Art
pharyngula | December 4, 2010Minnesota Atheists went back on the air a while back, and I think I'll tune in tomorrow at 9am central time (and it will also be streaming live on the web. Lynn Fellman and Glendon Mellow will be talking about art and science. It should be good!
sciencepunk | December 3, 2010
More in-depth analysis available from Ed Yong, Tom Chivers, New Scientist.
pharyngula | December 3, 2010Somebody needs to grab Bill Donohue by the ear and drag him to the Neues Musem in Berlin — all the way to the airport, during the long transatlantic flight, and on the taxi ride to the museum. Pinch hard, too, and make him squeal all the way.
While digging a subway tunnel in Berlin, construction workers discovered a cache of buried expressionist sculptures, hidden survivors of the Nazi campaign to destroy what they considered "degenerate art".
Researchers learned the bust was a portrait by Edwin Scharff, a nearly forgotten German modernist, from around 1920. It seemed anomalous until August,…
pharyngula | December 2, 2010Bill Donohue is on a roll. First he bravely put up a billboard that reassures everyone that Jesus was real, which is no problem, as far as I'm concerned; it's not true, but he isn't interfering with other people's right to express themselves. But now he has really done it: he has successfully pressured the National Portrait Gallery to remove an art work that Donohue did not like. That is obstructing the right of free expression, and is deplorable.
The work in question was a video about the pain of AIDS victims in Mexico, and references the Catholicism of that country by showing a crucifix…
omnibrain | December 1, 2010Maybe it's because I just had a stiff drink - but I absolutely love this thing. The art is cool, bicycles are great, and engineering for fun interests me. Maybe it's not the bourbon...
-Via Neatorama-
omnibrain | November 30, 2010The NYTimes has a great article, slide show and video with some phenomenal pictures of the brain. Well worth checking out.
Enjoy!
omnibrain | November 29, 2010yes you. Or perhaps you've fallen off of your midlife crisis testosterone penis boat?
This here inflatable brain could save your life. Order only if you are experiencing an actual emergency drowning situation.
Alternatively you could buy this for me for XMas... if only you knew where to send it.
omnibrain | November 28, 2010Jessica @ Bioephemera found some really great plastinated bull cocks and I have to agree with her on not buying them. But... I LOVE these brains! Too bad they're 1500 euros :/
omnibrain | November 28, 2010I don't usually post anything about "that kind" of psychology but I loved these:
(via Dangerous Minds & their creator - Matthew Wilkinson)
cagapakis | November 13, 2010Everything has a unique chemical signature. Every body, every place. When you smell home you're sensing all the chemical traces that make up the place you grew up. When you smell your mate, you're smelling the unique combination of their body and the microbiome of their skin.
The unique smell of a city is something that my Synthetic Aesthetics partner, Sissel Tolaas, has been interested in for a long time. Yesterday in her lab I got to smell her recreations of the smells of Paris--the corner bakery, dog poop on the sidewalk, old rusty cars, cigarettes and perfume, sun on the street after…
aardvarchaeology | November 9, 2010
As mentioned here recently, the Nazis didn't like Modernism, pessimism or decadent urban themes in art. So in 1937 they sanitised German art museums, removing stuff they didn't like. Between 1937 and 1941, a selection of the censored work formed a travelling exhibition under the title Entartete Kunst, "Degenerate art". The intention was to teach the public what NOT to like. As you can imagine, artists since then haven't minded much if you call them entartet.
Now something mind-boggling. During an excavation for an extension of Berlin's subway in RathausstraÃe, archaeologists have found a…
pharyngula | November 3, 2010Suddenly, it resonates with me.
I've also been sent these images of spectacular wall art. I want one. Somehow, though, I doubt that I'll be able to convince the TrophyWife™ that it's worth $950.
pharyngula | November 1, 2010Roger Ebert has a thoughtful post on the problem of not-safe-for-work images. It's a real problem, and it's a curious example of self-imposed censorship built on an artificial fear. I don't care who you are, you've all seen pornography, you've all heard profanity, yet somehow, if even a tasteful nude or an obscenity neatly typed in a small font face appears in a web post, people freak out: I could have viewed that in my workplace! My eyes aren't allowed to see a breast or a penis between the hours of 9 to 5!
There's good reason for that, of course, and Ebert discusses some of it.
I haven't…
sciencepunk | October 31, 2010Wikipedia user Colin Douglas Howell has created this spiffy gallery of dinosaur size comparison charts, which is ideal for those planning their next off road velociraptor safari.
Many images feature an intrepid time-travelling tourist, who shows the same nonchalance whether facing a cutesy Juravenator starki:
...or imminent death at the hands of some kind of giant reptile brotherhood of villainy:
cagapakis | October 20, 2010We can babble philosophically about whether or not what we call "red" looks the same from another person's eyes, we can compare the adjectives we use to specify colors--is it maraschino red or cayenne?--but when we're talking to our computers, categorizing flowers, designing objects for mass production, branding a company, or establishing a flag's official colors we have to be able to be specific about which exact shade of red we want.
These days we have standard color systems that define colors as specified mixes of red, green, and blue pixels on screen, specific mixtures of pigments in…
pharyngula | October 14, 2010This is beautiful, I'd hang it on my wall. It's a genetic map of the first synthetic organism, and it and many others will be on display in the Serpentine Gallery in London this weekend.
And gosh, what do you know, I am going to be in London this weekend! I may have to sneak out of The Amazing Meeting a bit, which is going to be hard to do since it's so jam-packed with cool people and cool stuff, but some of them might want to join me in a little extracurricular travel as well.
aardvarchaeology | September 23, 2010Immediately after the Swedish election the SD anti-immigration party made a major proclamation advocating policies copied from 1930s Germany - pertaining to the public funding of the arts.
Since the end of the war, the driver of a car is no longer known as an Autoführer, "car driver" in German. He's an Autofahrer, a "car rider". Other words have proved impossible to rehabilitate. A prominent one is völkisch, meaning "national", "ethnic", in some situations "folksy". The Nazis loved folksy culture, music with a lot of tuba and Glockenspiel, traditional songs, leather shorts, hats decorated…