The Art of Tiago Hoisel

Tiago Hoisel is a Brazilian graphic artist/cartoonist specializing in rendering in Photoshop and (I assume) Illustrator and other rendering programs. Anyway, his work is awesome. A few examples, below.

[NOTE clicking on the first image below takes you to Lightbox on Blogger (displaying all the images in a strip) -- you can also see all the images in this post by clicking on the "Read more" link or you can go to the site here. If you choose "Read more" and click on any image but the first one it will take you to information on that image -- Hoisel's descriptions of the work and in a few instances animated gifs, etc., showing his process.]

A User's Guide to Art Speak

Photo from Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

At The Guardian Andy Beckett discusses "art speak" -- something that's now been dubbed "International Art English" in a widely circulated article by an artist and an art critic. Mr. Beckett describes it:

If you've been to see contemporary art in the last three decades, you will probably be familiar with the feelings of bafflement, exhaustion or irritation that such gallery prose provokes. You may well have got used to ignoring it. As Polly Staple, art writer and director of the Chisenhale Gallery in London, puts it: "There are so many people who come to our shows who don't even look at the programme sheet. They don't want to look at any writing about art."

With its pompous paradoxes and its plagues of adverbs, its endless sentences and its strained rebellious poses, much of this promotional writing serves mainly, it seems, as ammunition for those who still insist contemporary art is a fraud. Surely no one sensible takes this jargon seriously?

David Levine and Alix Rule do. ...

      * * *
They christened it International Art English, or IAE, and concluded that its purest form was the gallery press release, which – in today's increasingly globalised, internet-widened art world – has a greater audience than ever. "We spent hours just printing them out and reading them to each other," says Levine. "We'd find some super-outrageous sentence and crack up about it. Then we'd try to understand the reality conveyed by that sentence."

"International Art English" is a great neologism. IAE is the patois of the ignorant attempting to describe the ineffable.

I am so happy with that last sentence, I should stop. But ...

This is Not a Cat

This is a owlette wit a cracker on its head. Via Nothing to do with Arborath.

The Ludic Lifestyle

A provocative thesis -- The Elimination of Work by Bob Black -- but it doesn't explain (a) how resources are distributed; (b) what ownership and property entail; (c) how output is valued; (d) whether the system is monetized and, if so, how; (e) how cooperation is rewarded or encouraged; (f) how distasteful activities get done; (g) how a ludic system is established, transitioned to, and enforced; (h) how ... look, I'm all for a "ludic lifestyle," but it is not immediately apparent how that can be achieved (or even whether it should be achieved) on societal level.  The "ludic" approach, rather, is one perhaps best sought by the individual in their own manner. (I'm also not sure "ludic" is exactly the word the author wants, but he uses it so I'm going with it.) Video via MetaFilter.

In Veritate Pulchritudo

The Latin motto generator is useful if you need a Latin motto. I don't know why anyone would need one, but should you, I'm there for you.

(And, by the way, not that you asked, sorry, in veritate pulchritudo is not Keats's "beauty is truth, truth beauty"; it's "in truth, beauty." There's a subtle but beautiful difference.)

The Challenger Disaster 27 Years On

Yesterday was the 27th anniversary of the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, caused by the failure of a frozen rubber o-ring in one of its booster rockets. I was not going to posted on it, and I might have taken the easy route and posted Richard Feynman's famous appendix to the official report on the disaster in which he demonstrates the causes, briefly, and discusses the bureaucratic role of management in underestimating the risk and pushing forward the launch. (Here's a related video.) But, via Miss Cellania, I saw this video today, and I like it best:

The (New) Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project

The (New) Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project is "[a]n ongoing quest to track the Daily Mail's classification of inanimate objects into two types: those that cause cancer, and those that cure it. Inspired by and a direct continuation of the Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project ...." It is hilarious. This is a genius level idea.

While I'm on it, The New Yorker has a lengthy article on Dr. Mehmet Oz of The Dr. Oz Show. Oz is a highly qualified, highly successful cardio-thoracic surgeon who loves the limelight and has sort of promoted alternative therapies unsupported by evidence, as he acknowledges. "Sort of" because he seems to suggest they work, or might work, and does not seem to bothered by evidence to the contrary. He's being "open minded." His wife, Lisa, who is the daughter of a very prominent heart surgeon, is, in fact, a "Reiki master." That means she attempts to heal through a "spiritual practice" of laying on hands. It's not even ancient voodoo: it was invented by a Japanese Buddhist monk in the 1920's. (And I don't doubt that many people find it comforting, and that this can be therapeutic in itself -- but it's not treatment.)

From Smithsonian, the Story of a Russian Family that Lived Apart from All Civilization for 40 Years

If this was not published by Smithsonian Magazine I'd find it hard to believe. In 1978 a six member family, thee Lykovs, was discovered living in a very remote part of southern Siberia, the Abakan, where they had been since 1938. They had no knowledge of World War II or, indeed, anything outside of their lives during that period. Two of the children had never seen anyone but family members.

