This was quite an eyeball kick when it popped up in my RSS reader. From Brock Davis, via the Street Anatomy blog:
I was asked by NY magazine Tokion to create a piece for the project section in the new June/July issue, based on the theme of sex. I took an approach around the idea of sexuality and consumerism, resulting in this sculpture.
EDIT: further discussion here.
Time to close some tabs.
The cover of the relevant edition. The spine is green and black.
I don’t know how widespread this is, but the Borders near my apartment is having some huge sales right now. I went in there this weekend, and on a table covered in boxes of what I assume is overstock there was a box full of attractive copies of Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad, priced at $4.00 each. This book is a favorite of my childhood, and one of those special books that remains just as compelling as an adult. It is a series of related stories about a wacky distant future in which all life is cybernetic life, and largely follows the exploits of two “constructors,” Trurl and Klapaucius, who have the technical expertise to, given enough time, build a machine to do absolutely anything. Their adventures are always entertaining (the chapter in which Trurl builds a machine to write poetry is one of the funniest pieces of short fiction I know about, and fabulous for reading aloud), and frequently deeply thought provoking as well. It is easy to agree with the New York Times blurb on the back of this edition which proclaims “Mr. Lem is a Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age.” Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett included two stories from The Cyberiad in their anthology The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul. And as if the humor and philosophy weren’t enough, there is also so much clever wordplay that it is hard to believe that it was originally written in Polish. It’s a book I recommend to people and give away copies of with some regularity, and for four bucks it is a steal.
This is popping up everywhere. Deservedly.
World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
Mostly in here:
This is my brain, age 20. Is there a story out there somewhere in which a character pays extra to get his own copies of an MRI? That may have had a real world inspiration. I got this because I was having weird twitching convulsion things that eventually just went away on their own. No good diagnosis was ever provided, the best the neurologist came up with was sleep deprivation.
I ran across this while digging out my college ID picture for the previous post. It occurred to me as I looked at it that if I were to post it online, and then at some future point society shifts to using brain geometry as a form of identification, I might be screwed. But the fun of showing off my own brain eventually overpowered my fear that the future might turn out to be a work of science fiction from the 70s.
My friend Megan has recently posted about her hair, and my friend Kat is taunting everyone by making bold claims which she declines to prove, but which I am inclined to believe all the same (don’t tell). I am inspired by these events, especially Megan’s comment:
I love when you ignore it for a while and it becomes hopelessly uninspired and the only thing you can do with it is wear it in a ponytail or look like a tumbleweed.
So, to join the fun, I share with you my hair at its most tumbleweedy. Some time during my senior year in high school I decided, having never let it get longer than two or three inches, to see how long I could go without getting a haircut. This experiment lasted well into my freshman year of college, long enough to be immortalized on my university ID. Unless I am someday gripped by a burst of highly uncharacteristic impulsivity, this is likely the weirdest my hair will ever look. (Also, I will probably only have my hair for a few more years, so there’s that too. Maybe, a decade or more from now, I will sit alone late at night, stare at this photo, and sigh profoundly to myself.)
The world today is a subtly changed place, full of mystery and curiosities. The tide of popular opinion waxes on strange shores:
Long familiar things have mutated into nearly unrecognizable forms:
But the most important change of the day? That would be this:
What? You don’t see it? Understandable. Look closer:
My friend and former roomie Ferrett‘s first pro sale, “Camera Obscured,” hit the stands today. I got to see the first draft of this story at Clarion, and was thrilled for him when it was bought by Asimov’s only a few months later. This makes Ferrett the first Clarion ’08er to crack one of the so-called “big three.” Asimov’s was the one my parents subscribed to when I was a kid, and thus retains a special, nostalgia-tinged place in my affections. Holding a copy of it that has a friend’s story inside is pretty exciting for me. Way to go, Ferrett!
An awesome one.
BIRDY NAM NAM – THE PARACHUTE ENDING from Steve Scott on Vimeo.
Thank you Steve Scott, whoever you are.
…is a pigeon. Used to smuggle cellphones into a prison in São Paolo. Link.
I am friends with a couple who just had their sixth and seventh children, premature twin boys that they just got to bring home. Preemies are tough, two of them are tougher, and the five kids they already had, ranging in age from 13 to 2, are a bit of a handful as well. So they already had a lot on their plate when, a couple of days ago, the two-year-old accidentally nearly blinded his twelve-year-old sister with toilet bowl cleaner. She’s healing nicely, but the commonest way for their family to spend evenings during the summer is to watch movies together, and she can’t easily do that now. So another friend and I had the idea to get her some audiobooks. She isn’t much of a reader, but we got her the audiobook of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, and she loved it. I have since given her Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies. I’m trying to find other good, recent YA–focusing on that with an SF bent–that she and her older sister might enjoy, especially that is available as an audiobook. Suggestions are welcome.