Archive for July, 2007

Summer Spirits.

Pink Tentacle links to a creepy, but very artistic, collection of Japanese ghosts in the spirit of the season:

Japan [has a] centuries-old tradition of swapping ghost stories [in the summer]. Some argue that the fear induced by a spine-chilling story can actually lower one’s body temperature, making it a great way to deal with the summer heat.

And if you click on the link to Pink Tentacle, you will find out all you need to know about . . . Severed Mouth Woman, who "sparked a mass panic in Japan in the late ’70s and early ’80s."

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The Cubes

Tired of being bossed around at work? Now you can be the boss of this tiny office:

Finally, the drudgery of corporate life has been captured in a play set for adults! The Cubes™ spend eight hours a day, five days a week, at tiny desks in tiny cubicles in a giant room packed with countless similar cubicles in a giant building filled with countless similar rooms.

Each set comes with a 2-3/4" posable plastic figure and all the necessary plastic parts to build a classic corporate environment.

Link

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Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps

Here’s a fantastic set of scans from Kees Boeke’s 1957 book Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps. We have Mitchell Charity to thank for having this copy of a fantastic book online:

Kees Boeke’s Cosmic View is a classic on learning about the scale of things. It is similar to the Morrison’s Powers of Ten, but aimed at a younger audience. Its legacy includes Charles Eames’s film Powers of Ten, the resulting book by Philip and Phylis Morrison, and several similar books which followed. Unfortunately, the problems Kees hoped to address, including peoples’ understanding being fragmented by scale, remain as pressing today as they were in 1957. I place it online in the hope of encouraging awareness and activity in this area.

Link | Start the "jumps" here.

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A Spectrum of Guinea Pigs!

So, this is a spectrum of some of the colors of guinea pigs: cream, saffron, buff, Pink Eye Gold, Dark Eye Gold, and red. They’re all cute! Found at bivoir [Flickr]

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World’s Largest Revolver

You’re looking at what probably is the largest revolver in the world: a replica of Remington model 1859, by Mr. Ryszard Tobys. It’s 1.26 meter (4.13 ft.) long.

Link

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Cute Japanese Snowplow Robot

We’ve seen the Japanese Robotic Dead Body Remover before, here’s something more "mundane": Yuki-taro, an autonomous snowplow robot. It "eats" snow, and craps out "hard blocks" as it goes along!

The friendly-looking Yuki-taro measures 160 x 95 x 75 cm (63 x 37 x 30 in.) and weighs 400 kg (880 lbs). Armed with GPS and a pair of video cameras embedded in its eyes, the self-guided robot seeks out snow and gobbles it up into its large mouth. Yuki-taro’s insides consist of a system that compresses the snow into hard blocks measuring 60 x 30 x 15 cm (24 x 12 x 6 in.), which Yuki-taro expels from its rear end. The blocks can then be stacked and stored until summer, when they can be used as an alternative source of refrigeration or cooling.

Link

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SkyScout.

The SkyScout is a revolutionary handheld device that uses advanced GPS technology with point and click convenience to identify thousands of stars, planets, constellations and more.

Simply point the SkyScout at any star in the sky and click the target button. The SkyScout will tell you what object you are looking at.

This would have made passing that astronomy final a whole lot simpler. Link -via Geek Alerts

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Long eggs?

Bunk Strutts at Say No To Crack explains where these “long eggs” come from. Why, from long chickens, of course!

“Yep they’re longer, bigger hens. But we don’t raise ‘em for the meat so much as the aigs. A reglar chicken don’t lay no more than one a day. These chickens lay one long one every three days, an’ it take about three hens lined up to hatch it.”

Link

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Getting to school the hard way.

Children of the Nujiang Great Canyon in China must cross a river to get to school, but there is no bridge. Instead, they harness themselves to a loop and cross on a rope suspended between trees on either side! Link

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Teh Deth Kitteh.

Apelad posted this panel of the Laugh Out Loud Cats at Hobotopia in response to Oscar, the death-predicting cat. Link -via Boing Boing

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Desperate Whitehouse Wives.

In this mental_floss article, find out which First Lady sold manure to cover her debts, which was suspected of murder, and which one was (surprisingly) the first one to sport gray hair while living in the White House. And then there’s the really strange ones. Link

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Food Design.

Marti Guixe designs many things, including food.

Food Design makes possible to think in food as an edible designed product, an object that negates any reference to cooking, tradition and gastronomy.

For example, these I-cakes are decorated as pie charts that indicates the percentage of different ingredients. Also see Guixe’s designs for kitchens, tools, packaging, and food performance as art. Link -via Grow-A-Brain

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Harptallica.

A Metallica tribute harp band? Ashley Lancz Toman and Patricia Kline are each accomplished harpists who collaborated on 10 Metallica cover songs for the CD Harptallica. You can hear the songs and see a video at their website, and order the CD. Link -via Gorilla Mask

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Cat Predicts Patients’ Deaths.