They had fled into the wilderness in fear of religious prosecution. They were "Old Believers," a sect of very conservative Russian Orthodox who were first persecuted by Tsar Peter the Great, and who had split off from the main line of the church in opposition to reforms, an event known as the "raskol."

The Lykovs repeatedly faced starvation, their metal pots rotted away, their seeds and few crops sometimes eaten away by animals. Their lives were phenomenal acts of endurance in the bitter cold and short summers without any technology, with few clothes all filled with patches. They, of course, had never seen television, did not believe people had been to the moon, were amazed by transparent plastic.

Sadly several of the Lykovs died shortly after they were discovered. Their patriarch, however, lived until 1988, and one daughter still lives today. Go to the story for the full fascinating tale. And, with an update via Kotke, here's a three part YouTtube series (1, 2, 3) of an untranslated Russian documentary on the family.

(N.B. I've noticed several sites refer to the place they were living as "the Taiga". "Taiga," in fact, refers generally to boreal forest all across Russia and Canada.)

Return of the Sun

A superlative short video:

Return of the Sun from Glen Milner on Vimeo.

Because I Can Post Anything I Want

Here's a list of recent interesting crap:

• Thanks Obama! (because anything that goes wrong must be Obama's fault)
• Inane conspicuous consumption (a video of a $5 million garage)
• Know your wines
• Driving in Russia (a short ani gif)
• Parrots
• I have suspicions this may be photoshopped (okay, via Kotke, here's a video. Holly shit.)
• 40 cute things
• Know  your  whines
• What came first, the chicken or the egg? (an elementary but not bad video)
• A multi insturment New Orleans street musician
• A superb street performer with a soccer ball
• A trombone quartet playing Kansas's Carry On Wayward Son
• According to Buzzfeed, the 35 dumbest things ever said on the internet (this blog once again not recognized)
• A chainsaw wielding robot (not as safe as it sounds)
• 1907 to 1930 Paris in color photographs
• Sperm whales adopted a deformed dolphin -- also here's a cool video of a dolphin repeatedly seeking out a diver's help to cut a net off of it -- also here's some divers who came upon some whales 50 meters down
• In other animal news, 15,000 crocodiles escaped from a farm in South Africa, 11 live otters were found in luggage in Thailand, a chimp will only go out in the snow if he has a blanket to wear while a funny little monkey ventured out in the snow wearing a coat, an abandoned turtle lived for perhaps 30 years in a storeroom before being found alive, and an abandoned dog ate its own tail.

We should do this more often.

Tarsier Facts

From the inestimable Ze Frank, via Miss Cellania, 

As to the tarsier's innocent wide-eyed appearance, well you might watch this short clip (from the BBC's Life and narrated by the wonderful and ubiquitous and also inestimable David Attenborough). To quote, in part: "Tarsiers are the only totally carnivorous primates on Earth." (Okay, Ze Frank says this, too, and sounds like Morgan Freeman, but he probably got it from Attenborough, who sounds like Attenborough.)

An Education in Patent Law and How to Make a Measured, Decent Response, by OXO

Quirky (a company where, for a fee, people can submit inventions and, if enough people are prepared to support it/buy it, it gets made) recently staged a very public protest against the company OXO for supposedly stealing an idea from one of its inventors. It turns out the product was first patented in 1919 (and was free from patent in 1936). Quirky's designer's design was not original. And OXO documents that, in fact, there are numerous instances where Quirky products closely resemble preexisting OXO products. And, in fact, according to OXO Quirky is right down the street from OXO and Quirky did not bother to discuss the situation with OXO before staging its massive "protest." Throughout its response, though, OXO is not inflammatory but measured and professional. I've looked at both their sites (I have no idea why I took a shine to this), and I gotta say to me OXO's is all about how to do it right; Quirky's seems to be all about how to do it wrong. (Via MetaFilter ... and, yeah, I try to credit my sources.)

Losing My Religion in a Major Scale rather than a Minor

Via Boing Boing, this is REM's classic Losing My Religion with the minor scale notes digitally converted a major. The shift is both subtle and shocking:

From MajorScaled Tv at Facebook.

Here's the original:

"Glass Microbiology" by Luke Jerram

"Glass Microbiology" by Luke Jerram, and incredible colorblind artist, consist of blown and shaped glass sculptures in the form of viruses and bacteria. They are vaguely -- very vaguely -- reminiscent for me of the incredible glass flower collection at Harvard created at the end of the 19th century to aid in the study of botany.

