Birdy Nam Nam - Absesses

These 4 guys, "Birdy Nam Nam" from Paris, won a competition for this amazing performace.

Eye Candy Roundup: 6/28/06

It's been a big eye candy week, so here we go.


1. Hallucinate without Drugs. Do exactly what they say. It's insane, I promise.


2. Animated 3d-vision!. Just look "past" the screen.


3. "The Amorous Nudibranchs Paint the Town Red (and Orange and Yellow and Green and Blue and Violet)..." by kozyndan is not only beautiful, but you can view it in quicktime VR, which is a whole new kinda whoa.





4. Stefan Hoenerloh is the kind of artist that really can make paintings that are more real than real. It truly blows the mind.









5. Scott Wade is either a man with too much time on his hands, or a man that knows exactly what to do with the time he has. I think it's the former. Whichever, he makes the most beautiful "dust art".

Here is a piece with the Mona Lisa and Starry Night on the back of a Mini Cooper.




6.Over at LightingPhotography.com they have a stunning collection of lightnight pictures. Plus, they have tips to help you take your own beautiful lightning photos. Sweet.





7. This is a hair-raising lamp made out of human hair and when the electricity is passed through it the hairs raise up and look like some kind of ameboid.

Rare Rainbows Burn Up The Sky

Relax Chicken Little, its nothing dangerous. Just really really pretty.

The Birds!

The Birds are coming! The Birds are coming!

These photos are of the "Black Cloud", as the Denmark locals call it. Every year hundreds of birds flock in beautiful formations all over the sky.







This is a nifty video of a huge flock of European Starlings flying around the sky. The entire flock repeatedly tries to land on the same tree and nearly brings it to the ground.





From BoingBoing: Birds from Huntington Beach, Californa have been acting crazy; flying around confused, running into cars and buildings, and even pecking eight humans. It turns out the birds are infected with domoic acid poisoning, the same illness that may have caused the 1961 northern California bird invasion that inspired Hithcock.

Space Roundup (Big and Small): 6/27/06

1. This website is an online representation of the distance between the protons and the electrons in the atoms in our bodies. It is scaled up so the smallest thing on the page, the electron, is 1 pixel across, and the proton is a thousand pixels across. At these sizes, that makes the distance from the electron to the proton 50 million pixels! Or, roughly eleven miles! Given all these free space inside the atoms inside us, kinda makes you feel ghostly.






2. The Size Of Our World uses images to give us a visible comparison between the size of our planet and the size of some of the others out there. Makes you feel pretty-itty-bitty, don't it?

BibliOdyssey

BibliOdyssey is probably my favorite blog right now. The overwhelming number of "Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart" just blows me away.

My new favorite gem is 'Knight of Autumn".

Stick Figures in Peril

The Stick Figures in Peril pool on Flickr has taken off and is now a huge dying stick figure resource for all those interested.


Sticky Situation by IsolatedIguana is my favorite so far.


Thanks to BoingBoing

Take Action: Support Kennedy Minimum Wage Amendment

Take a moment to support the minimum wage increase amendment to increase minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour. With this link you can give your information and send a letter to proper people. It just takes a second and can change a lot of lives.

Update: Congress has voted and denied the minimum wage increase. In the wise words of John Stewart, "Kudos to Congress for, literally, taking a giant shit on the poorest people in the country."

North Korea

This is a truly astounding collection of photos from North Korea on MilitaryPhotos.net. A number of the photos the photographer was told were "forbidden". It's a remarkable look at somone we talk a whole lot about. A beautiful collection.

Space Roundup: 6/19/06

Today... in... SPACE:

1. We got video of a Meteor hitting the moon. The video had to be slowed down because without an atmosphere nothing slowed the meteor and it hit with unbelievable power and made a fireball. Sweet.



2. The 'Infared Andromeda' is a huge galaxy with over 1 Trillion stars, and it's badass.




3. From Europe you can get a pretty good view of the International Space Station. Ants live in there!









4. The UND High-Altitude Balloon Project is a genius project that sent a camera up to 85,945 feet before it ran out of film.



Thanks to digg.

Access

Access by Marie Setser is a real time motion tracking installation that spotlights a person with amazing accuracy in a public place. Clips of audio were beamed at the targeted people, who were chosen live by viewers on the web.

This is a wonderful clever installation and I wish I could see it.

The Amazing Lyrebird

This amazing bird, The Lyrebird, can mimic just about anything he hears. Other birds, cameras, car alarms, even construction workers and chainsaws! What a badass.

I Wonder...

Maybe you can help... Here are my questions that I have no answers to:

1) Why must we fear that which we do not know?

2) Why are we weaker than our addictions?

3) Why do we fear telling the most important people the most important things?

4) Why do we believe what we are told, even when we know it to be lies?

5) Why is it so hard to tell truth?

6) Why do we fear ourselves the most?

