Saturday, February 22, 2014

No finite point has meaning...

AQUARD.IO makes me want to put a webcam on the fish tank in my office except it's not as nice as this one. Plus you can interact with the fish here and feed them.

The Clyfford Still Museum has recreated online the 1959 exhibition of Still's work at Buffalo's Albright-Knox Gallery, Paintings by Clyfford Still. One example of what you'll find is shown below but as you walk interactively through the five galleries see if you can find PH-225 which is currently in the collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. On a related note, enjoy this 3-minute video on abstract expressionism.

Clyfford Still, PH-91, 1948
An interesting commentary on the nature of beauty. Supposing that humans are primarily driven by two sides of their natures - the near term, sensual, empirical and the long term coherence, order, and understanding - true beauty "speaks powerfully to both sides of our nature at the same time." More poignantly, "When we recognise beauty in a piece of music, or the graciousness of someone’s conduct, we see things that we know we have neglected or betrayed, and we feel an astonishing combination of anguish and delight." I think this is remarkably insightful.

A long article on post-Brave Marillion.

How do sounds and music make you feel? Try it yourself at Emotions of Sound.

How closely can you reproduce the chest-burster scene from Alien using only Legos? Pretty damn close.

This is basically an indictment of secondary (high school) education in America. From a National Science Foundation survey (pg 406) see the percentage of adults who knew the correct answer to:
  • The center of the earth is very hot. 84% (Thank you The Core.)
  • The continents have been moving their locations for millions of years and will continue to move. 83%
  • Does the earth go around the sun or the sun go around the earth? 74% (Facepalm.)
  • All radioactivity is man-made. 74%
  • Electrons are smaller than atoms. 53% (O-M-G)
  • Lasers work by focusing sound waves. 47% (This must be why my mother kept yelling for me to keep my music turned down.)
  • The universe began with a huge explosion. 39% (I blame the church for this one. Shame.)
  • It is the father's gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl. 63% 
  • Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria. 51% (And here's the explanation for why we find ourselves in trouble.)
  • Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals. 48% (Thank you again, religious dogma.)
Uh oh, don't get too comfortable thinking Platonic solids are the only game in town. Mathematicians have discovered a new class of solids - Goldberg polyhedra.
When universes (plural) collide they leave circular "bruises" as found in the cosmic background radiation.
What are the most popular coding languages of 2014? (I don't see how this can be accurate given that the year just started but...)  C++ comes in #3 at 13%. Tcl is "a bit" further down at 0.03%.

Only one of the 10 best new restaurants in Texas is in Fort Worth: Little Lilly, a sushi joint.

Wanna decorate like a man? Check out TRNK.

I get the feeling there's a lot of built-up pain in Cleveland. A Kickstarter project for a coloring book titled Disappointing Moments in Cleveland Sports has blown through its goal of $2,000 having received over $15,000 with 22 days to go.

Burned out on the Olympics yet?
  • Know the difference between a swizzle and a twizzle in figure skating. Neither do I nor do I after reading those explanations and watching the videos. 
  • Everything you need to know about curling.
Under Armour may be taking a beating over the U.S. speedskaters' suits but this MagZip zipper seems like a winner.

Gary Hill, Fat Man. Glass sculpture of the Fat Man atomic bomb. It was later filmed when dropped from a height of 30 feet.
Would Coke in any other glass taste the same? I used to drink a lot of Coke so this $20 leaded crystal Riedel glass has me curious. Or for my beer drinking friends, the Monti-Birra glass.

Feel like a Disney princess. In your undies.

Travel tips for Japanese by Japanese who visit the U.S. The bit about laughing made me laugh. I wonder if any of my Japanese friends can validate these perceptions.

When archeologists dig in the trash what do they expect to find other than stuff like this 19th century douche.

Poor dinosaurs. Every bodily function eventually gets fossilized.
  • Here is a fascinating discussion of how dinosaurs urinated including comparison with modern bird excretory functions - which taught me a thing or two - and revelation of fossilized dino pee-pee puddles (the size of a bathtub). 
  • And with just a few more moments things might have turned out differently, but a marine reptile was fossilized during the act of live birth.
...without an infinite reference point. ~Jean-Paul Sartre 

2 comments:

Francis Shivone said...

The Japanese observations were great. Read them all. I'm not sure how Lily's Sushi got in the list of Best restaurants since it's pretty new although I hope they do well. I did visit Spice on Magnolia the other day. Very good Thai.

John said...

Nice to hear from you, Francis.

I was hoping that my 1 Japanese reader would validate how true those views of Americans are.

Never heard of Lilly's until now, haven't made it to Spice yet. Heck, haven't even made it to Il Canne Roso yet.