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

Oscar has lived almost all of his two years in the third-floor dementia unit at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Rhode Island. Most of the people he visits are unconscious, so his visits don’t frighten them. Experts don’t know what clues Oscar senses, but an animal behaviorist says the only way to really track his record of predictions is to carefully document how Oscar behaves with everyone. Link -via Arbroath

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Flying car.

The M200G Volantor is a two-passenger flying saucer produced by Moller International. It can take off and land vertically, fly ten feet above ground at up to 50 mph, and carry 250 pounds. The company is taking deposits from the first customers. Link -via J-Walk Blog

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Difference Engine with a Difference.

BBC News reports:

The blueprint for a tiny, ultra-robust mechanical computer has been outlined by US researchers.

The energy-efficient nano computer is inspired by ideas about computing first put forward nearly 200 years ago.

Basically, the designers are looking to Charles Babbage’s difference engine as a model:

[The] "difference engine" . . . consisted of more than 25,000 individual levers, ratchets and cogs and weighed more than 13 tonnes.

Although none of his designs were ever finished, recent reconstructions by London’s Science Museum show they were capable of carrying out complex calculations.

The US team’s proposal owes a debt to these early concepts.

"It’s inspired by Babbage’s ideas but these days we can scale it down," Professor Blick told the BBC News website.

"Now, we are able to process devices on the nano scale."

Heather McDougal of Cabinet of Wonders sees this as science fiction coming to life, comparing the development to technologies envisioned in  The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson, while her commenters cite Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and The Difference Engine by Gibson and Sterling.

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Stop War Shadow Grafitti

Spotted in Bloomington, Indiana, is this creative grafitti protesting the war. Way better than those ubiquitous "Stop Hammer Time" stickers:

The piece itself is was stenciled on the floor using a shadow cast by a light post at night, and later carefully sprayed with a ‘camouflage black’ can.

Image: counterclockwise [Flickr] - via connecting the dots

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Masters of the Modern

It’s almost impossible to talk about modern art without tipping your hat to these greats. Here are the masters who gave birth to the modern. 1. Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) Les demoiselles d’avignon (1907) Self-portrait (1907) Girl with Mandolin (1910) Le rêve (1932) Guernica (1937) Picasso [wiki] is the undisputed master of the modern movement. You have to go back to Michelangelo to find anyone of equal genius or stature. Convivial and energetic, he had a voracious appetite for the female sex, although his relationships with women were not always happy. Creator of a vast output of work, he was equally inventive as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicists, and theater designer. His work displays a bewildering change of technical and stylistic originality with a wide-ranging Freudian response to the human condition, including many intimate references to sex and death, sometimes blissful, sometimes anguished. Always highly autobiographical, Picasso had the rare ability to turn self-comment into universal truths about mankind. 2. Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954) Madame Matisse, "The Green Line" (La Raie Verte) (1905) The Dessert: Harmony in Red (The Red Room) (1908) La Danse (1909) Icarus (1944) Matisse [wiki] was the king of color and celebrated the joy of living through the exploration of his palette.One of the founders of the modern movement, Matisse achieved a joyous combination of subject matter (notably the open window, the still life, and the female nude) and a glorious exploitation of color, and proclaimed a new freedom to do his own thing without necessarily imitating nature. Matisse explored color independently from subject matter and turned color into something you wanted to touch and feel. While he was at his best with paint and paper cutouts, he was also a brilliant and innovative printmaker and a gifted sculptor. As a personality however, he was professorial, social, but a bit of a loner. 3. Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944) Composition VII (1913) Composition VIII (1923) Yellow, Red, Blue (1925) Composition X (1925) Kandinsky [wiki] was one of the key pioneers of the modern movement and reputedly the creator of the first abstract picture. Russian born, he initially trained as a lawyer, which made him at ease with abstract modes of thought. Possessor of a complex, multifaceted personality, Kandinsky cultivated an intellectual rather than an instinctive approach to art, backed up by much theoretical writing. Starting as a figurative artist, he worked his way via freely painted abstracts to a complex geometrical form of abstraction. The common thread in all his work is color. He intellectualized his ideas and his art, but at the same time he had such a strong physical sensitivity to color that he could literally hear colors as well as see them (a phenomenon known as synesthesia) 4. Piet Mondrian (1872 – 1944) Composition A: Composition with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow and Blue (1920) Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Red (1939-42) Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43) Mondrian [wiki] was one of the pioneers of a pure abstract art. His most recognizable works have the simplest elements: black horizontal and vertical lines, a white background, and only the primary colors. His aim was to find and express a universal spiritual perfection, but his imagery had a profound influence on 20th-century commercial and architectural design and has been endlessly recycled with little or no understanding of its underlying purpose. As a personality he was austere and reclusive; he hated the green untidiness of nature but was addicted to jazz and dancing. Sadly, in his own lifetime he had no commercial success, but Mondrian was highly revered and tremendously influential on the movers and shakers of modern art and design. 5. Jackson Pollock (1912 – 1956) Number 8 (1948) Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) Blue Poles: No. 11, 1952 “Jack the Dripper” [wiki] was the leading artist of the pioneer New York school. He was a tortured, monosyllabic, alcohol-dependent soul, swinging between sensitivity and machismo, elation and despair. At his best he produced magnificent work that needs to be seen on a large scale to fully appreciate the passionate, heroic, and monumental nature of his achievement. When he rolled his canvases out on the floor and stood in the middle of them with a large can of house paint, he was literally and physically part of his work, thereby achieving an integration of the artist’s personality and the activity of artistic creation that had never before been realized with such expressive freedom. 6. Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987) No. 6 from Campbell’s Soup 1 (1968) No. 1 from Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn) (1970) Sure, Andy Warhol [wiki] may have been a neurotic surrounded by drug addicts, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a key artistic figure. Warhol’s work represented one of art’s turning points because he changed the role model of the artist into one that all aspiring young contemporary artist now follow – no longer the solitary genius expressing intense and personal emotion (like Pollock) but the artist as businessman. He placed artists on a par with Hollywood film stars and Madison Avenue advertising executives. Understandably, he loved and exploited iconic images drawn from the world of glamour, mass media, and advertising, and you can still find his Campbell soup cans and Marilyn Monroe-themed prints everywhere. The son of Czech immigrants, Warhol acted out an oft-repeated American dream cycle – pursuing a driving need to be famous and rich (like his subjects) but destroying himself in the process.