Jarem, by the way, has a substantial body of other beautiful and thoughtful sculptural and glass work. Here's a few examples of his glass microbiology work (more below break) or by clicking on any picture):

E. coli

Fuck Yeah Dinosaur Art

Fuck Yeah Dinosaur Art is a tumblr blog I noticed from somewhere -- I think the awesome tumblr Scientific Illustration, but I can't find the link back -- but anyway, Fuck Yeah Dinosaur Art is fun to look at and often funny. Samples from some of its most recent posts:

Heart Performing Led Zeppelin? Actually ... Yes (no, no, not the band Yes, "yes," as in this is actually really good)

Via Boing Boing:

The Golden Rectangle, Golden Ratio, and Phi as Design Criteria

James Gurney, of the wonderful blog Gurney Journey and Dinotopia fame, has a series of five posts on the golden rectangle and it's key ratio 1 : 1.618 ... (which is known as the golden ratio or φ). The crux is that the importance of the rectangle and the ratio is overstated and, while not belittling "mystical feeling" (my phrase and quotes), the supposed mystical role of the ratio is not factually grounded. He says it alot better than I could. So here's a list of his posts (with a brief description for each):

Part 1: Mythbusting the golden mean (the Parthenon) This post -- with extensive links at the end -- outlines the well established view and evidence that the Parthenon is not based on the golden rectangle or golden mean.
Part 2: The golden mean and Leonardo This post discusses Leonardo's "Vitruvian Man" drawing and that it reflects the ratios advocated by Roman scholar and architect Vitruvius, which are not the golden mean. that doesn't mean that Leonardo was unfamiliar with φ, but it is not evident it was central to his work.
Part 3: How the golden mean caught on with artists This post discusses the occurence of
φ in nature and how this developed a sort of mystical relevance for many which was given a sort of historical gloss.Part 4: The golden mean and the human body This post discusses the use of the golden mean by a number of artists, most notably Bauhaus architect/designers and Le Corbusier, and takes a middle view that we can learn from their work but it is not factually accurate on all counts.
Part 5: Last question about the golden rectangle The last question Gurney asks is whether the assertion that work designed with the golden rectangle/golden ratio is, in fact, more aesthetically pleasing. It can be if that is what appeals to the viewer, but it is not inherently so.

Bonobo: Cirrus

In the words of Mark Farauenfelder of Boing Boing, "best viewed after licking your pet Sonoran Desert toad."  (My experience was the toad is actually not necessary -- this is just a great video.)

Beyond Synthetic Neanderthals: Synthetic DNA Computers

I posted a few days ago about Harvard biologist George Church's views about the likelihood that Neanderthals will be created/born in the foreseeable future and that DNA techniques will ultimately to design machines and devices. Admittedly those views seem farfetched (as well as presenting ethical issues). Anyway, now comes news in the leading peer reviewed  journal Nature of the development of "practical, high-capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA." To quote the summary:

Previous DNA-based information storage approaches have encoded only trivial amounts of information or were not amenable to scaling-up, and used no robust error-correction and lacked examination of their cost-efficiency for large-scale information archival. Here we describe a scalable method that can reliably store more information than has been handled before. We encoded computer files totalling 739 kilobytes of hard-disk storage and with an estimated Shannon information of 5.2 × 106 bits into a DNA code, synthesized this DNA, sequenced it and reconstructed the original files with 100% accuracy. Theoretical analysis indicates that our DNA-based storage scheme could be scaled far beyond current global information volumes and offers a realistic technology for large-scale, long-term and infrequently accessed digital archiving.

The idea of DNA based computers is not new. This study shows a significant step in this direction, and that regardless of computing methodology biologic based encoding seems a very good method for digital memory.

A bonus note: as to the history of computing (including memory methods), this video from 1983 is very cool.

People Movin'

People Movin' is a website that uses HTML 5 to generate graphic presentations of the number of people moving from one country to another. It's designer, Carlo Zapponi, created it as an example of tools he is developing to generate data graphics using HTML. In theory the site could be designed to scrape the data continuously, giving something similar to a real time sense of the flow of data (for an example of that, see the wind map), but I doubt sufficient population data is available to make that feasible. The data shown is for 2010.

One thing I had not previously known but, accepting his data sources, do now:  People Movin' shows about 10% of the population of Mexico relocated to the USA in 2010. The total number -- about 11 million people -- dwarfs any other migration from one country to another that year. The USA as an immigration destination also dwarfs any other country.

The charts are cool to browse through though I think so far of not much use but the wow factor. Anyway -- it's worth a look. Via Neatorama.

Exciting News About the New Hobbit Movies!

People are Awesome -- 2010

The videos the last three evenings were linked from Kottke.

Kumbh Mela

Kumbh Mela is a Hindu festival held every three years in which the faithful wash themselves in one of four rivers sacred to Hinduism -- the Ganges, Yamuna, Godavari, and Shipra. Each Kumbh Mela involves visiting that cycle's river at a specific festival site, so each site and river is visited once every twelve years. (Actually, there are also "half" festivals and the Yamuna is visited where it joins the Ganges and, supposedly, the Sarasavati -- the collection of the three rivers known as the "Triveri Sangam" -- so some of the rivers are visited more than once.)

