Leave it to Thabto to come up with a quirky name like Jpegs for these J-hooks.

Inspired by the classic wooden clothes peg, these hooks can manage just about anything from your keys to coats and bags and also wrangle your mail at the same time. Or, stick a love note in the clothes pin. Or lunch money!

Pop a photo of the hook’s owner to help keep your family’s things organized and separated.

Each Jpeg also come with powerful magnets so you can put them on your fridge to use for kids’ drawings or notes, and also hang a potholder or apron. There are tons of uses for these!

very short reply expected, ie you can answer this with "yes", "no", "sounds good" etc.

We on for tonight?

VSRE

"Yes"

1. Hot Wheels: Found! (sitting in a Barn for 30 years)

A 1974 Ferrari Dino 246 GTS with 2,910 miles, a 1972 Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona with 9,752 miles and a 1977 Maserati Bora Coupe with just 978 miles were all found in the dusty Texas barn pictured below. According the Californian auction house, Mecum, which auctioned the cars after their discovery in the summer of 2011, “the owner was a friend of Luigi Chinetti, the Italian racer who opened the first Ferrari dealership in the United States following World War II, and was for many years the only source of Ferrari vehicles here. The ’74 Dino may be the best original example of that model in existence”. As to why the Italian exotics were forgotten in a barn near Dallas? The mystery remains intact. Full story on Jalopnik.

2. On the Set

via Every Day I Show

3. A Bubble Gum Dispenser Fish Tank

Found on Kitschy Living

4. The Elephant Hotel in New York

The Elephantine Colossus, otherwise known as the Elephant Hotel, was a tourist attraction located on Coney Island that was built in the shape of an elephant. The hotel opened in 1885, a 12-storey pachyderm with 31 organ-themed guest rooms that faced the ocean and featured an observation deck and a cigar store in its leg. The seven-story tall structure designed by James V. Lafferty stood above Surf Avenue and West 12th Street from 1885 until 1896, when it burnt down in a fire. 

Found on The Bowery Brothers

5. Diamond Mines

(1) Mir Mine also called Mirny Mine is a former open pit diamond mine located in Mirny, Eastern Siberia, Russia.

(2) The Diavik Diamond Mine in Canada

via The Khooll

6. Faux Asparagus Cake

By Sweetapolita

7. A Kids Room in 1937

Designed by André Arbus.

8. There’s hobo wine and then there’s handbag wine.

Available from The Fancy

9. “Get Lucky” – The Michael Jackson remix

In case you haven’t heard, the song of the summer is going to be Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” featuring Pharrell Williams. I thought to myself how great it would be to have heard Michael Jackson singing it. Luckily for us all, someone else had the same thought and made a remix, speeding up Pharrell’s vocals to sound more like MJ. Take a listen…

Click here to view the embedded video.

10. The only duct tape a girl needs on moving day

 Shop on A Day with Kate

11. Metro maintenance work gone horribly wrong on the Place de l’Alma in Paris, 1905

12. Famous Sweaters

By Found Item Clothing, available on a T Shirt

13. The Pinball Girl

Click here to view the embedded video.

A short by Cool Hunting

:::

13 MORE THINGS:

.

(via *wipes a tear* - Imgur)

An adept furniture maker is familiar with scrap – but this designer-and-artist has turned leftover materials into something just as fantastic as his normal finished projects.

James McNabb has crafted fine wooden designs using lasers and routers, but the band saw drove this stunning series of abstract city landscapes shaped into circles and in some cases patterned after furniture, from tables and shelves to chandeliers.

He began shaping the individual pieces without picturing them as architectural, but by arranging them on a grid, the sense of buildings emerges from each work.

As he assembles each from uniquely-cut shapes, individual structures may be similar but no two compositions are alike.

Like many stellar artists of history and the present, his creativity comes from a departure from but includes education in traditional forms and techniques – his beautiful furniture forms the basis for these more innovative offshoots.

What would happen if you tried to fly a normal Earth airplane above different Solar System bodies?

—Glen Chiacchieri

Here’s our aircraft:

The Cessna 172 Skyhawk, probably the most common plane in the world.

Here’s our pilot:

Here’s what happens when the aircraft is launched above the surface of the 32 largest Solar System bodies:

In most cases, there’s no atmosphere, and the plane falls straight to the ground. (If it’s dropped from one kilometer, in a few cases, the crash will be slow enough that the pilot may survive—although the life-support equipment probably won’t.)

