Arthur

Outdoor Office

For a couple hours yesterday, the trails pictured above served as my office.

Earlier that morning, I was polishing a proof. In doing so, I needed to reference a pair of related papers. As I began reading these papers, I sensed a deep connection between these results and my own, but I couldn’t quite articulate it.

In my experience, this type of connection making is well-served by three ingredients: quiet, movement, and time. So I left my building and hiked onto a network of trails that abuts the Georgetown campus.

I spent the next couple of hours walking and thinking, trying to arrange and re-arrange my understanding of these results. I’m hoping this impromptu line of thought might yield something new and significant, but it’s too early at this point to tell.

More important for our purposes here, however, is the broader point this example underscores…

Quiet Creativity

When I talk about my purposefully disconnected life, a common retort is that I’m missing out on the creative possibilities born of the frequent exposure to new people and ideas delivered through social media and related technologies.

But here’s the thing, for the most part, this is not how high-level creative work is accomplished. It’s not, in other words, lack of input that stymies creative breakthroughs.

Take my own example: I don’t use Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linked In, Tumblr or Instagram, and I’m bad about e-mail, but I still have no shortage of ideas to work on.

(This is not surprising, even without these technologies, I’m still significantly more connected than most scientists and writers in most other times — and they had no problem coming up with big ideas.)

What does stands in the way of creative breakthroughs — I’m increasingly convinced — is lack of time spent walking quietly with your thoughts, working and re-working your understanding of a concept in search of new layers of meaning.

This is hard deep work. But it’s also the foundation for ideas that matter.

(Video Link)

Now you can truly say “this video game is Kafka-esque” without sounding like a vapid hipster, because The Franz Kafka Video game is on its way to your Castle. You will feel the Metamorphosis as you attempt to survive The Trial of playing this game, deep in Contemplation about Amerika and The Judgment of your friends if you’re unable to beat the game.

This brainy game was developed by A Hunger Artist by the name of Denis Galanin, a Russian game developer whose previous game release was based on Hamlet and who would probably write A Letter To His Father if he ever stood Before The Law, accused of making a mindless game.

Via Geeks Of Doom

(Photo: Mickaël T)

(Photo: Julen)

(Photo: Julen)

Fadiouth is an artificial island off the coast of Senegal. It’s made almost entirely of clam shells. People living in the area built it over generations of clam harvesting. This was their shell dump. Now it’s large enough to support houses, though it’s most widely known for its Christian cemetery.

Visitors can go there over a 400-meter long wooden bridge. As they walk through the streets and by the graves they can hear and feel the shells crunch beneath their feet.

-via Amusing Planet

buy this print!

A couple of comics about Edward, the Black Prince. I love that a man who was brutal in many ways was celebrated as "the Flower of English Chivalry" even into the 1900s. That's from a towering statue in Leeds, where I am headed for this year's Thought Bubble Festival! Love Leeds, love Thought Bubble, love the Black Prince, love his statue. I admit that last year I was proud of myself for identifying the figure from afar - it's all that bullet shaped armour around his head (amiright), a style we all wish would come back.

Also, glory be! New shirts! I am so glad to be stocking the store with new things. The Venus one is not in yet, but coming, but head on over to check out the rest. Deck yourselves in them, deck your friends, deck whoever! Just click the link:

Emails about how wrong I am in 3... 2... 1...

GLONK

Happy new year!

Yep.

KERPOW

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December 3rd, 2013: Every year we have a Christmas party with the Beguiling, and this year is NO DIFFERENT.. As usual it's at Pauper's Pub in Toronto (539 Bloor St. W.)! It'll be this Wednesday, December 18th, 2013 from 7:30pm-10pm. Come to party with me, Joey Comeau, Kate Beaton and A SPECIAL MYSTERY GUEST too. There will even be a SECRET SANTA (this always works out super great and is my favourite part of the evening!) Details are here and Facebook event is here! One year ago today: PREPARE YOURSELF... for an emotional milk run – Ryan

We admit it: we’ve cut little pictures furniture out of Ikea catalogs and held them up at arm’s length to see how it would look in a room. But the furniture retailer’s 2014 catalog makes it much easier to see just how their pieces would look in your home, no scissors required.

The augmented reality catalog works with your tablet or smartphone with the Ikea app. All you have to do is place the catalog on the floor in the place you imagine the new piece sitting. Then, use the app to select the product that you’d like to see there.

And then, hey-presto, you’ve got an augmented reality view of your room with your dream piece of Ikea furniture right there on your device’s screen. That way you can tell if the object you’re thinking of buying will look as amazing as you imagine or if it will ruin the look of the whole room.

There are only 90 pieces to choose from on the app currently, but it would be pretty amazing to eventually plan an entire home using this virtual window into the world of Swedish furniture.