This year is the Maha Kumbh Mela ("maha" means "great") in Allahabad (also known as Prayag, its Hindu name; "Allahabad," the name given by the Muslim Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1583, means ~"City of God" using the Arabic for "god"), which is the location of the Triveri Sangam. It's a big deal, supposedly the largest gathering of people on Earth. The Boston Globe's photo site The Big Picture has a spread on it, and here are a few of the images:

Two Developments in Solar Cells

Solar cells are, of course, one of the great hopes for a renewable energy source, but they're expensive to make and install and not that efficient. (See also these general articles on solar efficiency and grid parity.)

Two recent theoretical developments may improve the situation, though neither is a cure all (and there is no cure all for solar power without radically different approaches than silicon based solar cells).

First, scientists in Finland have developed a nano surface (theoretically) that traps a large amount of light -- a better development than current anti-reflective surfaces which still allow a significant amount of light to pass through. They believe the surface is capable of being printed on at low cost.

Second, Swedish and German scientists, along with a scientist from China, have developed a method for growing micro wires of indium and phosphorus which can capture and convert more sunlight to electricity. This process hopefully can be further tweaked to increase efficiency and may be developed for application on industrial scales, though that seems a ways away. This method also apparently lends itself to multijunction solar cells in which multiple layers of different types of solar cells capture more sunlight, though still less than 50%.

As a bonus, Scientific American has a nice interactive graphic on solar cells work.

Conservative Gun Rights Group Building Themselves a Prison Citadel

As reported at Talking Points Memo and , apparently, the Drudge Report (whose archives link to this "article"), a conservative group known as the "III Citadel Project" is planning on building a fortress in Idaho where they can live with each other and their guns. It will have high walls (three levels), guard towers, housing made out of concrete, limited access, controlled conditions and conduct on the interior, and mandatory drilling. In other words, it sounds like a prison. But that's their choice.

The "III" in the name "III Citadel Project" represents their belief -- shared by a number of extremist groups  -- that only three percent of Americans fought in the Revolutionary War. Three percent of the current U.S. population is more than 9 million people, which is the importance of the "statistic": that's enough, they believe, to "win."

They say they are going to abide by all "Constitutional" federal and state laws. When our society has a dispute about what is constitutional, we have an independent body, called judges, who decide in specific cases whether the law is constitutional. I suspect, however, that  III Citadel Project believes it will be making its own assessments on constitutionality.

Where I think things really break down, though, is that the folks behind the III Citadel Project have a particularly odd idea of "liberty."

People are Awesome -- 2011

"Orson Wells on Cold Reading"

Via Cynical C. Worth seeing if, for no other reason, to learn what a "shuteye" is. That, and Orson Wells could tell a great story.

Inauguration Photos

There are a lot of pictures of the inauguration out there -- here's a few links:

• In Focus (The Atlantic) on inauguration day
• President Obama's First Four Years
• New York Times on inauguration day
• National Geographic with more of a historical take
• The Wall Street Journal with a huge spread
• President George W. Bush -- oh wait, he didn't go

A "Live Action" "Animation"

This beautiful little short combines animation and comic tropes with live action storytelling in a very creative way. A nice little story well told.

People are Awesome. That is All.

Helping Scientific American's Michael Shermer with Basic Statistics

Michael Shermer, who writes for Scientific American -- but, I might add, is not a scientist (he has a PhD in history and calls himself "Dr. Shermer") -- has a recent column entitled The Liberal's War on Science. To the extent the thesis of that column is that there are a lot of liberals who hold unscientific ideas and values, he's right. And he is right to decry that in general.

But that is not, alas, his thesis.  As you can tell from his title, he argues that liberals taken as a whole are against science. I don't know if all liberals should be lumped together except for the most general purposes any more than most conservatives should. But, regardless, such lumping he does, and he gets it a bit wrong.

Let's look: he states that 41% of Democrats are young Earth creationists (he says 58% of Republicans are), and that 19% of Democrats doubt global warming (while 51% of Republicans do). Accepting these as valid (he does not provide the study), they still unfortunately do not support his thesis of a "liberal a war on science." Let's help him.

By his numbers 59% of Democrats -- a majority -- are not young Earth creationists. So if "not being a young Earth creationists" is a measure of being "scientific" (and all Democrats are liberals, as he equates them), then a majority of liberals are scientific. Hmmm. And, by his numbers, a majority of Republicans, 58%, are not scientific.  Likewise, if believing in global warming is a measure of being "scientific," as he asserts, then the fact that 81% of Democrats believe in global warming would mean the majority of liberals are scientific. On the other hand, the fact that a majority of Republicans, 51%, doubt global warming, would make them not scientific. Again, hmmmm.