There are nine Solar System bodies with atmospheres thick enough to matter: Earth—obviously—Mars, Venus, the four gas giants, Saturn’s moon Titan, and the Sun. Let’s take a closer look at what would happen to a plane on each one.

The Sun: This works about as well as you'd imagine. If the plane is released close enough to the Sun to feel its atmosphere at all, it's vaporized in less than a second.

Mars: To see what happens to aircraft on Mars, we turn to X-Plane.

X-Plane is the most advanced flight simulator in the world. The product of 20 years of obsessive labor by a hardcore aeronautics enthusiast who uses capslock a lot when talking about planes, it actually simulates the flow of air over every piece of an aircraft’s body as it flies. This makes it a valuable research tool, since it can accurately simulate entirely new aircraft designs—and new environments.

In particular, if you change the X-Plane config file to reduce gravity, thin the atmosphere, and shrink the radius of the planet it can simulate flight on Mars. (Note: Thank you to Tom J and the folks in the X-Plane community for their help with aerodynamic calculations in different atmospheres.)

X-Plane tells us that flight on Mars is difficult, but not impossible. NASA knows this, and has considered surveying Mars by airplane. The tricky thing is that with so little atmosphere, to get any lift, you have to go fast. You need to approach Mach 1 just to get off the ground, and once you get moving, you have so much inertia that it’s hard to change course—if you turn, your plane rotates, but keeps moving in the original direction. The X-Plane author compared piloting Martian aircraft to flying a supersonic ocean liner.

Our Cessna 172 isn’t up to the challenge. Launched from 1 km, it doesn’t build up enough speed to pull out of a dive, and plows into the Martian terrain at over 60 m/s (135 mph). If dropped from four or five kilometers, it could gain enough speed to pull up into a glide—at over half the speed of sound. The landing would not be survivable.

Venus: Unfortunately, X-Plane is not capable of simulating the hellish environment near the surface of Venus. But physics calculations give us an idea of what flight there would be like. The upshot is: Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane.

The atmosphere on Venus is over 60 times denser than Earth’s, which is thick enough that a Cessna moving at running speed would rise into the air. Unfortunately, the air it’s rising into is hot enough to melt lead. The paint would start melting off in seconds, the plane’s components would fail rapidly, and the plane would glide gently into the ground as it came apart under the heat stress.

A much better bet would be to fly above the clouds. While Venus’s surface is awful, its upper atmosphere is surprisingly Earthlike. 55 kilometers up, a human could survive with an oxygen mask and a protective wetsuit; the air is room temperature and the pressure is similar to that on Earth mountains. You need the wetsuit, though, to protect you from the sulfuric acid. (I’m not selling this well, am I?)

The acid's no fun, but it turns out the area right above the clouds is a great environment for an airplane, as long as it has no exposed metal to be corroded away by the sulfuric acid. And is capable of flight in constant Category-5-hurricane-level winds, which are another thing I forgot to mention earlier.

Venus is a terrible place.

Jupiter: Our Cessna can’t fly on Jupiter; the gravity is just too strong. The power needed to maintain level flight is three times greater than that on Earth. Starting from a friendly sea-level pressure, we’d accelerate through the tumbling winds into a 275 m/s (600 mph) downward glide deeper and deeper through the layers of ammonia ice and water ice until we and the aircraft were crushed. There's no surface to hit; Jupiter transitions smoothly from gas to solid as you sink deeper and deeper.

Saturn: The picture here is a bit friendlier than on Jupiter. The weaker gravity—close to Earth’s, actually—and slightly denser (but still thin) atmosphere mean that we’d be able to struggle along a bit further before we gave in to either the cold or high winds and descended to the same fate as on Jupiter.

Uranus: Uranus is a strange, uniform bluish orb. There are high winds and it’s bitterly cold. It’s the friendliest of the gas giants to our Cessna, and you could probably fly for a little while. But given that it seems to be an almost completely featureless planet, why would you want to?

Neptune: If you’re going to fly around one of the ice giants, Neptune (Motto: “The Slightly Bluer One”) is probably a better choice than Uranus. It at least has some clouds to look at before you freeze to death or break apart from the turbulence.

Titan: We’ve saved the best for last. When it comes to flying, Titan might be better than Earth. Its atmosphere is thick but its gravity is light, giving it a surface pressure only 50% higher than Earth’s with air four times as dense. Its gravity—lower than that of the Moon—means that flying is easy. Our Cessna could get into the air under pedal power.

