El Museum of Bad Art de Sommerville es algo más que una muestra de chapuzas y despropósitos. Es difícil diferenciar el arte malo del bueno y, por lo que parece, ellos saben hacerlo. De alguna forma, y por lo que afirman en la entrevista, una obra de arte mala no puede ser concebida como tal: uno tiene que intentar hacerlo bien y en alguna parte del camino se liará o se volverá loco; según el resultado de ese error se podrá catalogar a la obra como mal arte o directamente tirarla a la basura.

Lo que sí está claro es que el museo se niega en rotundo a exponer obras que no sean divertidas o que no contengan algún elemento perturbador. El hecho de que estén mal ejecutadas suma puntos, sí, pero lo importante es que el espectador vaya pasando de cuadro a cuadro preguntándose continuamente qué pasaba en la cabeza de esa gente mientras hacían semejantes sacrilegios.

Por desgracia, no he podido encontrar la entrevista subtitulada. Si tenéis un nivel mínimo de inglés la entenderéis perfectamente y si no, bueno, muestran algunos cuadros que son oficialmente malos, lo que ya es algo.

Visto en Neatorama

En el post de Lights Out presentaba una obra muy buena y, no sé, me he sentido mal porque parecía que nos estábamos poniendo serios. Así que me veo obligado a compensar el post anterior con los siempre agradecidos y no suficientemente valorados anuncios japoneses.

En esta ocasión tenemos a un tipo que se introduce un chicle en la boca. Y a partir de ahí, bueno, alguno de los guionistas se tomó algo que le sentó mal (o demasiado bien) y la cosa se le fue de las manos.

Visto en Cubicle Bot

Comic URL: http://www.lefthandedtoons.com/1621/

Comic URL: http://www.lefthandedtoons.com/1617/

We’ve had some trouble with obnoxious pop-ups displaying on the site. Problem has been resolved. More on that here.

Comic URL: http://www.lefthandedtoons.com/1610/

Another artwork from my “sartorialist sketches” series. These are artworks inspired by people in Scott Schuman’s book: The Sartorialist. Do you fancy yourself in a fashion illustration? @thesartorialist #scottschuman #thesartorialist #thesketchingbackpacker #fashionillustration #robertalejandro

Por si alguno duda aún de la supremacía de los robots sobre la raza humana, aquí tenemos otra prueba irrefutable.

El engendro mecánico de la imagen ha destrozado el récord mundial de "Operación" con una actuación impecable, rápida y eficiente que ha dejado boquiabiertos a los eminentes cirujanos que asistían, incrédulos, a la exhibición.

Visto en BitsAndPieces

Muchos de vosotros conoceréis el vodka Crystal Head, siquiera por su singular aspecto (la botella tiene forma de calavera). Bien: un artista forense escocés llamado Nigel ha decidido reconstruir la cara a la que supuestamente pertenecería esa botella. Y lo ha hecho a partir de la botella, claro. El resultado es más que sorprendente y no sólo por su realismo; jamás habría pensado que esa calavera escondía esa cara. O al revés. O, bueno, no sé, me he liado.

Hay más fotografías del proceso en el perfil de Nigel y merece mucho la pena echarles un vistazo.

Visto en Like Cool

Have you found your self recklessly deriding a fellow human or appealing to the dark arts, in the heat of a blood-boilingly vigorous exchange only to wish you had been more calculating and cogent, thus retaining the upper hand of noble civility? protect your reputation and corporeal integrity with this simple sequential exercise. Safety first in words and deeds.

Another sketch from my “sartorialist sketches” series of art. I wish I could make a living just doing this kind of art! #scottschuman #thesartorialist #fashionillustration #fashion #robertalejandro #cigarette

Comic URL: http://www.lefthandedtoons.com/1600/

If you made a beach using grains the proportionate size of the stars in the Milky Way, what would that beach look like?

Jeff Wartes

Sand is interesting.^{[Citation needed]}

"Are there more grains of sand than stars in the sky?" is a popular question which has been tackled by many people. The upshot is that there are probably more stars in the visible universe than grains of sand on all of Earth's beaches.

When people do those calculations, they often dig up some good data on the number of stars, then do some hand-waving about sand grain size to come up with a number for the sand grains on Earth.[1]From a practical point of view, geology and soil science are more complicated than astrophysics. We're not going to tackle that issue today, but to answer Jeff's question, we do need to figure out what the deal with sand is.[2]"i like sand because i don't really know what it is and there's so many of it"

—@darth__mouth Specifically, we need to have some idea of what grain sizes correspond to clay, silt, fine sand, coarse sand, and gravel, so we can understand how our galaxy would look and feel if it were a beach.[3]Instead of just containing a bunch of them.

Fortunately, there's a wonderful chart by the US Geologic Survey that answers all these questions and more. For some reason, I find this chart very satisfying—it's like the erosion geology edition of the electromagnetic spectrum chart.

According to surveys of sand,[4]There are apparently lots of them. the grains found on beaches tend to run from 0.2mm to 0.5mm (with the finest layers on top). This corresponds to medium-to-coarse sand in the chart. The individual grains are about this big:

If we assume the Sun corresponds to a typical sand grain, then multiply by the number of stars in the galaxy, we come up with a large sandbox worth of sand.[5]I mean, you come up with a bunch of numbers, but imagination turns them into a sandbox.

However, this is wrong. The reason: Stars aren't all the same size.

There are a number of widely-circulated YouTube videos comparing star sizes. They do a good job of getting across just how staggeringly large some stars are. Although it's easy to get lost in the videos and lose track of scale, it's clear that some of the grains in our sandbox universe would be more like boulders.

Here's how the main-sequence[6]The stars in the main part of their fuel-burning lifecycle. star-sand grains look:

They mostly fall into the "sand" category, though the larger Daft Punk stars cross the line into "granules" or "small pebbles".

However, that's just the main sequence stars. Dying stars get much, much bigger.

When a star runs out of fuel, it expands into a red giant. Even ordinary stars can produce huge red giants, but when a star that's already massive enters this phase, it can become a true monster. These red supergiants are the largest stars in the universe.

These beachball-sized sand stars would be rare, but the grape-sized and baseball-sized red giants are relatively common. While they're not nearly as abundant as Sun-like stars or red dwarfs, their huge volume means that they'd constitute the bulk of our sand. We would have a large sandbox worth of grains ... along with a field of gravel that went on for miles.

The little sand patch would contain 99% of the pile's individual grains, but less than 1% of its total volume. Our Sun isn't a grain of sand on a soft galactic beach; instead, the Milky Way is a field of boulders with some sand in between.

But, as with the real Earth seashore, it's the rare little stretches of sand between the rocks where all the fun seems to happen.