Synthetic Neanderthals

In an interview at Spiegel Online (Deutsch link) Harvard biologist Georgia Church explains (English link) discusses how recombinant DNA/stem cell techniques could in the near future lead to neanderthals being created/born:

Church: The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has actually been done. The next step would be to chop this genome up into, say, 10,000 chunks and then synthesize these. Finally, you would introduce these chunks into a human stem cell. If we do that often enough, then we would generate a stem cell line that would get closer and closer to the corresponding sequence of the Neanderthal. We developed the semi-automated procedure required to do that in my lab. Finally, we assemble all the chunks in a human stem cell, which would enable you to finally create a Neanderthal clone.

SPIEGEL: And the surrogates would be human, right? In your book you write that an "extremely adventurous female human" could serve as the surrogate mother.

Church: Yes. However, the prerequisite would, of course, be that human cloning is acceptable to society.

That this is possible and in the relatively near future will be feasible is not news. Biologist PZ Myers of the very widely read blog Pharyngula gets all stinky about the ethics of this.

A Simple Electric Motor

This can also be used as a battery tester. Just sayin'.

Video for Shugo Tokumaru's Katachi

The animation, below, is by Polish animating duo Katarzyna Kijek and Przemysław Adamski (link to their blog) -- via Colossal.

Colossal has links to other cool videos by Kijek and Adamski -- one stop motion animation for a music video made from drawings with markers, and another for a film they're making.

Father Builds His Son a Driveable Carbon Fiber Toy Car

If this is legit -- and I admit I'm a little skeptical -- a father in China built his son a toy car which the son can ride in -- okay that'ss believable -- and which is made out of carbon fiber and has an aluminum chassis with shocks and a wishbone suspension and keyless start of an electric motor and detailed working headlights and custom wheels and he designed it with a drag coefficient of a Tesla S and has painted it twice and it looks far nicer than any car I've ever owned. Some pictures (more at this link):

The Largest Object in the Universe (Besides Yer Mama)

On the back of the announcement of an extraordinarily massive black hole -- the largest ever found -- in the center of galaxy NGC 1277, the discovery of a large quasar group (LQG) that is 4 billion light years across was announced last week. To quote Space.com:

To put that mind-boggling size into perspective, the disk of the Milky Way galaxy — home of Earth's solar system — is about 100,000 light-years wide. And the Milky Way is separated from its nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, by about 2.5 million light-years.

The newly discovered LQC is so enormous, in fact, that theory predicts it shouldn't exist, researchers said. The quasar group appears to violate a widely accepted assumption known as the cosmological principle, which holds that the universe is essentially homogeneous when viewed at a sufficiently large scale.

Calculations suggest that structures larger than about 1.2 billion light-years should not exist, researchers said.

As to the massive black hole in the center of NGC 1277, it is 17 billion times the mass of the Sun and it accounts for 14% of the total mass of NGC 1277. Normally black holes in the center of galaxies account for about .1% of their galaxy's mass.

Again, just wow.

Watercolor -- Photographs by Gilles Bensimon

Via Devid Sketchbook some abstract-ish photographs by Gilles Bensimon, who is a fairly famous french fashion photographer. I like these better than his ordinary Elle oriented fashion work ...

I Have a Dream

This feels like the most obvious thing to post today:

King sought equality for all through nonviolence, which is not the same, however, as passivity or appeasement. Buzzfeed collects some of his less well known quotes. 

A New Surface Coating that Repels Almost All Liquid

Scientists at the University of Michigan published a paper and released the obligatory press release on their development of a new method of coating surfaces. Oh, the press release isn't that bad as it's easily comprehensible. Here's how the scientists' abstract describes the result:

Superomniphobic surfaces display contact angles >150° and low contact angle hysteresis with essentially all contacting liquids. In this work, we report surfaces that display superomniphobicity with a range of different non-Newtonian liquids, in addition to superomniphobicity with a wide range of Newtonian liquids. Our surfaces possess hierarchical scales of re-entrant texture that significantly reduce the solid–liquid contact area. Virtually all liquids including concentrated organic and inorganic acids, bases, and solvents, as well as viscoelastic polymer solutions, can easily roll off and bounce on our surfaces. Consequently, they serve as effective chemical shields against virtually all liquids—organic or inorganic, polar or nonpolar, Newtonian or non-Newtonian.

Look, I hate it when people pick on intellectual work for being written above their level, and I am trying to avoid going there (mostly because I don't want to admit this is above my level) -- and I don't mind looking up the words I don't understand. "Superomniphobia" doesn't appear in any of the dictionaries I've checked, though what the authors mean isn't too hard suss out. ("Hydrophobia" is resistance to wetting with water. Although "omniphobia" is commonly used to mean the human fear of everything (also known as "panphobia"), it apparently has been co-opted to mean resistance to wetting by many types of liquids -- even "viscoelastic polymer solutions" -- not just water. So then you've got "supermoniphobia." I think they just like making up words. Also they should use "fluid" not liquid.) So out of respect for you I've added links for the other non-obvious parts of the description.