In fact, humans on Titan could fly by muscle power. A human in a hang glider could comfortably take off and cruise around powered by oversized swim-flipper boots—or even take off by flapping artificial wings. The power requirements are minimal—it would probably take no more effort than walking.

The downside (there’s always a downside) is the cold. It’s 72 kelvin on Titan, which is about the temperature of liquid nitrogen. Judging from some numbers on heating requirements for light aircraft, I estimate that the cabin of a Cessna on Titan would probably cool by about two degrees per minute.

The batteries would help to keep themselves warm for a little while, but eventually the craft would run out of heat and crash. The Huygens probe, which descended with batteries nearly drained (taking fascinating pictures as it fell), succumbed to the cold after only a few hours on the surface. It had enough time to send back a single photo after landing—the only one we have from the surface of a body beyond Mars.

If humans put on artificial wings to fly, we might become Titan versions of the Icarus story—our wings could freeze, fall apart, and send us tumbling to our deaths.

But I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive. The cold of Titan is just an engineering problem. With the right refitting, and the right heat sources, a Cessna 172 could fly on Titan—and so could we.

How many unique English tweets are possible? How long would it take for the population of the world to read them all out loud?

—Eric H., Hopatcong, NJ

High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by.

—Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Tweets are 140 characters long. There are 26 letters in English—27 if you include spaces. Using that alphabet, there are \( 27^{140} \approx 10^{200} \) possible strings.

But Twitter doesn't limit you to those characters. You have all of Unicode to play with, which has room for over a million different characters. The way Twitter counts Unicode characters is complicated, but the number of possible strings could be as high as \( 10^{800} \).

Of course, almost all of them would be meaningless jumbles of characters from a dozen different languages. Even if you're limited to the 26 English letters, the strings would be full of meaningless jumbles like "ptikobj". Eric's question was about tweets that actually say something in English. How many of those are possible?

This is a tough question. Your first impulse might be to allow only English words. Then you could further restrict it to grammatically valid sentences.

But it gets tricky. For example, “Hi, I’m Mxyztplk” is a grammatically valid sentence if your name happens to be Mxyztplk. (Come to think of it, it’s just as grammatically valid if you’re lying.) Clearly, it doesn’t make sense to count every string that starts with “Hi, I’m ...” as a separate sentence. To a normal English speaker, “Hi, I’m Mxyztplk” is basically indistinguishable from “Hi, I’m Mxzkqklt”, and shouldn't both count. But “Hi, I’m xPoKeFaNx” is definitely recognizably different from the first two, even though “xPoKeFaNx” isn’t an English word by any stretch of the imagination.

Fortunately, there’s a better approach.

Let’s imagine a language which has only two valid sentences, and every tweet must be one of the two sentences. They are:

1. “There’s a horse in aisle five.”
2. “My house is full of traps.”

Twitter would look like this:

The messages are relatively long, but there’s not a lot of information in each one—all they tell you is whether the person decided to send the trap message or the horse message. It’s a 1 or a 0. Although there are a lot of letters, for a reader who knows the pattern the language carries only one bit of information per sentence.

This example hints at a very deep idea, which is that information is fundamentally tied to the recipient’s uncertainty about the message’s content and their ability to predict it in advance.

Claude Shannon—who almost singlehandedly invented modern information theory—had a clever method for measuring the information content of a language. He showed groups of people samples of typical written English which were cut off at a random point, then asked them to guess which letter came next.

Based on the rates of correct guesses—and rigorous mathematical analysis—Shannon determined that the information content of typical written English was around 1.0 to 1.2 bits per letter. This means that a good compression algorithm should be able to compress ASCII English text—which is eight bits per letter—to about 1/8th of its original size. Indeed, if you use a good file compressor on a .txt ebook, that’s about what you’ll find.

If a piece of text contains n bits of information, in a sense it means that there are \( 2^n \) different messages it can convey. There’s a bit of mathematical juggling here (involving, among other things, the length of the message and the concept of unicity distance), but the bottom line is that it suggests there are on the order of about \( 2^{140\times1.1} \approx 2\times10^{46} \) meaningfully different English tweets, rather than \( 10^{200} \) or \( 10^{800} \).

Now, how long would it take the world to read them all out?

