Danbusha

Fortune cookie

Taken recently off the coast of Bali, these surreal photos are the creation of Montreal-based director and photographer Benjamin Von Wong, known for his exceedingly difficult photoshoots. Where it might be more practical to create the complex aspects of these photos digitally, Von Wong took a different path and assembled a team of two models who also happen to be trained freedivers, 7 additional support divers, and obtained special permission to utilize a 50-year-old underwater shipwreck. The entire shoot took place 25 meters below the surface, and because of the extreme conditions and limitations, he relied heavily on natural light to create the final images you see here.

You can watch the video above to see how the photoshoot came together and read more about the process over on his blog. (via PetaPixel, My Modern Met)

James Somers says that we're probably using the wrong dictionary and that most modern dictionaries are "where all the words live and the writing's no good".

The New Oxford American dictionary, by the way, is not like singularly bad. Google's dictionary, the modern Merriam-Webster, the dictionary at dictionary.com: they're all like this. They're all a chore to read. There's no play, no delight in the language. The definitions are these desiccated little husks of technocratic meaningese, as if a word were no more than its coordinates in semantic space.

As a counterpoint, Somers offers John McPhee's secret weapon, Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, the bulk of which was the work of one man and was last revised in 1913.

Take a simple word, like "flash." In all the dictionaries I've ever known, I would have never looked up that word. I'd've had no reason to -- I already knew what it meant. But go look up "flash" in Webster's (the edition I'm using is the 1913). The first thing you'll notice is that the example sentences don't sound like they came out of a DMV training manual ("the lights started flashing") -- they come from Milton and Shakespeare and Tennyson ("A thought flashed through me, which I clothed in act").

You'll find a sense of the word that is somehow more evocative than any you've seen. "2. To convey as by a flash... as, to flash a message along the wires; to flash conviction on the mind." In the juxtaposition of those two examples -- a message transmitted by wires; a feeling that comes suddenly to mind -- is a beautiful analogy, worth dwelling on, and savoring. Listen to that phrase: "to flash conviction on the mind." This is in a dictionary, for God's sake.

And, toward the bottom of the entry, as McPhee promised, is a usage note, explaining the fine differences in meaning between words in the penumbra of "flash":

"... Flashing differs from exploding or disploding in not being accompanied with a loud report. To glisten, or glister, is to shine with a soft and fitful luster, as eyes suffused with tears, or flowers wet with dew."

Did you see that last clause? "To shine with a soft and fitful luster, as eyes suffused with tears, or flowers wet with dew." I'm not sure why you won't find writing like that in dictionaries these days, but you won't. Here is the modern equivalent of that sentence in the latest edition of the Merriam-Webster: "glisten applies to the soft sparkle from a wet or oily surface ."

Who decided that the American public couldn't handle "a soft and fitful luster"? I can't help but think something has been lost. "A soft sparkle from a wet or oily surface" doesn't just sound worse, it actually describes the phenomenon with less precision. In particular it misses the shimmeriness, the micro movement and action, "the fitful luster," of, for example, an eye full of tears -- which is by the way far more intense and interesting an image than "a wet sidewalk."

It's as if someone decided that dictionaries these days had to sound like they were written by a Xerox machine, not a person, certainly not a person with a poet's ear, a man capable of high and mighty English, who set out to write the secular American equivalent of the King James Bible and pulled it off.

Don't miss the end of the piece, where Somers shows how to replace the tin-eared dictionaries on your Mac, iPhone, and Kindle with the Webster's 1913. (via @satishev)

Update: In the same vein, Kevin Kelly recommends using The Synonym Finder as a thesaurus.

Just look up a word, any word, and it proceeds to overwhelm you with alternative choices (a total of 1.5 million synonyms are presented in 1,361 pages), including short phrases and only mildly related words. Rather than being a problem of imprecision, the Finder's broad inclusiveness prods your imagination and prompts your recall.