The science of "wetting" is actually a hot area, and there are a recent spate of "superomniphobic" coatings. Here's another really cool video:

A Courtesy Post for Leonardo Sagan's Cats

To hell with resolutions, there are some things that have to be seen.

Via Boing Boing.

The Orion Bullets

The Orion bullets are ejecta of mostly iron gas in the Orion Nebula moving at about 170 kilometers per second (about 380,000 mph or more than 1/2000 the speed of light). They're also massive: larger than ten times the diameter of Pluto's orbit around the sun. Their wakes are hydrogen ionized (and therefore glowing) as the bullets moved through.

The recent high res image of the cluster (shown at left, click through on link for full image) was taken by the Gemini South Observatory at La Serena, Chile. The mirrors on the telescope are deformable to correct for atmospheric distortion which is measured from aberrations in the laser light from five guide stars.

Just all so very cool. (Oh, while we're at it, here's a selection of great photos of the Orion nebula.)

Janis Joplin: Me and Bobby McGee

Common Google Shortcuts

Noticing a link to a large web graphic on how to use Google more efficiently, I whipped my own chart, which is a little broader, on Google shortcuts.

A Little Internetz Magik

Oh Galileo! Click the link. (Refresh it multiple times.) In the address bar replace the text with your own (+ between words).Via MetaFilter.

How LCD Monitors Work

There's also a good article at How Stuff Works on LCD technology. There's also a sort of meh LCD article at Wikipedia.  No to pontificate, but really we should all know this stuff.

Revision of the Reference Sources Tab

I've edited and better organized the references found at the Reference Sources tab of this blog. Reference Sources is sort of like a reference desk with all of the key sources I use accessible from one page. It does not contain blogs, and for a detailed list of the blogs I most often frequent go to the Link Sources tab, which is sort of like a blog roll but with lots of info about the blogs.

The Reference Sources tab contains some key stuff missing at places like Martindale's Reference Desk, which, on the other hand, contains a lot of links I do not, most of which appear to every related site, while I focus on what I see as the most useful ones.

Nonetheless, I can see my Reference Sources is missing a number of good references which I'll be adding in from time to time. I am also not so happy with the table formatting in Blogger (whose CSS makes formatting the table exactly like I'd want too difficult), which is why I did not use it originally, but it is plainly clearer in a table with subject lines. Anyway, I hope someone out there finds this useful.

Cracker: Teen Angst

I have no idea why I like this song, but I do, and it seems to fit Friday night.

Awesome Cell Illustrations

These scientific illustrations by Russell Knightly are stunningly beautiful. Seen at Fresh Photons.

Animal Cell

Plant Cell

Bacteria

A Brief Discussion of the DOMA Litigation with Very Few Interesting Points

I am not involved with the subject of this post and I don;t know that much about it, but that doesn;t prevent me from going off half-assed about it. This is the interwebs, people. Anyway, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. I suspect that, if it falls, it will fall because regulation of marriage is viewed as solely a State law issue, and the death knell of DOMA will also be a severe blow to federal Commerce Clause power. That is bad from a civil liberties and liberal perspective because many important federal laws and are premised on a strong federal commerce power.

It is hard to understate how important this is (and how unappreciated it is by many liberals who support gay rights). It is also important to understand that the validity of a law is a very different thing than a law being good policy. DOMA could be repealed; that is a better result for liberals supporting broad commerce power than finding DOMA unconstitutional unless the Court finds a fundamental right to gay marriage inherent in the Constitution, a thing I think a majority of the current Court is very unlikely to do.

Let me note, in the above regards, that the case in which the Supreme Court accepted certiorari, United States v. Windsor, was premised on finding DOMA discriminates against gays in violation of the Fifth Amendment (note that the Fifth Amendment's due process clause is thought to incorporate an equal protection guarantee similar to the Fourteenth Amendment's, which is explicit; the Fourteenth Amendment only applies to the States). This incorporation of equal protection guarantees is reviled by many hard line conservatives -- it is a form of "substantive due process" Justice Scalia, for one, has railed against. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito and Thomas certainly share that view.

That means that the Court could go off on "substantive due process" and find DOMA not unconstitutional, reversing the circuit court's reasoning. That means that if it is to uphold the circuit it would have to do so on another ground, such as finding DOMA in violation of the Commerce Clause. Of course, the Court could also find DOMA unconstitutional as a substantive due process/equal protection violation, but, again, I am doubtful a majority of the Court will do that. Finally, the Court has asked for briefing on the issue of standing, and it could find that the case is not properly in court at all, dodging the issue. I doubt that is likely, too, though the conservatives have wanted to limit standing of plaintiffs to sue.

This is so important -- and so poorly understood by so many -- that I may right separately about it another date. I thought, though, it might help to give a heads up about it now.

Basic Human Decency Just Seems to Bother Some People

The video and its subject below seems to be offensive to some people. Personally, I think knowing who you are and taking care of yourself and becoming happy are wonderful things.