Reading \( 2\times10^{46} \) tweets would take a person nearly \( 10^{47} \) seconds. It’s such a staggeringly large number of tweets that it hardly matters whether it’s one person reading or a billion—they won’t be able to make a meaningful dent in the list in the lifetime of the Earth.

Instead, let’s think back to that bird sharpening its beak on the mountaintop. Suppose that the bird scrapes off a tiny bit of rock from the mountain when it visits every thousand years, and it carries away those few dozen dust particles when it leaves. (A normal bird would probably deposit more beak material on the mountaintop than it would wear away, but virtually nothing else about this scenario is normal either, so we’ll just go with it.)

Let’s say you read tweets aloud for 16 hours a day, every day. And behind you, every thousand years, the bird arrives and scrapes off a few invisible specks of dust from the top of the hundred-mile mountain with its beak.

When the mountain is worn flat to the ground, that’s the first day of eternity.

The mountain reappears and the cycle starts again for another eternal day. 365 eternal days—each one \( 10^{32} \) years long—makes an eternal year.

100 eternal years, in which the bird grinds away 36,500 mountains, make an eternal century.

But a century isn’t enough. Nor a millennium.

Reading all the tweets takes you ten thousand eternal years.

That’s enough time to watch all of human history unfold, from the invention of writing to the present, with each day lasting as long as it takes for the bird to wear down a mountain.

140 characters may not seem like a lot, but we will never run out of things to say.

What if you somehow managed to make a stereo travel at twice the speed of sound, would it sound backwards to someone who was just casually sitting somewhere as it flies by?

—Tim Currie

Yes.

Technically, anyway. It would be pretty hard to hear.

The basic idea is pretty straightforward. The stereo is going faster than its own sound, so it will reach you first, followed by the sound it emitted one second ago, followed by the sound it emitted two seconds ago, and so forth.

The problem is that the stereo is moving at Mach 2, which means that two seconds ago, it was over a kilometer away. It’s hard to hear music from that distance, particularly when your ears were just hit by (a) a sonic boom, and (b) pieces of a rapidly disintegrating stereo.

Wind speeds of Mach 2 would messily disassemble most consumer electronics. The force of the wind on the body of the stereo is roughly comparable to that of a dozen people standing on it:

An ordinary stereo wouldn’t make it, but one with some kind of ruggedized high-strength casing might be able to survive.

If we put together a durable, heavy-duty stereo and launch it on a ballistic trajectory, it will only be traveling at supersonic speeds for the first 150 meters or so. This means that the target will hear a maximum of about a third of a second of reversed music.

This phenomenon is actually confirmed in the 2008 paper Reproduction of Virtual Sound Sources Moving at Supersonic Speeds in Wave Field Synthesis, which says that the sound wave field “contains a component carrying a time-reversed version of the source’s input signal”.

The sonic boom would be the first thing the target would hear. It would be followed by several sounds played over one another, including both reversed music (rising slightly in pitch as it fades out) and forward-playing music (which would play at half speed and an octave too low), followed by the crash of a stereo demolishing your neighbor’s shed.

Which means that if you’re playing one of those albums containing secret demonic messages, the result will be the strangest listening experience of your life:

I’m pretty sure he’s just humoring me.

The Night Shift Design Co-Op has come up with an innovative and interactive Kickstarter project that lets you, the backers, decide who the greatest band ever was by way of your donation and your vote, and the final product is a print that showcases that. So not only is this project crowd-funded, but its crowd-sourced too!

The limited edition, 24 x 36″ four-color screen print answers the question: Who is the greatest band ever? The backers who fund the project get a vote and the votes determine the final product. The more votes a particular band receives, the more space on the print they’ll get.

The poster pictured is just an example of what the final print will look like. The bands are just examples of who you might choose to be “the greatest band ever!” It’s all up to you.

You’ll not only get a vote when you donate, you’ll receive the final print. So donate, vote, and help choose the greatest band of all time!

Massive power outages give us rare glimpses of darkened cities, but in normal conditions, there is simply no way to see the starry skies above the typical urban metropolis – but one photographer has found a way to simulate them.

Thierry Cohen uses a multi-step process to create stunning visualizations (dubbed Darkened Cities) of would-be, could-be sights from New York to London, Shanghai to Sao Paulo … ones that the ordinary eye will rarely or never see naturally.

Cohen takes a series of shots of each of the cities themselves, and carefully removes illumination from the equation. Night sky photos from the same latitudes (adjusted for time and angle) are then layered into the background, creating a seamless illusion.

