Louis Wain was an artist who focused on cats, and indeed fed into the obsession with cat images at the turn of the century. That would be the turn of the 20th century, 100 years ago. We've posted Louis Wain's art before, and even the theory that the artist's descent into mental illness can be traced through the degeneration of his cat drawings. However, further study shows that the theory falls apart when you take in the body of Wain's works, instead of a few examples.

While Dr. Walter Maclay’s theories have been thoroughly debunked, Beetles says, his bad ideas have been perpetually recycled—including in an influential 1950 book, Psychotic Art. “Lots of Ph.D. students have come along and written the same tosh,” he says. “It’s rubbish. There’s not an increasing decline according to how jagged the images go. Those images are from different times, and he was producing things of great naturalistic setting and great sweetness at the end. Everything didn’t dissolve into mad shapes. He produced thousands of pictures, and very few of them are these fractal cats. There’s no evidence at all that as he got older, the cats were increasingly bizarre. It’s an academic caprice and academically lazy.”

In fact, Beetles says, Wain’s work got gentler in the last decade of his life, after he was transferred “to the lovely open spaces out in the Hertfordshire countryside at Napsbury asylum, where he lived, I think, with some contentment. A lot of the later work isn’t jagged, it isn’t highly colored, and it doesn’t break up. It is often very beautiful, idyllic countryside scenes, what I would describe as a Shangri-La, the perfect world. So his imagination did go to a utopian idyll, because he lived without stress in Napsbury asylum, which I suppose is good use of the old-fashioned word, ‘asylum,’ isn’t it?”

But Wain's story is still quite interesting. Read how he got his first cat, why he started illustrating cats, and how his art lifted the very idea of the pet cat in popular culture, at Collectors Weekly. Oh yeah, there's a lot of Wain's artwork to see, too!  

Tinney Davidson, together with her husband, moved to Comox, British Columbia in 2007. As their home was near a high school, they would wave to the students passing by their place. This would go on for many years. Even when her husband died, Davidson still continued this tradition.

“I just liked the look of the children and they all looked in and I thought, 'If they're looking in, I'll wave to them,’ ”...

Davidson will now move to an assisted living facility, and won’t be able to wave to the students. And so last week, hundreds of the students walked together to her place with flowers and “thank you” signs to bid farewell to the old woman.

(Image Credit: CBC News)

Tang Chang of Jiangsu, China, adopted a stray cat and named him Ah Fei, which means fat. The cat turned out to be very playful and has become popular on Instagram for his wonderfully expressive face.

Whether he is happy, sad, startled, excited, disappointed, puzzled, or just hungry, Ah Fei does not hide his feelings!

Read about Ah Fei at Bored Panda, and see lots of goofy pictures of him at Instagram.

Twitter user @ksobny brought this image to my attention. It tantalizingly suggests that, at some point, there was a Japanese-language version of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical novel Thus Spake Zarathustra and the cartoon character Hello Kitty.

According to the library database WorldCat, this 126-page book published in 2014 offers:

Extracts from Japanese translation of Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen accompanied by illustrations of Sanrio's character Hello Kitty.

The book is available in both Chinese and Japanese. WorldCat says that the San Francisco Public Library and Los Angeles Public Library systems have both. I couldn't find them in the SFPL online catalog, but I could find a Chinese one in the LAPL online catalog.

Back in 1989, the B52s gave us a summer party anthem that took us to the "Love Shack." Thirty years later, we all remember it well. The song was bouncy and happy and fun. But it could have been very different. What if H.P. Lovecraft had written the song "Love Shack"?

That morning, I had set out with Cedric (a fellow medical student at Miskatonka State) with the intention of putting to rest a ludicrously backwoods Southern legend. We had set off in a massive horse-carriage, a true leviathan capable of holding twenty souls, which bore the chrome mark of its maker: Chrysler Manufactory, Detroit.