Upcoming Posts at Galileo Feynman

When I began this blog I imagined a mix of posts on art and politics, music and culture, science and society interspersed with short essays on a variety of more philosophical subjects. I haven't had much chance to focus on the essay side -- which I'd normally post under the tag Blah blah blah, among others -- but I thought I'd mention what's in the hopper. It's all pretty nerdy, so abandon all hope if you're looking for something else. A lengthy list follows bellow the break.

Electron Micrographs from the Blog Small Stuff

Small Stuff (or is its name Many Little Things? it's not clear) is an awesome tumblr blog featuring mostly fantastic electron micrographs. Here are some of just the most recent ones (not in original order), just because ... they're cool.

Hydrozoans on the surface of a krill

This May Make You Barf

Another sophisticated Galileo Feynman post title. Via Cynical C.

Highlights of Last Weekends' NFL Playoffs

Continuing the world class sports coverage provided here on Galileo Feynman, today, via Kotke, we bring you what he claims is "the best thing ever." Yes. Yes it is.

Deep Thinkin' by the Gun Advocates

The anti gun control crowd has screwed their thinking caps on real tight in response to the potential that dangerous weapons might be regulated. Here's what they've come up with:

• If blacks had guns slavery would never have happened.
• The President's children are protected by agents carrying guns, so the President's an elitist tax lover.
• Gun control apparently causes crime.
• Gun control attacks firearms (and the NRA is only thinking of the children, people!).
• Obama is acting like a king. A king! 
• Guns don't kill people, people (with guns) kill people, who are crazy people on psychotropics, and if you support gun control I am going to kill you.
• The Connecticut shooting is a "false flag" (and our media is controlled by the state, I am telling you on the radio).
• Chicago is Obama's mafia city and he's a psychopath and the time for insurrection is at hand.
• Obama is the antichrist.

That's some fine, fine thinking.

At Last Our Rights are Protected!

Celebrity Make-Unders (What Celebrities Would Look Like if they were Related to Me)

Planet Hiltron, run by photographer Danny Evans, takes photos of celebrities and with unspecified Photoshop magic involving photo composites and not age altering software, makes them look like non-celebrities. Very nice, Mr. Evans, very nice. Via Kotke.

Britney Spears

About Bertillonage (Anthropometry)

Bertillonage (which is also known as anthropometry, though that is a broader area of study) is the process of taking bodily measurements and identifying key markings from criminals and those accused of crimes so they can be identified in the future. It was invented by Alphonse Bertillon, who was from a family of statisticians, after he dropped out of school, went through a stint in the army, and then ended up on the police force. It and its founder became famous. Per Wikipedia, "Bertillon is referenced in the Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which one of Holmes's clients refers to Holmes as the 'second highest expert in Europe' after Bertillon."

Alas, bertillonage was prone to error as officers did not take all measurements the same way, and multiple people could have the same basic measurements. So it is fair to say it sent more than a few innocents to prison. It's not clear that this deeply worried Bertillon, who, in fact, appeared as a prosecution expert in the infamous Dreyfus Affair. Although Bertillon had no expertise in handwriting, his handwriting testimony is what sent Dreyfus to Devil's Island. According to an observer at the trial, Bertillon was "certainly not in full possession of his faculties" and his testimony was "a long tissue of absurdities."

Bertillonage was supplanted by fingerprinting though it's still with us in the form of mugshots and other identifying photos taken on arrest. It should not, by the way, be confused with anthropological criminology, the discredited theory that cranial dimensions and facial features are a predictor of criminal behavior.

Also -- a pro tip. If your wife asks you to buy her clothing, do not ask her what her dimensions are. Ask for her measurements. (Alternative approach: do not ask at all as you're supposed to know these things. Just measure her clothes when she's not looking.) If you do ask for her dimensions, though, referencing bertillonage will not help you. 

Quiz: Jay-Z Lyric or Line From The Great Gatsby?

From Vulture, an online presence of New York Magazine, comes the quiz Jay-Z Lyric or Line From The Great Gatsby?

Hey, this is hard. I got exactly zero right.

John Baez's The Crackpot Index

John Baez, a well known physicist and more importantly the cousin of Joan Baez (I'm not sure why that is more important and I am sure he gets tired of hearing about it but everybody probably asks), developed the Crackpot Index a number of years ago to measure the degree of crackpottery of laymen who write to mathematicians and physicists about the layman's latest great discovery. We here at Galileo Feynman believe that "Dr." Baez is a hidebound reactionary and a self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy who created his index as part of the conspiracy to SUPPRESS ORIGINAL IDEAS.

A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics:

1. A -5 point starting credit.
2. 1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.
3. 2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.
4. 3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.
5. 5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.
6. 5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment.
7. 5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards).
8. 5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann" (sic).

"True Facts About Sloths"

Admittedly sloth-like posts by me lately as I am working on a project and have quite a lot of old links to clear out .. and who doesn't like sloths? (This may be in violation of Our New Year's resolutions, but I haven't checked the terms ....)

