This is especially true when looking at the real-life models artist Alexa Meade turns into living paintings:
She uses acrylics to turn 3 dimensional life into the flat, textured subjects of discrete works of art. In most of the pictures of her work that can be found on her flickr stream as well as her professional website, a few details give the secret away – hair that is too real to the eye, and distinctly flesh-colored fingers and toes:
There seems to be a new trend of game designers showing off their visual chops through the use of short point and click games. Little Wheel doesn’t buck this trend. It’s a sharp little sepia-toned adventure that can be finished in under 10 minutes with a stellar jazz soundtrack. Click the image below to play the game:
NASA is home to some serious science and some even more serious scientists, but apparently even NASA has a sense of humor. NASA took a cue for the military and started creating patches and other commemorative tchotchkes for space missions. In more recent years, however, the space agency has been commissioning posters that mimic the graphics on movie blockbuster posters:
A sultry female voice reads the call letters for “WHER – a thousand beautiful watts” on October 9, 1955 in Memphis Tennessee. This marks the start of something unique – the beginning of “all-girl” radio, opening doors for women-centered radio programs, stations, and collectives of today. The station, which was broadcast on AM frequency 1430, was the brain child of Sam Phillips. Phillips was a record producer with a sharp ear, responsible most notably for the discovery of Johnny Cash and Elvis. When Phillips, owner of Sun Recording Studios, sold Elvis’ recording contract to RCA, he had enough leverage to launch the radio station. According to Sam: “… I’d wanted a radio station all my life. Radio to me, it’s a living thing…” Women didn’t just set their voices free over the airwaves, they ran almost every aspect of the station including marketing, programming, and running the control board. The music mainly consisted of jazz selections highlighting Sinatra, Fitzgerald, and other greats. Phillips felt jazz suited the feel of the station and filled an empty niche in Memphis, Tennessee’s existing radio play.
The studio space was tiny but was designed to be lighthearted and play up the theme of an all female staff. Rooms were painted bright colors reminiscent of a doll house and in the same vein, was referred to as the doll’s den.
By many of today’s standards, the ideas of women and feminism promoted by the station would be considered restrictive and perhaps even the slightest bit misogynistic, but at the time the idea was groundbreaking and progressive. Assistant Manager and Program Director Dorothy Abbott was quoted as saying: “We are not trying to prove the we can get along in a world without men. We are simply trying to prove that when a group of women make up their collective minds that they are going to do something successfully, no force on earth can keep them from it.”
But all goods things come to an end and WHER was no exception. The station was recast as WWEE in 1971 and sported a mixed-gender staff.
The WHER story has been recently documented by the Kitchen Sisters, a powerhouse and award-winning storytelling duo consisting of Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva. They have created and produced more than 200 radio pieces including numerous segments for NPR in the past. They are currently working on a piece about girls around the world.
NPR has hosted the special on several programs, including most recently the eclectic show “Hearing Voices”. The 52 minute long segment can be heard currently on the Hearing Voices website. All the music in the piece was culled from WHER’s own library. Music credits can be found here.
For more:
http://www.cmshowcase.org/jimmuseum/wher_radio_station.htm
NPR’s Lost and Found Sound WHER page
Historian Jacquelyn Hall’s commentary on women’s roles and WHER
The science-inclined have a number of weird “days” to celebrate including mole day on Oct. 23rd celebrating Avogadro’s number, square root day on March 3rd, and today – pi day. π is intimately connected the circle, representing the relationship between it’s diameter and circumference. We are most familiar with the short-hand, rounded version of pi as 3.14, but the number can be calculated out to trillions of digits after the decimal place.
So what to do on Pi day? Well, if you’re like most people you’ll go about your daily business without much of a stray thought regarding the science holiday, but if you’re MIT, you post your admissions online that day as a virtual tip of your hat. Some people indulge in writing pi-kus, the nerd’s equivalent to haikus. Check out Piday.org’s website and send an e-card, or read CNN’s interesting and rather lengthy article on the day. Perhaps the most trippy thing you can do today is to watch the film “Pi” online, a 1998 non-traditional thriller from director Darren Aronofsky about a man’s descent into a number-fueled paranoia.