The results are at once mesmerizing, revealing the unseen potential for views of space right where we live, but also somewhat depressing – these are scenes that no one can actually ever see outside of deserts, at least unless disaster strikes.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love a piece of smartly designed, hybrid furniture and Dutch furniture designer Erik Griffioen is right on target with the Bed’nTable.

This joint design brings the bed together with a table and chairs, perfect for a loft or studio space. It would even rock to have this in a larger master bedroom.

I love the angled legs and how it translates to the sloped headboard for you to lean on. The angle is even carried over to the backs of the chairs.

Just think, this piece covers just about everything you do: it’s a place to sleep, eat, and work!

Love the built-in footboard bench that hides storage!

Am I right to be afraid of pressure cookers? What's the worst thing that can happen if you misuse a pressure cooker in an ordinary kitchen?

—Delphine Lourtau

The worst thing?

Pressure cookers are dangerous.

They can explode, in a sense, but not as violently as you might fear (or hope). The pressure inside a consumer cooker doesn’t go above about two atmospheres—about the pressure inside a can of soda. Those levels can be dangerous, but they’re generally not high enough to cause the metal to violently rupture.

So what makes a pressure cooker dangerous?

Imagine a world where Pepsi is scalding hot. Now imagine that someone shakes up a can of Pepsi and sets it in front of you.

That’s the real threat from a pressure cooker: If the seal fails (or the lid is opened too early), it can spray scalding stew in all directions.

But it’s not really an explosion.

The blast couldn’t even fling the lid very far. If you mounted a rifle-style barrel on a pressure cooker, even in ideal circumstances it wouldn’t be able to fire the lid much faster than you could throw it. Any potato cannon (especially this one) could do better.

Of course, the question wasn’t about whether a pressure cooker is likely to explode. It was about what the worst thing that could happen was.

If you disable the safety valve, there are plenty of ways to produce much more dangerous pressures. You could completely fill it with water and heat it, fill it with Drano and aluminum foil, or just pump in air from a compressor.

The result would depend on your pressure cooker. Chances are it would start to leak. If it didn’t, and it somehow stayed together up a few hundred atmospheres (pressures typical of scuba tank), when it finally ruptured it could easily kill you.

Even so, that’s far from the worst thing you could do with a pressure cooker.

Frankly, there are so many options it would be impossible to survey them all. But for my money, one of the most horrifying things you could do is this:

(Note: Never try this, for reasons which will become obvious in a moment.)

Fill the cooker with oxygen up to 5 PSI, then pump in fluorine until it starts escaping through the safety valve. Put the vessel over an open flame until it reaches 700°C (That’s °C, not °F. Yes, this will probably set off the smoke alarm.) Now, pump the hot gas over a liquid-oxygen-cooled stainless steel surface.

The procedure here is a little tricky, but if you do things right, the gas will condense into dioxygen difluoride (O2F2).

And that stuff is awful.

Ray Bradbury taught us that paper burns when exposed to oxygen at temperatures above 451°F. Dioxygen difluoride is so volatile that it makes almost any organic substance ignite and explode at any temperature hotter than 300°F below zero. It can literally make ice catch fire.

In an article about O2F2, Chemistry blogger Derek Lowe (of the excellent In The Pipeline) used phrases like “violently hideous”, “deeply alarming”, and “chemicals that I never hope to encounter”. Another article refers to fluorine as “the gas of Lucifer”, and lists chemists who were poisoned or blown up while attempting to work with it.

If your house is heated by natural gas, and it happens to contain hydrogen sulfide, you could pipe some of it into your container of O2F2. In addition to a massive explosion, this will also produce a cloud of hydrogen fluoride gas. Hydrogen fluoride can dissolve human tissue on contact, starting with your lungs and corneas.

As Lowe points out, the chemistry of this kind of reaction (O2F2 and sulfides) is largely unexplored.

Which gives us an answer to our question. What’s the worst thing that can happen in a pressure cooker?

Science.

What's the "best" kind of pizza? This question has always been a very touchy subject for people, most likely to regional loyalties. Is it Chicago style or New York? Neapolitan, or thin crust? And then what kind of thin crust? And do you use a starter in that Neapolitan dough or yeast? Moz or Buffalo Moz or Provolone or Provel? Etc.

This question is silly. You might as well try and pick a "best" color or try and define art. The best pizza is entirely subjective to what you like. For me, that's Neapolitan style pizza, and it's probably going to be different for you.

