Yesterday, I blogged about a simple classroom science experiment that turns an eggshell into a geode-like object by using copper sulfate. In the comments, Captain Womble suggested that we check out this amazing work of art by Roger Hiorns.
In 2008, Hiorns sealed off a bedroom in a London apartment building and flooded it with copper sulfate. After a month, he removed the residue and then cut the entire room out of the building.
Hiorns calls the work Seizure. He was surprised by how the crystals formed over the walls and objects in the bedroom. Hiorns says:
To some degree, we got it wrong in terms of what we were expecting. But we got it wrong on the right side of being wrong, I think.
Perhaps because I'm older, selfies seem very weird to me. I've taken only one in my life, and only because U-Haul required it for its self-checkout procedure.
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So I strongly approve of this project by photographer Stephanie Leigh Rose. She photographs herself apparently dead in front of famous landmarks. Her meaning, though, is deeper than my own general loathing of selfies:
All STEFDIES images occur spontaneously in my daily life, the images the viewer happens to see are the 25% of images that are useable. This is why a STEFDIES image is the opposite of a selfie. A selfie has controlled conditions, specific lighting, makeup/hair/wardrobe, an agenda, and is focused on the individual personality- it is a contrived and manipulated image distorted to achieve a desired result. STEFDIES is the polar opposite- I get one chance to get the shot, if it doesn’t happen, c’est la vie. We have one life to live, and we don’t get re-do’s- and i would like to think i try to capture that feeling, that fleeting sense of life and its impermanence, in my photos.
You can see examples of Rose's STEFDIES on her Instagram page.
I've just discovered the amazing twitter feed Chemical Reactions, which goes by the appropriate handle of @holdmybeaker. It shows astonishing chemical reactions, many of which are much faster than this geode-like crystalline structure made with copper sulfate. Some of them are classroom demonstrations that may have been a bit more dangerous than the teachers planned.
Shintaku Kanako, a Japanese artist, pours paint over her nude body to create vividly colorful images. She often marks them with the caption "I'm still alive." The creation of these living paintings is a performance art piece, as you can see from this video of Kanako painting herself in the woods.
Spoon & Tamago explains how these performances express the artist's journey out of a troubled childhood:
Eventually, to cope, she learned to separate her mind from her body, creating a state of consciousness that was somewhere in-between life and death. But our skin is like an antenna, she says, and by covering it in paint, the artist is able to confirm that, indeed, she’s still alive. Her solo exhibition in Kyoto last summer was titled “I’m still alive.” The extremely personal performance is her antidote to the painful human experience.
Shintaku’s performances run between 4 and 8 hours. Every 20 or 30 minutes, after the previous layer of paint dries, the artist applies a new layer, allowing it to drip down her body. She mixes starch into her paints to create more viscosity.
If continuous, mass surveillance is our future, then we'll need ways to protect ourselves from our would-be masters. That's why Noma Studio, a design office in Poland, developed the Incognito. It claims that wearing this mask makes facial recognition software unable to pin down a firm identity. So far, it works on Facebook's facial recognition system. Dezeen reports:
They made use of the site's DeepFace deep-learning facial-recognition system, which accurately identifies the people pictured and asks if you'd like to tag them.
Due to the size and arrangement of each of the elements of the mask, the prominent features on the human face are disturbed, and face-recognition algorithms in surveillance cameras aren't equipped to read them correctly.
Lauren Purnell, an artist in London, carefully selects, cuts, and shapes bits of food into wondrous scenes. They're surprisingly realistic and, no doubt, completely edible. That's why her site is appropriately called Culinary Canvas.
Sexual options can become very limited with physical disabilities. That's why designers Hsin-Jou Huang, Szu-Ying Lai, and Chia-Ning Hsu of Taiwan developed the Ripple. It's a kit that provides a variety of physical, auditory, and olfactory stimuli across a person's entire body.
A caregiver may need help the user put the suit on. But after that, the user can control the Ripple in private using a remote control. Natashah Hitti at Dezeen describes how it works:
The body suit features heated, inflatable air cushions positioned at the typically sensitive areas of the body, such as the breasts and thighs. These gradually inflate to put pressure on certain body parts that simulate the feeling of human touch.
Other stimulations such as vibration, for women, and pressure in the genital area, for men, are also incorporated into the body suit.
Ripple also includes a facial mask to enhance the experience, which boasts three main purposes – the first being to block out any artificial light.
Secondly, accompanying earphones on the mask play ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) sounds to promote relaxation, and lastly the mask releases pheromones to reduce any anxiety and arouse the user's sexual desire.
At the end of each session, the cushions in the body suit – more of which are positioned on the shoulders and stomach – inflate and heat up to mimic the feeling of a hug, helping the user feel at ease after an orgasm.