7) What does it take to push us up the hill of progress?

8) When will we realize that mass communication (the internet, etc.) is our one and only hope for the future?

9) Why are the most powerful the most clueless?

10) Why can't we admit our faults?

11) When will we, as a world-wide society, realize that we are not the last step in evolution and accept it?

12) Why is "Thou shalt not kill" the only ignored commandment?

13) When did we take religion in the wrong direction? (example: my religion is right, yours is wrong)

14) When will we realize?



Maybe you can help me out...

Walt Disney's Letter to the Future

So, our good buddy Walt Disney wrote a letter to the future, half a century in the future to be exact. Written in 1956, it didn't see the light of day till this year.

And I got to tell you, the man knows what he's talking about. Somehow, he describes the internet without even knowing it. "Millions of people in massive assemblies around the world may now be viewing the same staged or natural event, scanned by some incredibly potent scope, in the same amount of time."

He also has some great points about human nature.

"Humanity, as history informs us, changes very slowly in character and basic interests. People need play as much as they need toil. They never cease to be fascinated by their own powers and passions, their base or noble emotions, their faiths and struggles and triumphs against handicap--all things that make them laugh and weep and comfort one another in love and sacrifice out of the deeps of their being."

International Color Photography Awards

TheColorAwards.com has the International Color Photo Awards website up with all the winners and nominees in both the professional and amateur categories. With so many amazing photos it's a real treat.

This photo, by Simon Mossman of Australia, won 3rd place in the abstract category, and I love it.

Frogs: A Chorus of Colors

The American Museum of Natural History has a number of photos of these beautiful colored frogs.

Seen here, my favorite, the Blue Poison Frog, or Dendrobates Azureus.

Cats: 1 Bears: 0

The Worlds newest superhero: Jack the Cat. On Saturday a bear wandered into the yard of Jacks owners in Jersey and got chased up a tree by Jack! 15 minutes later it got the guts to come back down, only to be chased up another tree!

After taking the photo Jacks owners brought him back inside and the bear climbed down and left. Three cheers for Jack!

Touch Sensor as sensitive as the Human Finger

U.S. Scientists have developed a Touch Sensor that's as sensitive as the human finger! In this photo you can see a regular penny on the left and the readout of the sensor on the right. It even picks up the tiny print next to Lincoln.

Next Step: T-1000!

Space: The Never Ending Frontier

Todays Space Roundup:

Hubble Heritage Gallery is a wonderful collection of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.


The HubbleSite has a bunch of very interesting and informative sections on different space topics and are all designed very well. My favorite at the moment is Black Holes.

Cool Cars with Awesome Features

BusinessWeek.com has put together a short but sweet list of cool upcoming cars with some very interesting features.

For example, the Bugatti Veyron (seen here) has 1,001 horsepower, can go from 0 to 60 in 2.5 seconds and has a top speed of 253 mph. Wow. Oh, and a tiny little price tag of 1.3 million.

DJ Kels and the Three Instructors

DJ Kels spliced together three different instructional videos to make a very cool and catchy video. Nifty.

Eye Candy: Hubble On Edge

This is mind-bending. This is a photo of a galaxy (named NGC 5866) taken by Hubble at a side on view. Beautiful.

From the Description:
This is a unique view of the disk galaxy NGC 5866 tilted nearly edge-on to our line-of-sight. Hubble's sharp vision reveals a crisp dust lane dividing the galaxy into two halves. The image highlights the galaxy's structure: a subtle, reddish bulge surrounding a bright nucleus, a blue disk of stars running parallel to the dust lane, and a transparent outer halo. NGC 5866 is a disk galaxy of type "S0" (pronounced s-zero). Viewed face on, it would look like a smooth, flat disk with little spiral structure.


And don't miss the many other galaxies meandering around the outside.

Art of Science

The Princeton University community was asked to submit work "produced in the course of research or incorporating tools and concepts from science" for the Art of Science Competition. There are some really stunning pieces and I'm in awe of all of them.

Meeting of the Minds by Keith Morton and Eric Fountain is one of my favorites.

William J. Bennett vs. Jon Stewart

For those of you that missed The Daily Show last night, you missed a great interview with William J. Bennett. (Video plays in second pop-up)

The topic of conversation was Gay Marriage, and it was a fiery one. I have to give Mr Bennett credit for keeping his cool, but without having anything substantial to back up his anti-gay marriage opinion, he got a good 'whooping' shall we say from Jon Stewart. Check it out.

The Fantastic in Art and Fiction

The Fantastic in Art and Fiction is a huge collection of really interesting and fantastic artwork from days gone by. Be prepared to lose hours of your life to this. Not in a bad way though. More, a "WTF?" way.

Earth From Mars

This is what we look like from Mars. One big shiny star.

Mother's Angry

These are truly stunning pictures of storms and the like. Mother Nature lets you know when you piss her off.