Then what's a perfect pizza? This question is remarkably easy to answer. I can distinctly remember the first perfect pizza I ever made, and I also remember the first perfect pizza made using Dante (my outdoor oven). Before today I'd only ever made 5 or 6 of them, but I just made 3 in a row so I figure now is the time to write down my definition.

So here's my definition of Perfect Pizza: A pizza that when eaten either makes you physically dance, jump around in joy, or brings an honest to god tear to your eye.

I've come remarkably close to getting a real tear in my eye after eating a perfect slice, but it's always been the jumping in joy that made me realize I had just tasted a perfect pizza.

I like this definition. Any style of pizza can fit in here, and it doesn't even box you into your favorite.

And I have a little theory to add as well. It is going to be easier find a perfect pizza if you make it yourself. It took me years of trying to finally begin making pizza that I absolutely love, and I think it's part of the searching and experimentation that will let you know when you've found it. So if you want perfection, it might be easiest to go grab some flour and get to work.

Drawing on index card by koalazymonkey (cc by)

In a thread seeking advice/gifts to impart on a 9 year-old receiving his first wallet, MetaFilter member decathecting describes the ultimate reference card for young people:

Make a card that is twice the size you actually need. Fold it in half, and then write on both sides of what is now the outside. Tell the young man that this is his emergency card. Include on the card a telephone number that you promise to answer, day or night, if he is in trouble and needs an adult, no questions asked. Advice about stuff he can't talk to his parents about, help getting a ride home from someplace he's not supposed to be, bail money, whatever. Before you laminate it, slip a $50 bill between the two halves, inside the fold. Tell him it's there, and that it's his emergency money, and that it will always be there if he needs it, but that the money is a one-time offer, so he really needs to save it for a situation he can't get out of on his own.

“You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.”

“Dogs are not about something else. Dogs are about dogs,” Malcolm Gladwell indignated in the introduction to The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs. Though hailed as memetic rulers of the internet, cats too have enjoyed an admirable run as creative devices and literary muses in Joyce’s children’s books, T. S. Eliot’s poetry, Hemingway’s letters, and various verses. But hardly ever have cats been at once more about cats and more about something else than in Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology (public library) by writer Caroline Paul and illustrator extraordinaire Wendy MacNaughton, she of many wonderful collaborations — a tender, imaginative memoir infused with equal parts humor and humanity. (You might recall a subtle teaser for this gem in Wendy’s wonderful recent illustration of Gay Talese’s taxonomy of cats.) Though “about” a cat, this heartwarming and heartbreaking tale is really about what it means to be human — about the osmosis of hollowing loneliness and profound attachment, the oscillation between boundless affection and paralyzing fear of abandonment, the unfair promise of loss implicit to every possibility of love.

After Caroline crashes an experimental plane she was piloting, she finds herself severely injured and spiraling into the depths of depression. It both helps and doesn’t that Caroline and Wendy have just fallen in love, soaring in the butterfly heights of new romance, “the phase of love that didn’t obey any known rules of physics,” until the crash pulls them into a place that would challenge even the most seasoned and grounded of relationships. And yet they persevere as Wendy patiently and lovingly takes care of Caroline.

When Caroline returns from the hospital with a shattered ankle, her two thirteen-year-old tabbies — the shy, anxious Tibby (short for Tibia, affectionately — and, in these circumstances, ironically — named after the shinbone) and the sociable, amicable Fibby (short for Fibula, after the calf bone on the lateral side of the tibia) — are, short of Wendy, her only joy and comfort:

Tibia and Fibula meowed happily when I arrived. They were undaunted by my ensuing stupor. In fact they were delighted; suddenly I had become a human who didn’t shout into a small rectangle of lights and plastic in her hand, peer at a computer, or get up and disappear from the vicinity, only to reappear through the front door hours later. Instead, I was completely available to them at all times. Amazed by their good luck, they took full feline advantage. They asked for ear scratches and chin rubs. They rubbed their whiskers along my face. They purred in response to my slurred, affectionate baby talk. But mostly they just settled in and went to sleep. Fibby snored into my neck. Tibby snored on the rug nearby. Meanwhile I lay awake, circling the deep dark hole of depression.

Without my cats, I would have fallen right in.

And then, one day, Tibby disappears.

Wendy and Caroline proceed to flyer the neighborhood, visit every animal shelter in the vicinity, and even, in their desperation, enlist the help of a psychic who specializes in lost pets — but to no avail. Heartbroken, they begin to mourn Tibby’s loss.