Quantum Physicists' Beliefs about Quantum Theory

Physics arXiv recently published a paper on a poll on the meaning of results and the future of quantum physics, which was taken of physicists specializing in quantum theory, as well as a few mathematicians and philosophers attending a seminar on the subject. I thought the results were really interesting, so I reproduce some of the key results, below (as images from the paper -- the entire paper is an easy read and illuminating not only on the poll but physics disputes underlying it). I should note that none of the authors or poll participants is questioning the validity of quantum theory -- which extraordinarily well supported by experiment and observation. Indeed, even Albert Einstein, whose antipathy towards some of the broader interpretations of quantum theory is well known, was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics.

Organisms with Super Powers?

Hey, these aren't super powers; it's biology! Anyway, the blog Southern Fried Science has a popular post on five organisms who have "powers" similar, in the author's view, to the super powers of comic book heroes. You've got Bdelloid rotifers that are unisexual and caeable for going dormant for extraordinary periods and can survive in space and when they come out of dormancy in a new environment can absorb DNA or local organisms adapting to the new environment. You've got a deep sea snail that can absord iron sulfide into its shell and foot, making them metallic and aiding their survival at great depths. You've got the parasitic barnacle Sacculina which takes over the blue crabs sexual system replacing it with its own, changes the crabs mating behaviors to mate with other crabs infected with Sacculina, and, if the infected crab was a male it will change its sex to make it a female to care for the Succulina's eggs, which grow on the crab. Then you've got octopi whose ability to shape shift is now well known from numerous videos. And you've got black mold that was altered by radiation at Chernobyl and now "feeds" on radiation.

That actually is a tiny fraction of the weird and incredible things that organisms on Earth do that seem like super powers. And, while the Sacculina parasite may gross me you out, its about the tip of gross parasites. Hey, here's a video of a roundworm emerging from the stomach of a dead spider. Um, enjoy!

"The World's Best Father"

Dave Engledow is "The World's Best Father." Via Devid Sketchbook.

Images of Unmixed Paint

From Imgur the found abstract art of paint with tints prior to mixing -- very beautiful more exciting than watching paint dry. (And I have no recollection where I first saw this.)

The Fermi Paradox and the Logic of a Tapeworm

The "Fermi Paradox" was an assertion by famous physicist Enrico Fermi that if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe it would have visited Earth already. Since it hasn't it must not exist.

It is, obviously, silly. It makes assumptions without evidence as to the ease of travel between star systems, the large prevalence of life elsewhere if it exists at all, the widespread desire of other lifeforms to visit Earth, and at its heart it misunderstands (indeed, sort of makes a mockery of) positivism as a scientific principle.

Boing Boing links to a post by Charlie Stross on his blog Charlie's Diary that takes Fermi's paradox apart imagining it as the philosophy of a tapeworm wondering if there are other tapeworms. It is, in Stross's words, "the Fermi paradox, mired in shit." He takes apart its errors point by point.

What we know of the world is well reasoned conjecture based on observation. The observations on which the conjecture that life exists elsewhere in the Universe are the scale of the Universe, the number of galaxies and stars it contains, the likelihood that Earth-like planets exist, and what we know of the circumstances where life could arise. Life elsewhere, somewhere, seems likely.

"If You Believe in Yourself You Will Know How to Ride a Bike"

God Intervenes on Behalf of Cindy Jacobs' Shoes

Yes, ha ha, she's a nut and possibly should be institutionalized. Oh this is funny. Except that Cindy and Mike Jacobs run a huge evangelical Christian network and are leading supporters of Texas Governor Rick Perry. According to their site God Knows "[t]he ministry has moved from a small gathering in Texas to an international movement to reform the nations of the world through ministering in the prophetic and apostolic." Here's some summaries from Right Wing Watch which, although not intended this way, make for hilarity if, um, you have a good sense of dark humor.

Da Capo -- A Beautiful Short Video

Da Capo from JuBaFilms on Vimeo.

Aw, This is So Touching!

As reported by The Onion, America's Finest news Source:

NRA Sends Complimentary Bereavement Gun Baskets To Families Of Shooting Victims

NEWTOWN, CT—As the nation continues to mourn the women and children who lost their lives in last month’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the National Rifle Association has reportedly joined the outpouring of support for families of victims by sending each household a bereavement gun basket. “On behalf of everyone here at the NRA, we extend our deepest sympathies to your family during this difficult time, and hope you enjoy this complimentary assortment of the finest semi-automatic weapons and ammunition,” read the note accompanying each wicker basket, which included a variety of magazine cartridges, shooting range memberships, dried fruits, and high-powered firearms. “If there is any other ammunition or handgun accessory we can send to you, please let us know. Our thoughts and prayers are with you.” Sources said the NRA has also offered to match any assault rifle purchase in the Newtown, CT area.