Dolly Faibyshev is a Russian-American photographer who lives in New York City. Her work focuses on "the meaning of the American dream in all of its forms." She's especially interested in mid-Twentieth Century modern design.
In her mind, that is best represented by Palm Springs, California, the site of the above mailbox. In an interview, Ms. Faibyshev explained why:
I’ve lived in New York for years, and I’m an east coaster but I just don’t think there’s any other place like it. It’s like stepping into the past, a time warp where many of the homes and surrounding architecture have been preserved (especially the exteriors) since the 1950s. Sometimes it feels like everything is changing around us so fast, it feels good to go to a place that hasn’t changed much at all. There’s something a little unsettling about that for me too.
You can see more photos in her Palm Springs series here.
Pictured above is a recreation of Smilodon fatalis, the species of saber-toothed cat that is the mascot of the Page Museum in Los Angeles. At one time, several species of sabercat roamed North America, but they disappeared along with the other big extinct mammals whose bones are found in the La Brea tar pits. Not fossils -millions of actual bones that have been preserved for thousands of years in asphalt.
Familiar or alien, all these creatures — and many others — disappeared from North America between 50,000 and 8,000 years ago. On a human scale, this seems a long time, but in the fossil record it marks a calamitous, rapid decline. Paleontologists and archaeologists have invoked many possible causes for the catastrophe, from disease and a wayward comet to climate change and hungry, hungry humans. Today, only the latter two mechanisms are taken seriously, but exactly how the dispersal of humans conspired with the onset of a warmer, wetter global climate to drive so many species to extinction is still fiercely debated. Figuring out how the disaster played out is critical to understanding the future of life on Earth. This was not a just a last stand of Ice Age animals against the beginning of the Anthropocene, or age of humans. The extinction of the megamammals is part of a drawn-out process that continues to tatter and imperil what’s left of the planet’s wilderness.
Most scientists have believed that, as the mammoths, horses and bison of the Ice Age disappeared — whether killed by humans in need of meat, by habitat loss, or by a combination of factors — the abundant populations of Smilodon simply ran out of food on the hoof. Jaguars, grey wolves and other carnivores survived, but North America’s last sabercat apparently could not cope with the changes that arrived at the close of the Pleistocene.
Research in the tar pits has shifted from finding the largest and weirdest animals 100 years ago to preserving all the evidence of prehistoric creatures, no matter how small, in order to build a more complete picture of the ancient environment that may give us more clues as to why Smilodon is no longer with us. Aeon magazine has an article about the sabercats and what we know about them, including how our knowledge of them has changed over the past few decades. -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
Artist Jee Young Lee just can’t seem to decide how she wants her studio to look, so she’s made the small workspace over in fourteen fantastic ways in her installation series Body Of Work.
From surreal dreamscape to full blown visual art installation to nightmare imagery cubicle, her re-imagined rooms are simply magical to behold, and to make sure we’re able to appreciate the glorious nature of each space she photographed each room and shared them with the world via the interwebs.
Jee created each scene by hand, and aside from a bit of color correction there is no photoshop involved in these incredible redesigns of an otherwise ordinary space.
If you’re lucky enough to live in a place where the snowflakes fall all winter long then you probably won’t see the need to print your own, but if you live in the land of perpetual sunshine, or you’re simply looking for a holiday decoration that won’t end up becoming little puddles on the floor, then prepare your printer- for winter is coming.
Simply download these Game of Thrones inspired House Sigil snowflake patterns by Krystal Higgins, get your scissors ready for a snipfest and voila! DIY holiday decorations that won't make you lose cool points with your geeky guests.
Juergen Horn and Mike Powell are moving to a new place for 91 days at a time, and in that amount of time, you have to pack in a lot of exploring and sightseeing! After leaving Iceland, they are now in Yucatan, Mexico, where they visited the Río Secreto, an underground river that flows through beautiful cave chambers.
After a bumpy bus ride to the site, we put on wet suits and helmets, and followed our guide into the woods. Soon, we had arrived at a gateway into the underworld. The scene that awaited us inside was breathtaking: a cave full of stalactites and stalagmites, perfectly illuminated by light filtering in from above and reflecting off the still blue water. Although it had long been known to locals, Río Secreto was only discovered by the world at large in 2007, and was immediately put under governmental protection. So the condition of the caves is stunning.
There's lots more pictures at For 91 Days, including a huge arachnid of some sort that startled me. Otherwise, they show a beautiful underground trip. -Thanks, Juergen!
