Art
chaoticutopia | December 7, 2007Is it just me, or are the holidays getting more and more high tech and environmentally friendly? Maybe it is me. I haven’t used real pine to decorate for the holidays in years. There may be some bits among the potpourri in the centerpiece, but just about everything else has been replaced with paper or plastic versions of the real thing: the tree, the garlands, and the wreath. This year, I’ve been seeking better ways to do the holiday thing. For instance, my tree and garlands now are strung with LED lights. (The odd "lunar white" glow was a bit disconcerting at first--they seem to flicker with…
sb admin | December 6, 2007Here are some comics and images I've been saving up for so long that I mostly forget where I found them. Click the fold below to view. Enjoy!
[Okay, that last one is not funny...]
voltagegate | December 5, 2007
My fiance's art show was a huge hit. Her and the other artists had a great turnout despite the chilly Friday night, well over 100 visitors. I basically didn't see her for the two weeks prior as she prepared for the show, painting, scraping and filling walls in the gallery, building a base for and finishing construction of her installation piece, and figuring out placement. She was literally still painting - on walls and on canvas - the day of the show.
(Before I show any pics, I want to make sure that everyone knows that my camera sucks, and the blurriness is my fault, not hers. I wish they…
pharyngula | December 4, 2007I wish I could be there this Friday — this sounds like an extremely cool art gallery event, sponsored by the Cephalopod Appreciation Society. See, Seattle gets a whole society, while Morris just gets me, sitting in a corner, pining for molluscs. If you're in Seattle, you should go. Tell 'em I sent you.
Please join the CEPHALOPOD APPRECIATION SOCIETY Friday, DECEMBER 7th at the McLeod Residence for an art opening and squid celebration featuring 20-foot Giant Squids made of fabric by NY artist Cassandra Nguyen.
The general reception is from 6:00 - 9:00 p.m., and from 7:30-8:30 p.m., the…
neurophilosophy | December 4, 2007
An article in the NY Times discusses the work of Michael Marmor, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine who has created a computer simulation of how eye diseases such as macular degeneration and cataracts have affected the painting styles of a number of impressionist artists.
Claude Monet, for example, was known to have suffered from slowly progressive cataracts. Although diagnosed in 1912, problems with his vision began about 7 years earlier, when Monet, who was then 65, began to complain of changes in his perception of colour:
...colors no longer had the same intensity…
omnibrain | December 4, 2007I love science blogs but you know... I really get sick of the acronym filled science talk, the obnoxious politics, and of course the religion sometimes. I just discovered a great new blog that has all the natural curiosity of a science blog but non of the crap. It is wonderfully written by a non-scientist in a 'what I did today' format (which for the first time ever I like!)
The Daily Coyote chronicles, through pictures and stories, the life of Shreve Stockton, her cat, and her coyote friend. Here's the scoop from her:
Charlie is a wild-born coyote who was unexpectedly delivered to my…
voltagegate | December 3, 2007Well, two weeks of hell has receded for me. This past Friday we finished moving all of our stuff out of Frostburg, waving a not-so-tearful goodbye to the old apartment and its coal furnace (not just for heat either; our water was warmed by the furnace as well, which I didn't know until this past year... they used to use gas).
To be frank, Friday was one of the worst days of my life. We still had the essentials in the apartment - food, a few dishes, coffee, computers, mattress, etc. - so they needed to be packed in both cars to haul up to our new place. But before we could load her car, it…
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2007
My Bulgarian ICQ buddy Tatyana Mircheva is studying design in Birmingham, UK. Recently, she published this photograph on her blog. It's really good, and I assumed it was some professional advertising shot she'd lifted from the net. Turns out it's a self-portrait, shot at home with the aid of a bedroom lamp and a blanket from Ikea! Tatyana chose her gear, posed the shot and lit it, and her roomie snapped it. I'm impressed!