As we left Atlanta, we gave the horses free rein, and our great carriage set sail down the broad, cypress-lined highways. Our easy progress, however, was not to last. As the hours stretched on, an oppressive mist began to rise from the accursed marshes that surrounded us. Cedric and I spent uncountable hours peering into the gloom, and just as I was about to lose all hope, at the side of the road, a faded sign shewed forth:

SHACK OF INDULGENCE
15 MILES

It gets better from there. So come along, and bring your juke box money! The horror edition of "Love Shack" is at McSweeney's. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: "Forgotin"by Martin Eckles is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

There are 10 intriguing facts about the solar system you probably did not know....for instance, the hottest planet isn’t closest to the sun!

Via Amaze | Image: Wikimedia

The editors of Polygon have dared to compare all 22 movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe against each other and have published a ranked list. I can't complain about their choices because I've only seen four of them. The mini-reviews that accompany the entries have something good to say about each movie, and they do contain spoilers, just in case you haven't seen Avengers: Endgame yet. Check it out and see if you agree with their assessments. -via Digg

(Image credit: Marvel Studios/James Bareham/Polygon)

An iconic character etched in the annals of cult history has now, as it is said in the popular space saga, "become one with the Force". The actor Peter Mayhew may have passed away but his memory and legacy lives on in the hearts and minds of Star Wars fans the world over and even beyond the galaxy.

We remember Chewbacca as the hairy, bellowing Wookiee who was the trusty sidekick of Han Solo and many have done impressions of his characteristic lowing but have you ever heard him speaking English? It turns out Chewie does it quite well.

During the filming of Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back, actor Peter Mayhew, in costume as Chewbacca, spoke aloud in English (rather than Wookiee) in order to give Harrison Ford‘s Han Solo context for their dialog.

-via Kottke

(Image credit: Leandro Neumann Ciuffo/Flickr; Wikimedia Commons)

(Video credit: Eyes on Cinema)

Twitter user @ahptik suggests, "the restroom requires a sacrifice." But I think that I can read the emotions from my own baby care days. There has been a poop explosion (where the mass of poop exceeds the mass of the baby--a mysterious but real phenomenon) and although the baby is satisfied with the result, the parents are rushing to contain the disaster.

-via David Thompson

"Meeting Gorbachev" has been released and it gives us an inside look into the life and career of the man who ironically brought the Soviet Union down in that, due to his policies which were supposed to save Soviet socialism, they ended up doing the opposite.

Meeting Gorbachev, Herzog’s new documentary (co-directed with André Singer), is based on three long interviews with the Soviet Union’s final leader. As a historical figure, Gorbachev is difficult to categorize.

To the generation of idealistic liberals who came of age in the United States and Europe in the late 1980s, Gorbachev was and to some extent still is revered, a figure who can plausibly be mentioned in the same breath as Nelson Mandela as an icon of peace and reconciliation.

But whereas Mandela remains a beloved figure in South Africa even after his death, today many Russians despise Gorbachev, and most hardly think of him at all.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that it would be Werner Herzog who would make this sort of character study on Mikhail Gorbachev. He lived at around the same time as the old Soviet leader and perhaps even in almost similar circumstances.

Herzog doesn’t offer a materialist or ideological analysis of the transition from Soviet socialism to anarchic neoliberalism. The story he tells is resolutely individualist, a tragedy centered on a great man. Besides Gorbachev, he offers interviews with the men (they are all men, aside from some archival footage of Margaret Thatcher) who helped end the Cold War, including Lech Wałęsa, James Baker, and George Schultz.

Overall, the story he tells goes something like this: Gorbachev, with the purest intentions, tried to reform communism and bring about world peace, but was undermined by other, more cynical men, who replaced the Soviet Union with something worse.

(Image credit: RIA Novosti archive, image #28133 / Boris Babanov / CC-BY-SA 3.0; Wikimedia Commons)

Not to belabor the point but human activities have been pushing our world into a corner and at one point or another, nature will push back with deadly consequences and before that even happens, we need to proactively take steps to preserve and conserve the environment.

“We have never had a single unified statement from the world’s governments that unambiguously makes clear the crisis we are facing for life on Earth,” says Thomas Brooks, chief scientist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland, who helped to edit the biodiversity analysis. “That is really the absolutely key novelty that we see here.”

Without “transformative changes” to the world’s economic, social and political systems to address this crisis, the IPBES panel projects that major biodiversity losses will continue to 2050 and beyond.