What a wonderful invention! It could greatly improve the life experiences of people with disabilities.
A century ago, it was conventional and accepted medical wisdom that good health required long exposure of the skin to natural sunlight as a means of producing vitamin D in the human body. This lead to the widespread use of heliotherapy--that is, sunbathing.
To facilitate efficient sunbathing, French physician Dr. Jean Saidman constructed this solarium--a sunbathing facility--in the French Alps in 1930. As the sun moves across the sky, the elevated platform rotates to maximize exposure.
Saidman built a total of three solariums (solaria?): two in France and one in British India. The French ones closed in 1937 and 1943.
The last of these solariums still exists, although it has not been used since 1996. The 2013 video above shows what's left of it.
You can read more about these rotating solariums at Amusing Planet.
Would it be more polite to say that Tarantino is inspired by other films or that he makes homages to other films and film movements within his own movies?
Maybe, but even Tarantino himself says that he steals content from other films. His works are, in addition to his own original ideas, pastiches of other movies.
There is at least one error in this otherwise excellent exploratory Insider video: Reservoir Dogs came out in 1992, not 1997.
This colorful building must appeal to the whimsy of its regular users, which consists of kindergarten students. This school in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam has windows that, all appearances to the contrary, are carefully chosen to provide daylight and ventilation throughout the day.
I especially like the English vocabulary stairs, which could certainly spawn imaginative games among the students.
Actress and cosplayer Angel Giuffria was ready for action at the recent Comic-Con in San Diego. She's an amputee and uses that status to full advantage while cosplaying. Most recently, she began wielding an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.
Why can't you find a nice guy to date? Sadly, there aren't any men around at all. In the meantime, here's a muscly set of speakers that will whisper sweet nothings into your ear in a deep, sensual baritone. That's why they're appropriately called the Hero of Maiden Hugging Speakers.
You can control your boyfriend with an app on your smartphone. He's Bluetooth compatible and responds to your every command.
Would you like one? Sora News 24 has more information, including how you can enter a contest to win one.
This is Boram. She's six years old and already richer than you and I ever will be.
She's made her millions with a wildly successful YouTube channel in which she reviews toys and plays with them. She is so skilled at these tasks that she recently purchased a multi-million dollar house. CNN laments:
Boram bought the 9.5 billion Korean won ($8 million) building in the trendy Seoul suburb of Gangnam earlier this year, through the Boram Family company, which was set up by the YouTuber's parents, according to a public real estate registration document.
Boram is not an outlier. Some of the highest-paid YouTubers are kids:
According to Forbes, the highest earning YouTuber last year was seven-year-old Ryan Kaji, the American star of Ryan ToysReview. In 2018, he earned an estimated $22 million through his channel, which has attracted over 20.8 million subscribers.
Other young stars include five-year-old American Tydus, who appears on his family's YouTube channel Trav and Cor, which has 3.1 million subscribers.
YouTubers make money in a number of ways, including through taking a cut of the ads that play on their videos, and by partnering with brands to sell merchandise or include products in their content. Boram, for instance, sometimes links out to products featured in her video reviews.
This isn't just a cane toad. It's a Queensland cane toad, which means that it's likely to be more well-endowed than toads in the states of Western Australia and New South Wales. Those toads, according to a recent study of the subject, tend to have testicles about 30% smaller than their neighbors.
That may be a good thing. ABC News explains that there may be an evolutionary advantage to smaller testicles:
Researchers have previously found these frontline toads are generally bigger, stronger, and able to travel greater distances.
But it seems that the superior physical prowess comes at a cost, and that cost is the size of their testicles.
"There seems to be a trade-off between having long legs and being very mobile, and potentially your testes size," Dr Friesen said.
These frontier toads in Western Australia and New South Wales have less competition for potential mates, so they can do perfectly well with smaller testicles:
But the other reason is that being amphibians, cane toads have external fertilisation and that introduces the potential for "sperm wars".
"We have seen cases of this where there are multiple males on top of a particular female," Dr Friesen said.
But sperm wars are less likely for the big toads that are good at travelling to new territory where there is less chance of competition to fertilise eggs.
"When you get out to the frontline, it might be harder to find a mating partner, so there's less likelihood for that sperm competition," Dr Friesen said.
In general, a species that has greater sexual promiscuity tends to have larger testicles, which is why evolutionary biologists find them so fascinating:
"A bush cricket has the largest testes on the planet for their body size, and their testicles are 14 per cent of their body mass, where ours are well below 1 per cent," he said.
"There's great variation, and that variation we correlate with mating systems or how promiscuous the sexes are and how much sex they have with other individuals."
Cosplayer Krystle Starr appeared at Comic-Con with this new outfit. It combines Princess Leia in her iconic slave outfit from Return of the Jedi with Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager, including the Borg's hand and optical implants. Fun will now commence.
