Archive for the 'Art' category

Normally, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is interesting only the physicists for its uses in scientific research and the physicians for the fabulous pictures it gives of the insides of the human body.

An MRI scanner will allow to display fine cuts of the body of the patient laid into the machine, but what is to be seen when the human guinea pig is replaced with fruits or vegetables? We discover the new face of these friends of our everyday food. And when the pictures are animated, this gives something like:

Impressed? Go and check the others on http://insideinsides.blogspot.com/.

These pictures of Russia are color photos taken a few years before the October REvolution. A memory of a far era and of a society which has been deeply transformed in the following years.

Big Picture – Russia in color a century ago.

Pinkhus Karlinskii, eighty-four years old with sixty-six years of service. Supervisor of Chernigov floodgate, part of the Mariinskii Canal system. Photo taken in 1909. (Prokudin-Gorskii Collection/LOC)

Found by chance alone, I wanted to let you immerse into it.

Who said there was only one way to play the guitar?

The guitar player, Ronnie Moipolai, lives in Kopong a village 50 km North of Gaborone, Botswana’s capital.

Exactly one century ago, died Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),[3] better-known by his pen name Mark Twain. So, why not celebrate this with a few tidbits about him?

For example, the only known video showing Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) at home with his two daughters Clara and Jean:

But a brilliant writer like Mark Twain is worth more than a bad quality old movie. Far from being an actor, he was a writer and, thus, was able to delightfully write about anything at any time. For example, when he addresses a a snake oil peddler: “You, sir, are the scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link”.

Dear Sir, Your letter is an insoluble puzzle to me. The handwriting is good and exhibits considerable character, and there are even traces of intelligence in what you say, yet the letter and the accompanying advertisements profess to be the work of the same hand. The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link. It puzzles me to make out how the same hand could have constructed your letter and your advertisements. Puzzles fret me, puzzles annoy me, puzzles exasperate me; and always, for a moment, they arouse in me an unkind state of mind toward the person who has puzzled me. A few moments from now my resentment will have faded and passed and I shall probably even be praying for you; but while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own poison by mistake, and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other patent medicine assassins have so remorselessly earned and do so richly deserve. Adieu, adieu, adieu! Mark Twain

I would love to be able to apply this myself to one of the modern spammers.

But Mark Twain was also man of a wider judgment: “Of all the creatures that were made, man is the most detestable… The only one, the solitary one, that possesses malice… He is the only creature that has a nasty mind.” Mark Twain

Happy Birthday!

The fashion of drawing fractals is a memory of the past (it was probably linked to the first appearance of computers able to collate the computing power for the needed calculations and the display capacity for complex images). But the pleasure is all mine to find this HD video which sends us into a Mandelbrot set, this fractal structure (which seems to never change whatever the observation scale – a little like the ever finely cut coast of Brittany).

So, here are 10 minutes of total fractal travel:

The zoom is so intense that the original fractal is larger than the known universe, but the last image gives details smaller than the smaller of nuclear physics particle.

Astonishing mathematics via Boing Boing.

A great classic piece of music from Rossini, Duetto buffo di due gatti is interpreted here by two young singers whose countenance is all the more appreciated for their honorable clothes and the Korean public that appreciated a lot the unexpected performance.

If you’re like most people, you’d like to have pretty wallpaper on your desktop background. You can always go to wallpaper web sites but most of them are choke-full of ads and they always provide the same usual set. How about getting new ones?

Use Google.

Now, Google is able to search images by size. Just enter your screen size and you will be treated to a galore of images. If you also search for the word “wallpaper”, you are sure to find exactly what you need.

For my own 24″ screen, I could find brightly colored pictures or elegant designs. All designed to be wallpapers, even when no wide-audience web site had found it yet.

Free wallpapers on Google

did I mention that it also works for dual-screen wallpapers? And did I mention that it’s free? (for a commercial use, this would not be an acceptable practice)

Beards, they are amazing, full of surprises, flowering with novelty. Do you want some evidence?