What does it take to restore the damage that has been done to the Earth? Can it even be restored or is it already irreversible? We can only hold out hope that there are ways in which nature can be nursed back to health. But it's going to need a huge concerted effort for all stakeholders involved and it looks like that it would take at least a century for that to happen.

(Image credit: Daniel Hjalmarsson/Unsplash)

Which is good news for many online authors who are just starting out in digital publication and have no resources to get high quality images especially for very specific topics. Now, aside from other free license photo sources, Creative Commons will now add 300 million images for easier attribution through CC Search.

CC Search searches images across 19 collections pulled from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset, including cultural works from museums (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art), graphic designs and art works (Behance, DeviantArt), photos from Flickr, and an initial set of CC0 3D designs from Thingiverse.

Aesthetically, you’ll see some key changes — a cleaner home page, better navigation and filters, design alignment with creativecommons.org, streamlined attribution options, and clear channels for providing feedback on both the overall function of the site and on specific image reuses.

via Kottke

(Image credit: Creative Commons)

Creating a world for stories, games, or other purposes could be difficult and tedious for people with little to no drawing abilities like me which makes this medieval town generator a wonderful tool to help you create one.

By adjusting parameters like size, color palette, building styles, and which features to include (rivers, coastline, temples), you can make a random ichnographic map of a medieval town or city.

Check out the tool here.

(Image credit: Kottke)

Let me start out by saying that doctors are humans too. They may have the skills and the technical know-how to save multiple people's lives, but they too have their own limits.

And with the demanding environment in the medical field today, the rate of burnout on professionals in the medical field might continue to increase and impact the overall effectiveness of the health care system.

A great deal of ink has been spilled on the causes of burnout and the reasons for its rapidly increasing prevalence. But if you look at the underlying currents that shape the ways health care has changed in recent decades, there is one persistent trend. This trend is a plausible contender for the biggest cause of increased burnout: the dramatic fall in physician autonomy.

Hectic sixteen-hour shifts (at least) put a lot of pressure on doctors to accomplish their tasks and with the kinds of restrictions and procedures that they need to abide by, doctors have less control over how they do their job.

But if that were the case, why don't we see any changes to the current system? Why don't doctors simply demand for better schedules or more autonomy? Well, the reason is pretty simple. They are "supposed" to be selfless and not care about their personal interests over the greater good of the public.

No one thinks very highly of the doctor who objects to a quality improvement project on the grounds that it reduces her independence. We’re all supposed to focus on the quality of the care we provide, and if the best way to improve care is to reduce autonomy, that’s a trade we should all be happy to make. At some point, though, reductions in autonomy negatively impact care.

If the people we go to and consult about our physical ailments themselves are not able to take care of their health, how can we expect them to provide the care that we need? Doctors are humans too. They need to be treated as such.

(Image credit: Doximity)

Many prominent figures in the past have called many to action about the pressing concerns of their time, and the same thing can be said for this generation.

"We are the first generation to witness and experience the problems we ourselves created and we may very well be the last to do something about it" is the common rhetoric to direct our attention to an issue that has worldwide repercussions and incite us to do something about it.

Here are a few excerpts from history in which this has been used:

From W.R. Barnhart,

We are the first generation that can completely destroy ourselves. At the close of the First World War the younger generation was called the lost generation. If our present younger generation should be another lost generation it may be the last generation.

And former Seattle Mayor Michael Patrick,

The impacts of climate change are real, we are experiencing them today and they will continue to worsen. We’re the first generation to see the effects of climate change, and the last generation who can do anything about it. To refuse to use every tool at our disposal in this fight — to embrace inaction — is to endorse a trajectory that will lead to suffering, privation, and calamity.

It has a certain ring to it. If you think about it a bit more deeply, the generations from the past century until today might truly be the ones who will be the undoing of humanity. Has there ever been a period in history wherein the things that humans create could cause so much destruction in the blink of an eye?

Well, one might say that humans have been the undoing of humans since time immemorial with all the strife and wars that have been waged. But our instruments of warfare and progress as well as the cumulative effects of the things we did to get them are now being felt. We are probably racing against time at this point. It might seem inevitable. Unless we do something about it.

(Image credit: William Bossen/Unsplash)