[More blog entries about photography, glamour, art, advertising; foto, fotografi, glamour, reklam, konst.]
neurophilosophy | November 30, 2007
Emotional Systems is the inaugural exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Culture Centre La Strozzina at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy. It begins tomorrow and runs until 3rd February, 2008.
The...installation...[includes] an exhibition, a publication and a programme of lectures designed to investigate the topic of emotions, proposing a reinterpretation of the correlation between the contemporary artist, the work of art and the user, in the light of the latest discoveries in the neurological sciences about the human brain and its effects on the emotions.
The artists in the…
sb admin | November 30, 2007Anaesthetist's Hymn performed by the comedy duo Amateur Transplants, set to the music of Total Eclipse of the Heart.
[P.S. What's this got to do with the brain? Consciousness.]
sb admin | November 23, 2007This Friday is a holiday (in America, at least) and what's better on a holiday than a rerun? Yay for reruns. So, I've written about the Amygdaloids before, but here's an introduction video in case you didn't see it (or want to enjoy it again). Also, this band of rockin' cognitive scientists has a CD available now.
The Amygdaloids: Live concert at Union Hall
Preview their new CD here (buy it here) alongside descriptions of each brain-based song.
"Past lovers often leave strong and enduring memories. 'A Trace' tells a story about this. Memory researchers in the know will figure out that the…
pharyngula | November 22, 2007So do I, although I favor more squid, less girl.
(Should be work-safe, since any nudity is tasteful, and human-animal chimeras aren't that offensive, are they? Besides, you should be at home, loosening your belt and letting that nice feast settle.)
omnibrain | November 21, 2007Everyone has been talking about stem cells in the last couple days. Here's something to offend most of you - Christopher Reeve eating fetuses for their Stem Cells. Enjoy ;)
Now that you are probably horribly offended about something or other here's why I'm posting this video now:
Now paralyzed people can eat their own stem cells to become superpeople!
sb admin | November 19, 2007I couldn't wait for Multimedia Friday to post this video, it's just too funny.
I Am the Very Model of a Psychopharmacologist is set to Gilbert and Sullivan's classic song with animation. Created by Stephen M Stahl, MD, PhD, of the Neurosciences Education Institute, Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California San Diego, author of Essential Psychopharmacology. Credentials for neuropsychopharmacological hilarity.
omnibrain | November 18, 2007A Flickr user took the all the U.S. currencies with buildings on them and lined them up to the real ones in Washington D.C. Pretty cool!
Omni Brain loves these tricks of vision. Check out some more here.
-via Neatorama-
pharyngula | November 18, 2007People had some peculiar ideas in 1932. Try reading this wonderfully detailed diagram of evolution (if you've got the bandwidth, download the 3212x8748 pixel version).
The vertical axis makes sense: it's a logarithmic scale of geologic time. It's not quite right, since it has life arising about 1.6 billion years ago, when we now have good evidence that that occurred more than twice that long ago. I'm not going to complain about that — science does march onwards, and it probably represents the best estimates of that time.
The horizontal scale is a real problem, and is revealing something about…
neurophilosophy | November 16, 2007
In his Insect Lab Studio, sculptor Mike Libby customizes real insects with parts from antique pocketwatches and electronic components from old circuit boards. Here, he describes how the idea first came to him:
One day I found a dead intact beetle. I then located an old wristwatch, thinking of how the beetle also operated and looked like a little mechanical device and so decided to combine the two. After some time dissecting the beetle and outfitting it with watch parts and gears, I had a convincing little cybernetic sculpture. I soon made many more with other found insects and have been…
neurophilosophy | November 16, 2007
Synaesthesia is a condition in which stimuli of one type evoke sensations in another sensory modality. For example, hearing particular sounds might evoke strong sensations of colour or (more rarely) words might evoke strong tastes in the mouth.
In The Hidden Sense, social scientist Cretien van Crampen investigates synaesthesia from an artisitic and scientific perspective. He interviews a number of synaesthetes, and finds that none of them considers their condition to be an impairment. He also describes the profound influence that synaesthesia has had on artists such as Kandinsky and van Gogh…