It’s expensive to get a new telescope into space to search for alien worlds, so NASA scientists came up with an ingenious way to reactivate the defunct Kepler space telescope. It was unable to properly aim its field of vision after losing too many of its stabilizing gyroscopes, but it now balances itself against photon energy from the sun.

Its two remaining gyroscopic wheels are be able to form a kind of tripod with photon energy from the sun to again point its view back out into the universe for its K2 mission of searching for previously unknown planets. It can’t just aim anywhere, because light from the sun will prevent it from noticing the tiny dots of planets passing in front of stars.

Here’s how NASA explains the process of using the sun’s energy to balance Kepler, because it’s pretty amazing:

How will K2 work? By using the Sun as a ‘third wheel!’ http://t.co/kiPk5FMOIG #aas223 pic.twitter.com/j8WqV2ZRF2

— NASA Kepler (@NASAKepler) January 6, 2014

They’ve tweeted a few pictures of what it’s seeing since its reactivation, and it has apparently already discovered some new planets, so we’re glad they were able to bring Kepler back—even if their methods make us feel like cave men who barely understand how fire works by comparison.

(via NASA, image via NASA Blueshift)

Meanwhile in related links

• The sun is also pretty neat to look at—especially in a rainbow of wavelengths
• Here’s what the Earth and moon looked like to Juno as it flew by
• The curiosity rover is still up there doing a science and finding signs of Mars water

Last week, we found out that dolphins get high by chewing on puffer fish, and the discovery was caught on hidden camera, but the footage was part of a not-yet-released BBC nature documentary. Today, the BBC finally uploaded a clip of the dolphins passing the puffer (fish) around and being mesmerized by their own reflections. Oh, and it’s narrated by David Tennant.

Last time we put up a clip from the documentary, it was region-restricted the next day, so let’s hope this one sticks around a little longer, because it’s pretty priceless.

[Update] Sadly, it looks like the BBC region locked this video, as well, and we haven’t found it anywhere else. Yet.

(via BBC on YouTube)

Meanwhile in related links

• This sea creature is nowhere near as cute as high dolphins, but still amazing
• The dive-bombing hunting technique that foxes use is pretty fun to watch
• Scientists accidentally killed the world’s oldest animal

As an experiment, Cracked writer Alli Reed composed a fictitious but truly awful online dating profile. Her goal was to to create a persona that was truly despicable and that no one would ever consider dating:

In making this profile, I made sure my creation touched on every major facet of being truly horrible: mean, spoiled, lazy, racist, manipulative, and willfully ignorant, and I threw in a little gold digging just for funzies. I maintain that there is not a human on this planet who would read this profile and think, "Yes, I'd like to spend any amount of the fleeting time I'm given on my journey around the sun getting to know this person." 

As you can see, she put a lot of thought into how truly offensive she could be. Her persona, aaroncarterfan, is despicable. She openly brags of engaging in paternity fraud and harassing homeless people.

But within a day, she received 150 responses from interested men. In their online conversations, she did her best to convey the impression that aaroncarterfan would be the worst possible girlfriend. She was unsuccessful. You can read them here.

This cool illustration from a 1921 issue of Scientific American uses a human head to demonstrate how map projections distort the sizes and shapes of landmasses. The upper left drawing shows a globe, which is why the head looks normal.

This is one of several neat cartographic demonstrations rounded up by Joe Hanson, a biologist and TV star. You can find the rest here.

Berlin-based designer Michael Bernard has a lot on his plate and we like every single thing. His furnishings seem to be centered around two basic principles: simple and sustainable. He creates objects that interact with things we either build ourselves or already have in order to make an entirely new piece that feels much more personal.

The Leviathan table legs, made from lightweight wire-tubing, gain their stability once connected to the user’s tabletop and allow for simple construction and dismantling.

The Ad Hoc Lamp offers the user the possibility of an individual design. The lamp’s head and base can be connected with any object that fits inside the conduits and then fastened with a locking screw.

The Nooks Shelf System consists of nothing but brackets, in practically endless combinations of color, material and board thickness (thanks to on demand 3D printing), allowing the tool-free assembly of any selection of wood into a custom storage unit.

The legs of this Trestle Bed take the advantage of a standard bed frames and can easily attach without tools. The space-saving, stackable feet can be easily assembled and dismantled.

While you might not recognize his name you’ll probably recognize his designs or at least his ideas. Harvey Probber was an iconic American designer who introduced the world to modular sectional seating in the 1940s and went on to have a successful career that spanned four decades. He sold the company in 1986 and since that time, his designs have become prized collector’s items around the world. Luckily, M2L has signed an exclusive agreement with the Harvey Probber Design Archive to reissue some of Probber’s most iconic furniture designs. The initial launch of M2L BRAND for Harvey Probber includes pieces from his popular Architectural Series with additional pieces coming next year.