And then, one day five weeks later, Tibby reappears.

Once the initial elation of the recovery has worn off, however, Caroline begins to wonder where he’d been and why he’d left. He is now no longer eating at home and regularly leaves the house for extended periods of time — Tibby clearly has a secret place he now returns to. Even more worrisomely, he’s no longer the shy, anxious tabby he’d been for thirteen years — instead, he’s a half pound heavier, chirpy, with “a youthful spring in his step.” But why would a happy cat abandon his loving lifelong companion and find comfort — find himself, even — elsewhere?

When the relief that my cat was safe began to fade, and the joy of his prone, snoring form — sprawled like an athlete after a celebratory night of boozing — started to wear thin, I was left with darker emotions. Confusion. Jealousy. Betrayal. I thought I’d known my cat of thirteen years. But that cat had been anxious and shy. This cat was a swashbuckling adventurer back from the high seas. What siren call could have lured him away? Was he still going to this gilded place, with its overflowing food bowls and endless treats?

There only one obvious thing left to do: Track Tibby on his escapades. So Caroline, despite Wendy’s lovingly suppressed skepticism, heads to a spy store — yes, those exist — and purchases a real-time GPS tracker, complete with a camera that they program to take snapshots every few minutes, which they then attach to Tibby’s collar.

What follows is a wild, hilarious, and sweet tale of tinkering, tracking, and tenderness. Underpinning the obsessive quest is the subtle yet palpable subplot of Wendy and Caroline’s growing love for each other, the deepening of trust and affection that happens when two people share in a special kind of insanity.

The inimitable Maira Kalman blurbed the book admiringly:

The writing and drawings are funny. Nutty. Heartwarming. Smart. Loopy. Full of love.

“Evert quest is a journey, every journey a story. Every story, in turn, has a moral,” writes Caroline in the final chapter, then offers several “possible morals” for the story, the last of which embody everything that makes Lost Cat an absolute treat from cover to cover:

6. You can never know your cat. In fact, you can never know anyone as completely as you want.

7. But that’s okay, love is better.

Images courtesy Wendy MacNaughton

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Thomas Lamadieu se sert des silhouettes créées par des bâtiments dans le ciel pour y dessiner des personnages.

Edible masterpieces from the pastry chef at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

As a lover of modern art, Mondrian-inspired creative projects, and unusual cookbooks, I was instantly enamored with Modern Art Desserts: Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Confections, and Frozen Treats Based on Iconic Works of Art (public library) by Caitlin Freeman, pastry chef at the Blue Bottle café at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s, which she roams for inspiration, then translates the artwork into edible masterpieces. From Matisse parfait to Mondrian cake to Frida wedding cookies to Fuller hot chocolate, the recipes hit the spot for art-lovers and foodies alike, adding an extra layer of whimsical delight to the art of dessert.

The story of the Blue Bottle café is itself a heartening tale of modern creativity. It was founded by Freeman’s husband, James — a former professional clarinet player and hobbyist coffee-roaster — in 2002, after he started experimenting with roasting coffee at home and began selling his drinks at Bay Area farmers’ markets. A few years later, he dreamed up a cafe at Rooftop Garden of the SFMoMA and approached them with the idea. The museum loved it. Meanwhile, Caitlin had just sold her own pastry business, so the timing was perfect for her to bring her talents to the newborn venture. The rest, as they say, is modern history.

Mondrian cake

Donald Judd tomato soup

Rothko dessert

Modern Art Desserts is, in both the punniest and least punny way possible, an absolute treat.

Photographs via Kobini

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

Copywriter Jeff Tyser and designer Kerryn-lee Maggs started their blog—The Lost and Found Blog—to document their travels through Africa and beyond. Over the course of 150 days, the Johannesburg, South Africa-based couple traversed seven countries and 22,500 kilometers—about 13,981 miles—across Southern Africa.

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Twenty years ago, a dank, lawless, congested and compacted city located just outside Hong Kong was evacuated and destroyed, putting an end to the nearly century-old settlement first created as a Chinese military fort. Kowloon Walled City was packed with at least 50,000 inhabitants in 6.5 acres just before its demolition in 1993, and its history included a period of mob rule with sky-high rates of prostitution, gambling and drug use. Today, it’s the Kowloon Walled City Park, a tranquil place modeled on traditional gardens of the early Qing dynasty.