I’ve long been interested in octopi (the plural of octopus, as octopuses doesn’t quite work). I’ve recalled prior stories on their mimicing ability and tales originating from aquariums about their resident octopi crawling out of their tanks, into others nearby, and snacking on the exhibit fish. Or perhaps this story about an octopus who escaped a tank in an Australia aquarium and bided his time in a drain waiting for an opportunity to escape. They’re incredibly smart animals which has suprised researchers as they expect these traits in longer-lived organisms. Most species of octopus will lives less than five years. Nevertheless, according to a fascinating article in Discover Magazine:
“Anatomy confirms what behavior reveals: Octopuses and cuttlefish have larger brains, relative to body weight, than most fish and reptiles, larger on average than any animals save birds and mammals. Although an octopus brain differs from a typical vertebrate’s brain—it wraps around the esophagus instead of resting in a cranium—it also shares key features such as folded lobes, a hallmark of complexity, and distinct visual and tactile memory centers. It even generates similar electrical patterns.”
The latest in a series of reports about octopi doing a little marine yoga and arranging their bodies in shapes reminiscent of other ocean life is a video of an octopus in the Caribbean mimicing a flounder (in some senses, he almost looks like a skate to me):
This is the first Atlantic species discovered to do this, but scientists have known about the Indonesian mimic octopus for quite some time:
Not only, are these creatures masters of mimicry, but it appears they also join the list or organisms observed using tools. Another indonesian species, the veined octopus has been spotted carrying around coconut shells that they can use to form a shelter when predators threaten. Read more here.
The content for this post has been circulating on Nat Geo, Yahoo, and TreeHugger among other places. This strange soot-colored King penguin took both researchers and Nat Geo contributing editor Andrew Evens by surprise:
“Our group from Lindblad Expeditions spotted this very unique bird at Fortuna Bay on the subantarctic island of South Georgia. Out of several thousand pairs of king penguins, this was the only individual that was entirely black although earlier in the morning I had spotted another that showed muted coloration. Recent science papers (PDF) show that the trait has been documented only a handful of times in South Georgia. Some fellow travelers recall seeing a melanistic penguin at St. Andrew’s Bay, also on South Georgia.”
The black penguin was shown to Dr. Allen Baker, ornithologist and professor of Environmental and Evolutionary Studies at the University of Toronto and head of the Department of Natural History at the Royal Ontario Museum for further feedback. When he recovered from his initial astoundment, he noted the most unusual aspect of the bird’s coloring was the areas of a King Penguin that are white/light colored generally are so because they lack melanin, the pigment that allows for skin, feathers, and fur to take on color. This presumable mutation has in a sense allowed the penguin’s natural pigmentation to go beserk. Dr. Baker also noticed this particular bird appears to have notably over-sized legs as compared to a normal specimen (you can see this in the photograph if you compare our black penguin with the normally colored penguin in the background).
The probability of finding a King penguin illustrating some kind of non-typical coloration is approximately 1 in 250,000. Because this is such an unusual mutation, the likelihood of finding more of these jet-black birds is anticipated at far, far less. Read the blog post at National Geographic’s Intelligent Travel Blog.
A whole episode of National Public Radio’s show Fresh Air was dedicated to the Carolina Chocolate Drops, undoubtedly because they are so fascinating. The group is an all-black string band, embracing components of old-timey style and instrumentation with banjo, fiddle, jug, bones, and even kazoo, while fusing it with newer elements of pop and hip-hop. The mix doesn’t just work, it transcends.
During the episode,Terry Gross not only speaks to musicians Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemons, and Justin Robinson about their influences and backstory, but also persuades them to play around with their instruments and break down exactly what’s happening in their songs – a musical show and tell.
Yes, you’ll hear songs that sound like they nestle in well with the classic string-band style, often because they are in fact older songs with strong tradition tied into their histories. Songs like “Your Baby Ain’t Sweet Like Mine”,a song attributed to Papa Charlie Jackson, a New Orlean’s banjo player from the early 1900’s:
They are equally able to rock the modern tunes as well as evidenced by their version of Blue Cantrall’s Hit Em Up Style:
Check out the band’s official website for tour dates, more videos, and pictures.
This amazing composite image of a tree three hundred some-odd feet tall was featured as a centerfold in last year’s October edition of National Geographic. Nat Geo sent their photographer, Michael Nichols, to live among the redwoods for a year. Read NPR’s article about the process of taking the photo which proved challenging and arduous:
“In a recent lecture at National Geographic in Washington, D.C., Nichols described his frustrations. Eventually, though, he devised a way to do redwoods justice. It involved three cameras, a team of scientists, a robotic dolly, a gyroscope, an 83-photo composite and a lot of patience.”
Michael Nichols work provided the see-it-to-believe it visuals the associated Redwood article needed. I also love the on-line format of National Geographic because of the full use of the medium to provide amazing content associated with their features, like the interactive maps and wildlife atlas of the Redwoods featured here. Also see more of Michael Nichol’s photo work by clicking on his photo of the white rhinoceros below:
Help Sushi Cat find his true love while having a little fun at the same time:
A Bit of Stardust 