From mental_floss’ book Condensed Knowledge: A deliciously Irreverent Guide to Feeling Smart Again, published in Neatorama with permission. The article is originally written by Robert Cumming, an art critic and writer. Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ extremely entertaining website and blog!

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Artistic Tanks

Photo: Rusty Baker

Artistic Tanks website has neat photos of "modded" oil, propane, and water tanks - this one, the Yellow Submarine tank, is spotted in Holmes County, Ohio. Link

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Web 2.0: Wisdom and Dumbness of Crowds

Web 2.0 has been all the rage on the InterWeb (for you not-in-the-know, web 2.0 [wiki] is a buzzword for web-based communities or user-created contents)

Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users blog had a post a while ago about distinguishing "wisdom of crowds" from "dumbness of crowds".

"Collective intelligence" is a pile of people writing Amazon book reviews.

"Dumbness of Crowds" is a pile of people collaborating on a wiki to collectively author a book.(Not that there aren’t exceptions, but that’s just what they are–rare exceptions for things like reference books. I’m extremely skeptical that a group will produce even a remotely decent novel, for example. Most fiction suffers even with just two authors.)

Link

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Mating Behavior of Banana Slugs

Yes, that is a slug penis.

UC Santa Cruz Graduate Brooke Miller studies the unusual mating behavior of banana slugs (which happens to be the mascot of UCSC!):

So what is so interesting about banana slugs!? Well, these slugs are hermaphrodites, which means that they can act as both males and females at the same time. When they mate, they insert their penises into eachother at the same time. The unusual thing (in case you don’t find that unusual enough!) is that sometimes, but not always, when they finish mating one slug will chew the penis completely off the other, a process called Apophallation. Sometimes it happens that both slugs
engage in chewing so that at the end of the mating encounter, both slugs are penis-less.

Does it grow back? Probably the most common question that I get. NO. Past work has suggested that it does not regenerate, at least not within a year. The penis is a very bizarre structure that is very complex. It would be difficult to regenerate it.

Link | Brooke Miller’s Homepage

If you like that, definitely check out Neatorama’s 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits

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Funny Business Name: WTF

(Image Credit: walkah [Flickr])

Continuing our previous post of weird business name, here’s WTF Group!

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The Cosmic Calendar.

The history of the cosmos condensed into a single Earth Year. Narrated by Carl Sagan. Push play or go to YouTube. -via Educated Earth

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The Sun Loses Its Spots.

This picture from NASA’s SOHO satellite show the Sun with almost no solar activity (sunspots). In the coming weeks, scientists will be closely watching the sun for signs of new sunspots, indicating that it is beginning another 11 year solar cycle. Link [NASA]

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Beached limosine.

Maybe San Francisco isn’t the best place for a stretch limosine. This isn’t the first time it’s happened; there are more pictures. Link -via Reddit

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Fonejacker

BoingBoing linked to a very funny video from a show in the UK called Fonejacker where an English comedian called Kayvan Novak makes a prank phone call to an electronics store, pretending to be a foreigner who calls DVDs “doovdes” and the electronics company JVC “joovke.” I don’t generally care for the prank call genre, but I laughed out loud with this one. YouTube has a number of Fonejacker clips. There is a comprehensive catalog of them here at Fonejacker.tv. A number of them involve a fake Ugandan trying to fool people into giving their bank account info to him over the phone. Have any of our readers in the UK seen the show? Too funny! Original link via BoingBoing. Video links at YouTube.

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Trouble ahead.

If I saw this in real life, or even in a video, I’d shut my eyes (and hold my breath). I think it may be an insurance ad. -via Bits and Pieces

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