tingilinde

presentation of scientific data to the public

A nice post in the Science of Sport blog.

give the leaders piles of cash

a way to encourage poor performance - a well known result summarized in this video

beyond fingerpainting

A brush for artwork on your iPad - the Nomad brush.

Something like this is hugely liberating for iPad users who have a bit of artistic talent.

 

(strongly recommended by artist reader Holi)

working on a darwin award

a seriously flawed way to change tires as practiced in Saudi Arabia

intensity, bra loops and gazing into china

Chris Lydon interviews Peter Hessler of The New Yorker on his Chinese experience (35 minutes audio)

fascinating as you might expect given the players

the right wing defense of obesity, unhealthy eating and lack of exercise

Of course everyone has choice, but attacking people who want to get kids started off with fewer disadvantages is a over the top.

Except for the poor adults have some choice about what they eat.  Some adults have legitimate weight and exercise issues but one expects a distribution.  If you have ever watched a tea party rally you see a mean body mass index that is shifted far from average.  Seeing them argue kids should not exercise and should not be given quality food in school lunch programs is disturbing.  You expect that from Fox commentators, but Romney and other politicians are destroying their credibility.

the high view

Bjarne notes this view from the cupola in the International Space Station.

During the Mercury program the engineers wanted to build a capsule without a view, but some glass to have a look outside became a non-negotiable demand by the astronauts.

a taxonomy of city blocks

Very interesting stuff

snip

Imagined cities built from the fragments of real ones: something similar is happening in Tout bien rangé, a cartography-based artwork by French artist Armelle Caron. It consists of a series of map pairs, one a blind, but recognisably real city map, the other what looks like an assembly kit for that same city, with the its blocks impracticably but neatly arranged by shape and size.

The transformational process involved is threefold: the city on map A is deconstructed, its blocks are classified for size and shape, then reassembled in rows, arranged by type, on map B. The result is reminiscent of butterfly cases and other taxonomical tableaux rather than of a street map. More Linnaeus than Mercator. 

In what the artist herself calls Anagrammes graphiques de plans de villes, Caron strips cities of their spatial context. Roads and rivers become irrelevant, districts and parks disappear. The relationship between built-up areas and empty spaces is obliterated. 

The city is hung out to dry by its smallest constituent parts. The cartographic compact - maps, however imperfect and partial on paper, are reliable real-world guides - is nullified. The city is un-mapped. Is it therefore also de-coded? The former term implies a loss of information: the city is disassembled, put in storage. The latter suggests a revelation of hidden knowledge: the fragments are pieces of an urban puzzle.

 

thanks for the link Nancy

at least our star can run for billions of years ...

Something that shocks people is when you tell them the power density of our Sun from nuclear fusion is less than the power density of a human from metabolism.

Most of the fusion that takes place in the Sun happens in the core - almost all of it happens in a region that is 25% of the radius.  The power density for the core is about 275 watts per cubic meter    ..   a 70 kg person has a 100 watt metabolism on average which works out to about 1400 watts per cubic meter.  A really good athlete can spike that by an order of magnitude for a short period.

The energy density of the Sun is more on par with the metabolism of a reptile.  Of course the Sun is big enough to run for about 10 billion years and the Earth collects enough light to easily supply our demands as we are small - even with the machines we have created so far..

beautiful bikes

Urban Velo is posting photos from the NorthAmerican Handmade Bicycle Show that is underway in Austin.

Some of these are almost too nice to ride.