An Entertaining Thing To Do Would Be To Replace Every Instance Of “for Ritual Purposes” In Any Archeology

Emerald City Comicon

Con is over and I’m finally back at home recuperating. Sorting through photos was a good way to keep myself occupied in line, but I’ve still got a few hundred more shots to weed through. So far my ECCC folder has about a thousand images in it so this may be a little while.

Photos to be posted include… Tyler Hoechlin Amanda Tapping Jewel Staite Marina Sirtis Anthony Mackie Clark Gregg Orlando Jones

…along with a few shots of our fantastic moderators for the weekend, Grant Imahara and Clare Kramer throughout these sets.

I’ll be putting everything up on flickr first, but will also be posting selected ones here, so keep an eye out!

sagrada familia. gaudi’s magnificent, over the top, biomimetic fantasy spaceship

Celestial Mapping and Celestial Proportions by Tallmadge Doyle

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Surreal Monochromatic GIFs by Carl Burton

So, our physics teacher has the strange idea of motivating his students by letting each of us present a physical phenomenal we find interesting to our classmates in a 5-minutes-presentation. And now I need something that is interesting for everyone - even people that usually don't care for physics -, but has interesting facts for someone who's interested in it, too (preferably with an easy experiment). You don't happen to have any ideas, do you?

First of all, your professor is awesome for taking the time to do this. Of the top of my mind, the best one I have is Chladni figures.

Basically take a flat metal plate, fix it at the center and spray some fine sand particles on it.

Using a violin bow, gently excite any edge of the plate to magically witness these beautiful normal mode patterns ( known as Chladni patterns/figures ) forming on the plate.

Also notice that by pinching the plate at different points, the pattern obtained changes.

There is a whole lot of physics that goes behind such a simple phenomenon and I dare say we understand it completely. There are lots of questions on these figures that we have no answer for!

Hope this helps with your presentation. Have a good one!

Gif source video: Steve Mould

Playful Ravens by Mika Honkalinna

The last surviving sea silk seamstress

Byssus, or sea silk, is one of the most coveted materials in the world – but after more than 1,000 years in the same matrilineal family tree, this ancient thread may soon unravel.

“My grandmother wove in me a tapestry that was impossible to unwind,” Vigo said. “Since then, I’ve dedicated my life to the sea, just as those who have come before me.”

Like the 23 women before her, Vigo has never made a penny from her work. She is bound by a sacred ‘Sea Oath’ that maintains that byssus should never be bought or sold.

Instead, Vigo explained that the only way to receive byssus is as a gift. […]

“Byssus doesn’t belong to me, but to everyone,” Vigo asserted. “Selling it would be like trying to profit from the sun or the tides.”

More recently, a Japanese businessman approached Vigo with an offer to purchase her most famous piece, ‘The Lion of Women’, for €2.5 million. It took Vigo four years to stitch the glimmering 45x45cm design with her fingernails, and she dedicated it to women everywhere.

“I told him, ‘Absolutely not’,” she declared. “The women of the world are not for sale.”

This 110 million-year-old, armored plant-eater is the best preserved fossil of its kind ever found.

From the article:

The more I look at it, the more mind-boggling it becomes. Fossilized remnants of skin still cover the bumpy armor plates dotting the animal’s skull. Its right forefoot lies by its side, its five digits splayed upward. I can count the scales on its sole. Caleb Brown, a postdoctoral researcher at the museum, grins at my astonishment. “We don’t just have a skeleton,” he tells me later. “We have a dinosaur as it would have been.”

Read more on Michael Greshko’s (beautifully written) article at National Geographic. Photos by Robert Clark.