory details. Link

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Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head.

This olive python is ignoring mother’s advice and pulling a wallaby out of the water, with the intention, one would assume, of eating something considerably larger than its head. Via Snopes, who verifies the species involved.

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Georg Gerster.

Georg Gerster is a Swiss aerial photographer whose work spans 40 years, six continents, and 111 countries. This photo is Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone National Park, taken in 1982. I could spend way too much time looking through his extensive gallery. Link -via Ursi’s Blog

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Probably The Longest Train in the World

This extremely long train can be spotted in Mauritania, deep in the Sahara Desert. It carries iron ore from central Mauritania to the Nouadibou harbour.

Link to YouTube – via Videofeber

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5 Greatest Sculptors of All Time

Playing in two dimensions is easy enough, but what truly separates the men from the boys? Maybe it’s when you give up your easel for a tool belt and get to work with a hammer and chisel. These amazing sculptors took their talents 3-D. 1. Donatello (1386? – 1466) David in bronze (Photo Credit: italiangerry [Flickr]) St. George (bronze copy of the marble original) (Photo Credit: Jastrow [wiki]) Unquestionably the greatest sculptor of the early Renaissance, Donatello [wiki] was born in Florence, though he traveled widely and was famous throughout Italy. Donatello had complete mastery of bronze, stone, wood, and terra cotta, and nothing escaped his extraordinary capabilities: relief sculpture, nudes, equestrian statues, groups of figures, and single figures seated or standing. In fact, he reinvented the art of sculpture just as other contemporaries were reinventing the art of painting, and his innovations and discoveries were profoundly influential. Above all, Donatello seemed to be able to bring sculpture to life by his ability to tell a story, combine realism and powerful emotion, and create the impression that his figures were more than mere objects of beauty for passive contemplation, but creations filled with energy and thought, ready to spring into action. 2. Michelangelo (1475 – 1564) Michelangelo’s David Michelangelo’s Pietà Clearly an outstanding genius, Michelangelo‘s [wiki] influence dominated European art until Picasso changed the rules. A sculptor first, painter and architect second, Michelangelo was a workaholic – a melancholic, temperamental, and lonely figure. He had a profound belief in the human form (especially the male nude) as the ultimate expression of human spirituality, sensibility, and beauty. In fact, Michelangelo’s early work shows the human being as the measure of all things: idealized, muscular, confident, and quasi-divine. Gradually that image becomes more expressive, more human, less perfect, fallible, and flawed. He loved turning and twisting poses full of latent energy, and faces that expressed the full range of human emotion. Endlessly inventive, he never repeated a pose, although being a true Renaissance man, he was proud to borrow from Greek and Roman precedents. 3. Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598 – 1680) Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina Bernini’s David Bernini [wiki] set sculpture free from its previous occupation with earthly gravity and intellectual emotion, allowing it to discover a new freedom that permitted it to move, soar, and have a visionary and theatrical quality. A child prodigy, Bernini had a sparkling personality and brilliant wit (he wrote comedies) – qualities that shine through his sculptures. He was also a true visionary technically, able to carve marble so as to make it seem to move or have the delicacy of the finest lace. At his best he blends sculpture, architecture, and painting into an extravagant theatrical ensemble, especially in his fountains, where the play of water and light over his larger-than-life human figures and animals creates a vision that is literally out of this world. 4. Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917) Rodin’s The Thinker, original bronze cast at the Musée Rodin in Paris (Image credit: a.muse.d [Flickr]) Rodin’s Gates of Hell, at the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Rodin’s The Walking Man (Photo credit: David. Monniaux [wiki]) Rodin [wiki] is the glorious, triumphant finale to the sculptural tradition that starts with Donatello. He is rightly spoken of in the same breath as Michelangelo, although they’re very different: Michelangelo carved into marble whereas Rodin molded with clay. A shy workaholic, untidy, and physically enormous, Rodin emerged from impoverished beginnings. He became an international celebrity and was deeply attractive to smart women. Rodin was also well known for loving the fluidity of clay and plaster, and was able to retain this quality even when his work was cast in bronze, thereby magically releasing in his figures an extraordinary range of human feelings and a sense of the unknown forces of nature. 5. Constantin Brancusi (1876 – 1957) Brancusi’s The Kiss Brancusi’s The Endless Column Brancusi [wiki] is one of the seminal figures of 20th-century art with a profound influence on sculpture and design. Born into a Romanian peasant family, he settled in Paris in 1904, becoming a student of Rodin. Amazingly, Brancusi remained indifferent to honor and fame. At the heart of his work is a tireless refinement and search for purity. Never abstract, his work always references something recognizable in nature. Brancusi believed in the maxim "Truth to materials," and he always brought out the inherent quality of each material that he used. The purity and simplicity of his form touch something very basic in the human psyche, just as does, for example, the sound of the waves of the sea.

From mental_floss’ book Condensed Knowledge: A deliciously Irreverent Guide to Feeling Smart Again, published in Neatorama with permission. Original article written by Robert Cumming, an art critic and writer. Cumming was also a curator in the Tate Gallery Education Department, and founder and chairman of the Christies Education programs. Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ extremely entertaining website and blog!

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