Some Links
Sorry for the serious lack of posting lately, folks. I’ve been having bad blogging fatigue (I’ve hardly even been reading blogs), so I’m taking it easy, in an effort to avoid some kind of spectacular flame-out. And, Emily and I both just started a new semester. I have been incredibly busy; I’m sure Emily has, too.
That aside, here are some interesting links.
1. What the collapse of the Soviet Union can teach us about the probable collapse of the US. (Via How To Save The World.)
2. Don’t Divorce Us! — a very sweet video fighting Prop 8.
3. A Gentile Privilege Checklist.
4. And on a completely different note, pygmy seahorses!
Innerspace
Artist Michael Oliveri has teamed up with a group of nano scientists at the University of Georgia to create these ghostly images, strangely reminiscent of Earthly landscapes. He writes:
Using current photographic technology and a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) I have created grand scale micrograph interpretations of their research. In this series I selected perspectives of unusual microscopic happenings within the actual nano structure samples to blur scale into seemingly familiar human settings.
They’re pretty neat. Check ‘em out.
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Steampunk Guitar
Check out this steampunk-styled guitar, made by one Mark Dalzell for the 2008 Jersey City Artists Studio Tour. Awesome! I wonder if it’s really playable, and how it might sound if it is…
Via Brass Goggles.
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Legoland’s Mini Inauguration Celebration
For the next few days, California’s Legoland theme park will be celebrating Obama’s inauguration with a very detailed miniature lego model of the event to come, complete with over a thousand tiny attendees and plastic accommodations. Here’s a short video about it which I found at List of Now, via Feministe:
Fun!
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Jewelry by Melanie Bilenker
Melanie Bilenker makes jewelry which depict ordinary, elegant scenes using individual strands of hair. Check it out.
Mystery Roar From Space
A group of astronomers looking for “faint signs of heat” from long-dead stars has found, instead, a booming sound of unknown origin.
Of course, sound waves can’t travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they can’t very efficiently. But radio waves can.
Radio waves are not sound waves, but they are still electromagnetic waves, situated on the low-frequency end of the light spectrum.
Many objects in the universe, including stars and quasars, emit radio waves. Even our home galaxy, the Milky Way, emits a static hiss (first detected in 1931 by physicist Karl Jansky). Other galaxies also send out a background radio hiss.
But the newly detected signal, described here today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, is far louder than astronomers expected.
About six times louder, apparently.
Detailed analysis of the signal ruled out primordial stars or any known radio sources, including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy.
Other radio galaxies also can’t account for the noise – there just aren’t enough of them.
Certainly intriguing…
Via Boing Boing.
Make Your Own Squid
Emily told me about this awhile ago — it’s a fun little game where you can build your own squid and then set it free into the virtual seas. It’s pretty minimal, of course, but amusing. At the end you can play with your squid by dragging and dropping it around the screen, and you can come back later to check on it. Right now my squid has traveled zero kilometers, weighs one kilogram, and has had only one adventure (“hunting for shoes”?).
Presumably these things will change.
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Tumbleweed Vortex
Check out this Australian tumbleweed vortex at Boing Boing. Madness!
Two food-related things that I love today.
The first is Food Party with Thu Tran. Possibly the greatest cooking show ever (not that I’ve seen many actual cooking shows to compare it to). Here’s the beginning of Episode 1, to get you started.
The second is Anna the Red’s Bento Factory, a blog featuring pictures of lunches that are too cute to eat! Via Make.
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