The former fort became an enclave when Britain gained control of the New Territories, which is one of the three main regions of Hong Kong. During World War II, as the Japanese occupied Hong Kong, the walled city’s population began to multiply dramatically. Once Japan surrendered, China announced plans to take back the city from Britain, and even more refugees poured inside, increasing the number of squatters to 2,000. Unable to drive them out, both China and Britain washed their hands of the situation, allowing it to rule itself.

But it was hardly a democracy that rose inside Kowloon in response. Underground mob groups increased already-rampant crime, taking control of brothels, gambling parlors and opium dens. Hong Kong police would only attempt to infiltrate the city in large groups.

The architecture of Kowloon Walled City was haphazard, rising vertically with such narrow alleyways on the interior that sunlight rarely penetrated to street level. Pipes constantly dripped onto pedestrians. Children climbed to the rooftops to play. Many interior apartments had no windows. These factors came together to give it a dystopian feel, popularizing it as a setting for novels and games.

Exasperated with the unsafe, unsanitary conditions, China and Britain mutually agreed to tear it down. In its place, a 330,000-square-foot park was created, completed in 1995. Paths and pavilions inside are named after the streets and buildings of the vanished Walled City. Some artifacts, like entrance plaques and the city’s south gate, are on display. Where the city’s 300 interconnected buildings once stood are now floral walks, ponds and carefully cultivated gardens. Catch a glimpse into Kowloon Walled City’s fascinating past at the website of photographer Greg Girard.

It takes a powerful book to survive decades or even centuries and stay prominently in the public eye. This pair of classics are a rarity in that respect, but like any books, one thing does change over time: their covers.

First, Fahrenheit 451, reintroduced by designer Elizabeth Perez. In her words, it is “a novel about a dystopian future where books are outlawed and firemen burn any house that contains them. The story is about suppressing ideas, and about how television destroys interest in reading literature.”

And what would be more apt than a book cover and binding that reflects that horrific world? The one becomes a match, and the spine becomes a striking surface, powerfully reinforcing the core message of the novel.

Then we have 1984,  part of a series of re-releases from Penguin designed by David Pearson - again, the message of censorship becomes boldly emblazoned right on the cover of the volume.

But with physical books being, perhaps an endangered species, maybe you would like something new to swap into your collection but that also breaks traditional boundaries. Introducing: Paper Passion, a scent from Stiedl. It is a fragrance based on the smell of books – a powerful scent familiar with anyone who has revisited their childhood favorites.

Many of the people who end up with your business cards will use them to jot down notes or grocery lists, but this creative twist on the conventional lets them leave their mark in a much more fun and memorable way. Austrian graphic design studio Bureau Rabenstein created a set of heat-sensitive, white-bordered business cards that look like developing Polaroids for photo producer Natalie Daniels.

The thermo-sensitive black ink under the surface takes on the imprint of whatever is placed upon it – be it fingers, lips or objects – for just a few moments before they fade.

While they’re are certainly nowhere near as cheap to produce as plain old paper ones, they’re also nowhere near as disposable. Creative business cards like these will not only make a (literal) impression, they’re likely to stick around as fun keepsakes instead of ending up in the trash.

Other cool, way-out-of-the-box business card designs include razor blades, lock picking kits, pop-up cards, Legos and x-rays. Check out 15 examples.

Like a flip book, there is no text, and each page of these volumes contains a slightly different scene. Except instead of paging through them rapidly to reveal the story, the ‘reader’ unfolds the entire book at once into a dynamic panorama.

Artist Yusuke Oono has a whole series of these 360-degree books telling stories of daily home life, remote jungle adventures, and everything in between.

Each one unfolds into a three-dimensional scene, created using CAD-derived designs and laser-cutting programs, completed with a splash of color.

The resulting negative space allows viewers to see through pages and visualize scenes, assembling them from the two-dimensional information on each layer – like rotational cut-outs of some miniature reality (or slices of life, if you like).

Ground, trees, walls and roofs provide the context – small figures of women, men and children tell silent stories that change with perspective and light. Each page is both a moment in space and in time. Brilliant, beautiful, simple.

As a boy Massoud Hassani and his brother crafted clever toys to race in the Kabul desert. The wind-powered creations would roll along the dusty earth and too often into the landmine area where they were lost—their race ended prematurely. You could say the same about the thousands who lose their lives or limbs every year because of abandoned landmines.

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