You can join the competition for the beard holding the largest number of wooden toothpicks:

2222 toothpicks in a single beard!

If you feel a pinch, don’t accuse the beard!

In order to stay on the competition field, there was this beard contest in Alaska in May 2009. The new champion: David Traver.
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You love books, you love all about old books, stock paper, engravings, intaglio printing, hollow back binding, etc. The electronic book cannot satisfy your thirst for reading and touching books. So, here I am with some weird news for you.

First, the journal Analytical Chemistry teaches us that, even if we love the smell of those old books, this is the perfume of Death itself. It goes as far as using the identification of some chemical substances to determine which book is most in need of protection and help before too early a decease [1]. And, for this, researchers from the University College London’s Centre for Sustainable Heritage now use a chromatograph/mass-spectrometer.

But, by Jove! Old books will loose their odor? Of course not! Here come the replacement smell. I dare say: Luxurious perfume for the old restored writings, for the savorless new e-Book, for the amateur of foreseeable bibliophily! Here comes the new book smell in a pressurize can.

SmellOfBooks.com has it for $28.99 only!

In order to close with something a little more tasteful, I advise you to discover these ex-libris plates (famous or not) which will bring you back into past ages and will not make us walk in giant’s footsteps but somewhat visit some giant’s reading habits: The Extraordinary World of Ex Libris Art.

Bookplates from Amy Sacker (XIX/XX century)

Merci à Pierrick.

A friend of mine recently bought a copy of a Japanese wood engraving. While reading this article from BibliOdyssey, about the wood engravings of Kitagawa Utamaro, I thought I should share some of the pictures of this artist.

Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806)

Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806)

I consider that the most useful and often the most interesting wallpapers for your computer desktop are images that are relatively feature-less. A picture full of little details continuously grabbing your attention is a major nuisance. It’s much better to have either a very smooth image or a photo containing a lot of continuous tones.

Windows 7 official wallpapers

Look at the full set of the Windows 7 wallpapers. This is the upcoming version of Windows (after Windows Vista, it seems that Microsoft intends to switch back to a numbering scheme). Most of them may be colourful, but with very smooth surfaces where your icons will be appearing quite neatly and they offer a nice contrast.

Fresh Impact Crater Formed between February 2005 and July 2005
Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

So, I was quite interested when I stumbled upon the collection of pictures taken by the HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera installed on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter). Shooting photos of Mars surface, this photo camera brings extraordinary color images that provide nice patterns to be used as background for your Windows desktop (or even Linux or Mac desktop) and can be renewed quite regularly: Their catalog is available on the University of Arizona web site.

Furthermore, they provide an enormous resolution for their images which is a very good way to extract any size you may need for your extra-high-resolution background or to cover your 2- or 3-LCD display. Or even more. If you feel that there own selection of wallpapers is not enough:

• 800×600
• 1024×768
• 1152×864
• 1280×960
• 1440×1080
• 1600×1200
• 1920×1440
• 2048×1536
• 2560×1600

You can still stick to the original size (JPEG-2000 format images range between 0.5GB and 3GB).

And the good news is that there is no copyright restrictions, so you could do pretty much what you want with them: Really free desktop wallpapers.

The Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin is a museum presenting a large mount of technology history. Quite naturally, they are biased toward presenting a lot of German achievements and this country is known for hosting some of the very best optical engineers and being rightfully proud of brands like Carl Zeiss, Leitz/Leica.

Charlie Sorrel wrote a piece of article for Wired.com, titled “Gallery of Sawn-In-Half Cameras” that I intensely recommend reading.

Belgian Kimberley Vlaeminck, 18, went to a tattoo parlor and asked for 3 tattooed stars. But, she fell asleep and woke up with 56 black stars. In a sense, this is nice, but she seems pissed off.

PETER DECONINCK/AFP/Getty Images

Update on 24-June: It appears that after some time and media pressure, Kimberley admitted that this was not a mere issue of misunderstanding between the tattooist and her. Frightened by her father reaction to her stars, she tried to explain that it was not her fault. But she actually requested 56 stars from the beginning. So, she was lying…