“We wanted to make an object that could only be done through 3D printing.” I think that Toru Hasegawa of the New York City-based Proxy Design Studio overstates his case. It might be possible to make this kinetic sculpture by hand. But since it has one million distinct polygons in the design, it would take a long time.
The Mechaneu is a structure composed of 64 interlocking gears. Turn one and all the others turn in time. It’s an exploration of what Mr. Hasegawa sees as the natural evolution of geometry to solve design problems. I don’t agree with (or perhaps don’t understand) his argument, but I think that the sculpture is cool.
Keng Lye creates sculptural works of art that look like snapshot images of sea life brought into the third dimension, so lifelike viewers expect them to start swimming around at any moment. But these colorful sea creatures won’t be swimming around, or doing much of anything for that matter, because they’re made out of painted resin.
Keng is a master of creating hyper realistic sculptures, and these undersea still life works are made using a clear resin that resembles water which is painted on in layers, slowly building up the look of each creature complete with shading, fine detail and cast shadows.
The Amish and similar groups call themselves "plain people." Here's the plain truth about the plain way they dress.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
In the 16th century, a radical group of Protestant Christians from Switzerland and Germany formed their sect based on the belief that only adults could make the conscious choice to accept God. So even though they had been baptized as infants, this new group had themselves re-baptized, earning them the name Anabaptists (ana is Greek for "repeat" or "again"). Humility was the cornerstone of Anabaptist belief. They rejected pride, shunned non-believers, and refused to take part in any military action. They took no oaths, not even wedding vows, and firmly believed in the separation of church and state.
The Anabaptists were fiercely persecuted in Europe, which led to mass migrations early in the 19th century to the more tolerant United States. By this time the Anabaptists had split into a number of separate sects, most of them named after their spiritual leaders: the Amish, led by Jakob Amman; Mennonites, founded by Menno Simon; the Hutterites by Jacob Hutter; and the Brethren in Christ. Each branch established its own rules for living and for what devotees could and could not wear. They lived simply and dressed simply, which earned them the nickname "plain people." Their style of dress became known as "plain dress."
Plain people believe that beauty comes from within. Any sort of fancy dress or ornamentation that calls attention to the physical body is against their ordnung, or church rules. Their dress is an expression of humility and non-conformity with the outside world. Many people assume that plain dress is a 16th-century style, but it's really a mishmash of styles from different time periods. Today plain women wear 17th-century long-sleeved dresses with 18th-century bonnets and 19th-century shawls.
We see faces everywhere- on fruits and vegetables, in the structure of houses and cars, and sometimes even on people’s nude torsos. Faces are all around us, and in true internet fashion a Twitter account has been set up so people can send in their own photographic evidence of the facial invasion.
Faces In Things is where you need to go if you’re surrounded by eyes, mouths (and occasionally noses) and want to share your scopophobia with the world. Faces In Things will show you that you're not alone, others are seeing faces in things too, and some of those faces are so darn cute it's hard to be mad at them for wanting to hang around and stare at us all day.
Look at this shape. It seems to be some kind of box with a hinge facing us. But what it is doesn't really matter. It appears that the top and bottom are different colors BUT…
Place your finger horizontally over the "hinge" part. See? The top and the bottom are exactly the same color now. What sort of wizardry is this? -via Boing Boing
I don't know anything about this. The entire description at YouTube is this:
"BRWABLGABLWRABRABLA" ~boat.
But I know that my cheeks are hurting from laughing. Something that does that needs to be shared. And then someone had to go and improve it. -via reddit
Sometimes in large bodies of water, wave systems cross each other. When they hit each other, these systems will form crests twice as high and troughs twice as deep. It can be difficult to sail in such waters. In the above case at the Île de Ré, an island off the Atlantic coast of France, the wave systems appear to meet at a right angle.
Things get super weird around Christmastime -especially if you are a cat and haven't read the literature. Simon's cat explores the strange little man with a red cap, and finds that he can be a lot of fun! Well, the cat didn't bring down the Christmas tree this time, but there's still going to be a mess to clean up. -via Tastefully Offensive
This compilation shows that there are many dogs out there who are totally intimidated by the house cat. Can you blame them? After all, cats are pointy on five ends! Some of the cats eventually show us why the dogs are afraid. I think a little human intervention is called for, don't you? After all, we don't stand by and let our human children bully each other! -via HuffPo
Felix Colgrave animated a strange group of unearthly yet oddly familiar beasts in The Elephant's Garden. It was his third year film at RMIT University Melbourne. Totally cosmic, man. -via Everlasting Blort
