Cartoonist Tom Gauld has new signs that you can post on the walls of your lair/laboratory. When reality begins to warp as a result of your experiments with dark matter and Skittles, it's not enough to simply slap up a biohazard warning sign.
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The University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany is offering three grants, each of which pays the equivalent of $1,887 to people who will commit to doing nothing. The Guardian describes the grant application:
The application form consists of only four questions: What do you not want to do? For how long do you not want to do it? Why is it important not to do this thing in particular? Why are you the right person not to do it?
The premises of the project are to promote human sustainability by inaction and to question the assumption that activity is good:
The idea behind the project arose from a discussion about the seeming contradiction of a society that promotes sustainability while simultaneously valuing success, Von Borries said. “This scholarship programme is not a joke but an experiment with serious intentions – how can you turn a society that is structured around achievements and accomplishments on its head?” [...]
All applications will form part of an exhibition named The School of Inconsequentiality: Towards A Better Life, opening at the Hamburg university in November. It will be structured around the question: “What can I refrain from so that my life has fewer negative consequences on the lives of others?”
-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Pixabay
The colorist SNAPPED
— IG: theBlingAddict (@stillT0XIC) August 18, 2020
pic.twitter.com/lWClZkRoET
Master hairstylist and colorist Agno Santos makes astounding sculptures with the hair of his clients. What I find most impressive is how he can style hair in such a way that it appears to change color as the head rotates.
-via Super Punch
They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they could invent the Pee-Week Herman and unleash him upon the visitors of the park.
Pixel Riot, which mixes up characters and movies through seamless digital editing, now brings to the screen a mashup of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Jurassic Park. Here, then, is the trailer for the cinema's next big thriller.
-via Dave Barry
Sora News 24 tells us about tsumekaki hon tsuzure ori, a traditional form of tapestry weaving that is unique to the Shiga prefecture in Japan. To press down threads smoothly into place, practitioners use their own fingernails, into which they file perfectly-spaced notches.
The prefectural government created this video in order to promote tsumekaki hon tsuzure ori, which translates as "nail-scratching genuine-tapestry weave."
Photo: 株式会社清原織物
Of Nero, the Roman historian Seutonius wrote:
In stature he was a little below the common height; his skin was foul and spotted; his hair inclined to yellow; his features were agreeable rather than handsome; his eyes grey and dull, his neck was thick, his belly prominent, his legs very slender, his constitution sound.
This add a bit of flavor to the work of digital artist Daniel Voshart, who used historical records with surviving portraiture to reconstruct images of Roman emperors from Augustus (d. 14) to Numerian (d. 284).
-via Geekologie
Mike Fahey of Kotaku reports that Strata Miniatures now offers a line of 3D printed Dungeons & Dragons miniatures for tabletop fun. They depict fantastic combat wheelchairs and their users who are fully prepared for the challenges of any quest. Fahey, a role-player who uses a wheelchair, is delighted:
My personal favorite, and the one I’ve purchased, is the elf rogue. She looks nothing like me, but her sly little grin is all me. I love playing the sneaky rogue in RPGs. I bet her chair has a silence spell of some sort cast on it. Look at those dagger-lined wheels! That is one badass wheelchair user.
Image: Strata Miniatures
Shigeru Ban, the architect, says that the new restrooms in a park in Tokyo have "smart glass" that turns opaque when someone is inside.
Do you see someone inside that stall? I do.
Anyway, The Guardian explains that the purpose of using transparent walls, aside from inducing anxiety, is so permit people to know if a stall is unoccupied before attempting to enter:
“There are two concerns with public toilets, especially those located in parks,” it said. “The first is whether it is clean inside, and the second is that no one is secretly waiting inside.”
The glass allegedly becomes opaque after you lock the door. So don't forget to do that.
-via Dave Barry
In 1587, England planted a colony of 117 people on Roanoke Island in North Carolina. Three years later, when an English vessel checked in on the colony, the entire population had vanished and the settlement lay in ruins. The only clue left behind was the word "CROATOAN" carved into a wooden palisade.
What happened to the colony? One of the earliest hypotheses was that it had moved into and joined a Native American community.