The Deep Tuft Sofa launched in 1972 (first image also) with plush tufted cubes making up each of its three available sections.

The Lounge Chair from the Architectural Series launched in 1960 and the wood-wrapped chair was a departure from the curves of his other work.

Another piece from the Architectural Series, the buffet features similar architectural lines to the chair and is another simple, timeless part of the collection.

The wood-wrapped desk from the Architectural Series holds the same lines and details as the rest in the collection.

The Mayan Sofa, from 1981, is an unholstered piece with clean lines and and a unique silhouette created with the help of layered multiple-density foam over a hardwood frame.

Back in April, I wrote about these chainmail leggings by Vancouver, Canada-based seller MITMUNK.

Now, they have robot/mecha-inspired leggings and OMGIWANTTHEM.

 

 

Michael Lopp:

The things we’re giving to the future are feeling increasingly unintentional and irrelevant.

I'm so high I'm gonna eat this. In news that shouldn't surprise anybody who's ever dreamed of being a drug-abusing teenage dolphin, scientists have discovered groups of young dolphins chew puffer fish to get high. Me? I chew puffer fish because I like the way their spines tickle the roof of my mouth.

Scientists found that dolphins apparently had learned just how much of the toxin would safely intoxicate them, and they carefully chewed the fish and then passed it among themselves. The dolphins then entered what appeared to be a trancelike state. "This was a case of young dolphins purposely experimenting with something we know to be intoxicating," said Rob Pilley, a zoologist who worked as a producer for the series. "After chewing the puffer gently and passing it round, they began acting most peculiarly, hanging around with their noses at the surface as if fascinated by their own reflection."

Whoa whoa whoa -- everybody knows rule number one of doing drugs is NEVER LOOK AT YOUR REFLECTION. No good ever comes from that. If I had a nickel for every hour I've spent watching my face melt in the mirror and telling myself what a worthless piece of shit I am, I could afford to go out tonight. Thanks to PYY, who agrees there's no porpoise getting high if you're not going to enjoy yourself.

[Source: ComickerGirl]

It’s such a great conceit for a crime show: guy commits murder; guy denies it; turns out it was guy’s identical twin all along; everyone is happy (except murdered dude). Sadly, procedurals are going to have to get some new plotlines, because scientists at Eurofins have finally discovered a way to tell identical twins apart genetically.

Though identical (or “monozygotic”) twins account for only one birth in every three thousand, geneticists have been baffled attempting to find ways to tell twins apart forensically; regular DNA fingerprinting doesn’t show any difference between the two individuals. This, obviously, can create some complications when it comes to forensic evidence and even paternity testing.

But a new study published in Forensic Science International: Genetics shows that Eurofins, a German company specializing in forensic genetics, has found a very specific way to differentiate between identical twins. They sequenced genes from identical twins and the child of one twin, and discovered five mutations (called Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) in the father and child that didn’t appear in the uncle’s genes. Eurofins says that these SNPs prove that there are minute genetic differences between identical twins, if you know where to look, and that they are carried down to the next generation – making both forensic and paternity testing much simpler. 

Eurofins is now offering the “Twins Test” service for sale to “authorities, courts, and individuals,” so if you find yourself in a very complicated struggle involving identical twins (?), you know who to call.

(via Gizmag and Eurofins, image via The National Guard)

Meanwhile in related links

• NASA performed tests on an astronaut using his identical twin as a control
• Your genes also may determine what you can and can’t smell
• Scientists have unravelled the chocolate genome

Goal takes a look back at the career of Eusebio and the magical moments that helped form his footballing legacy

Goal compares the respective careers of two Portugal legends following the death of the Black Pearl on Sunday

The 1966 World Cup star, who died on Sunday aged 71, will go down in history as not only one of football's greats but also as one of the sport's trailblazers

(YouTube link)

I dropped the kids off at the multiplex one day and, since I was close to the door, scanned the posters across the front. They all looked alike. None of them told me anything about the movie they advertised. Dark colors, big heads, few words, nothing informative at all. It's almost as if movie producers expect the viewer to get all their information about a film from trailers or the internet …which we do, because the poster won't tell us anything. GoodBadFlicks takes a look at the various formulas and tropes used to produce these rather forgettable posters. -via Geeks Are Sexy

You know, adherence to a formula for designing posters can backfire on you.

Rotterdam-based Pronk. were hired by a motorcycle-loving designer to design proper shelter his bikes. Instead of creating your basic shed, they thought outside the typical box and went for a diamond-shaped shed constructed out of hollow polycarbonate sheets and stainless steel.

To get the shape just right, Pronk. went through about 12 mockups because it couldn’t just be beautiful to look at, it had to be practical. The result is a sleek and safe shelter for the owner’s beloved bikes that is also pretty dynamite to look at.