After eleven years of research, a team of archaeologists (both amateur and professional) has concluded that this hypothesis is probably correct. They found evidence of a mixed community of Europeans and Native Americans on Hatteras Island. The Virginian-Pilot reports:
Teams have found thousands of artifacts 4-6 feet below the surface that show a mix of English and Indian life. Parts of swords and guns are in the same layer of soil as Indian pottery and arrowheads.
The evidence shows the colony left Roanoke Island with the friendly Croatoans to settle on Hatteras Island. They thrived, ate well, had mixed families and endured for generations. More than a century later, explorer John Lawson found natives with blue eyes who recounted they had ancestors who could “speak out of a book,” Lawson wrote.
The two cultures adapted English earrings into fishhooks and gun barrels into sharp-ended tubes to tap tar from trees.
-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: PunkToad
Having some guests over for a long stay? Then this home in Fayette, Missouri is perfect for you and 9 of your friends (or 18 if they double up). That's because this house, which was built in 1875, was originally the home and office of the county sheriff.
A door off the kitchen leads down to the restored 9-cell facility, which is appropriately painted grey.
There's also a booking room, so you can process your guests for their indefinite stay. Each cell lock, the realtor confirms, still works. You can, though, still prank your brother-in-law by pretending that you've lost the key after he's stepped inside one of the cells.
-via Dave Barry | Photos: Travis Kempf
A work of art.... pic.twitter.com/bnj8fTwIMj
— Holy Cross W. Hockey (@HCrossWHockey) August 15, 2020
The anonymous artist goes to work, preparing the rink for the women's hockey team at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He uses no machines--only his skill, sharpened like the edge of a razor. It is a wonder to behold.
-via Super Punch
Archaeologists in South Africa have determined that a grass and ash bed in a cave dates back 200,000 years. Why did early humans choose materials for their bedding? One of the archaeologists quoted by UPI explained that the ash may have been an insect repellent:
"We speculate that laying grass bedding on ash was a deliberate strategy, not only to create a dirt-free, insulated base for the bedding, but also to repel crawling insects," lead study author Lyn Wadley, professor of archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, said in a news release. [...]
Because insects have trouble moving through fine powder, ash helped protect slumbering humans from the bites of insects. Atop the ash and grass bedding, researchers also found remnants of camphor bush, a plant that's still used as an insect repellant.
-via Instapundit | Photo: MADe
Rudy Willingham likes to amuse the good people of Seattle. He does so by leaving around the city paper cut-outs that, when viewed from the right angle, turn an everyday object into something much more. Last year, he described his approach to King 5 News:
"Using the paper and the hand, as we opposed to just Photoshopping things, gives it a human element that I think people really respond to. It's a little more childlike and not as digital or forced."
Hester Ford was born in 1904 in Lancaster, South Carolina. She lived and worked on a farm, growing and picking cotton, among other chores. She later married and had 12 children. Those 12 children eventually led to an estimated 120 great-grandchildren. On Saturday afternoon, many of those great-grand children were among the celebrants who drove by her home in Charlotte, North Carolina.
WCNC News talked with Mary Hill, one of Ford's grandchildren:
“It’s so important if you do have loved ones, no matter what their age, cherish them especially when they get older. and don’t forget to celebrate them,” Harris said. “Because life is so short.
For years, Hester Ford always thought she was born in 1905, but just last year the census bureau documents show she was born in 1904. Ford is now the oldest person in the country, and the seventh oldest person in the world, according to the Gerontology Research Group.
-via Debby Witt | Photo: Ford Family
The marvelously surreal world of artist Hugh Hayden now includes cast iron skillets and pots that are cast to resemble masks. Hayden explains that in his exhibition titled "American Food," the masks speak of the African diaspora offering a hazy look into the past:
The function and form of both the skillets as early African cookware and the masks’ ancestral and ceremonial origins are merged in a technique called sand-casting; Hayden adopts this rudimentary means of manufacture to celebrate the imperfectness of the materials, their colonial histories, and the inherent loss of detail in the reproduction process. Hayden likens the abstraction of the original objects that occurs in the sand-casting process as a form of diaspora that transforms the skillets into something layered and culturally syncretic.
-via Colossal | Photo: Lisson Gallery
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