Tags: books   James Somers   John McPhee   language

Design Crush

Toothpaste for dinner

“Blind Eye Sees All (No Secrets Anymore)” – 2014 by Jud Turner via BB.

“Blind Eye Sees All (No Secrets Anymore)” is a sculpture about the illegal surveillance activities of the United States and the NSA. For a very limited time, 50 original mini-sculptures based on this master work are available, and 1/3 of the proceeds will be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help protect our digital freedoms.

Read more.

Wood Sculptures by Stefanie Rocknak

Figurative works influenced by the traditional marble sculptures of Michelangelo, Donatello and Bernini. Trained as a painter, she started working with wood as her mother used to refinish countless pieces of antique furniture, her father worked as a professional carpenter, and her grandfather had a wood shop.

Made-up words project

Magnificent Ruin

Awful library books

Don’t forget

Design Crush

Behomm, a home exchange for creatives

Photo © Damien Mcfadden

Photo © Damien Mcfadden

Photo © Damien Mcfadden

Photo © Damien Mcfadden

Photo © Damien Mcfadden

Photo © Damien Mcfadden

Photo © Damien Mcfadden

Plant care comes in many forms. For some of us it’s enough to keep a few potted plants hanging on for dear life on a windowsill, while others indulge in the joy of pushing lawnmower around every few weeks, or maybe even keeping a garden. But John Brooker of Norfolk had a horticultural vision unlike the rest of us. For the past 13 years he’s hacked and trimmed and molded the 150ft-long (45.7m) hedge outside his Frizzleton Farm property into a massive dragon complete with flowing tail and wings. Photographer Damien McFadden (also on Facebook) recently stopped by to snap these fantastic photos of Brooker at work. All images courtesy the photographer. (via Neatorama, BBC)

Using Edgar Wright as a positive example, Tony Zhou laments the lack of good visual comedy in American comedies and provides examples from Wright's films (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, etc.) to show how it's done properly.

Hot Fuzz is one of my favorite comedies...the scene Zhou shows of the Andys sliding off screen and then quickly back in consistently leaves me in stitches. (via digg)

Tags: Edgar Wright   Hot Fuzz   movies   Tony Zhou   video

I didn't really read this whole thing, but the gist of it is that increasingly people have no problem discussing the cultural events of our day without actually knowing anything about them.

What we all feel now is the constant pressure to know enough, at all times, lest we be revealed as culturally illiterate. So that we can survive an elevator pitch, a business meeting, a visit to the office kitchenette, a cocktail party, so that we can post, tweet, chat, comment, text as if we have seen, read, watched, listened. What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists - and having a position on it, being able to engage in the chatter about it. We come perilously close to performing a pastiche of knowledgeability that is really a new model of know-nothingness.

Serious Eats author J. Kenji López-Alt takes a scientific approach in boiling that perfect egg. It truly is an art form.

Back when I was a lowly line cook at a fancy-pants restaurant in Boston, as the new guy*, it was my job to wake my butt up at the crack of dawn to come in early and prep breakfast whenever one of the Beacon Hill politicians wanted to impress their campaign funders with boozy waffles and perfectly soft-boiled eggs topping their asparagus. In those days, I used the brute-force method of getting perfect boiled eggs: I boiled at least three times what I needed, knowing that at least half of them would stick to their shells and turn into egg salad sandwiches for family meal.

Since then, I’ve had a bit of time to reflect and refine my methodology. The secret to peeling hard boiled eggs? Well “secret” might be a bit of an exaggeration. Here’s the truth: there is no 100% fool-proof method, and anybody who tells you different is selling something. And I do believe I’ve tried them all, many, many times over. The number of eggs I’ve boiled over the last several years in carefully controlled circumstances numbers well into the thousands, but despite that, the best boiled egg I cooked this year is no better than the best boiled egg I cooked twelve years ago in that Beacon Hill kitchen.

That said, a bit of the old scientific method has helped to greatly increase my success rate. Finding the hard truth about boiled eggs was a tough case to, er, crack.* I can now pretty routinely produce perfectly boiled eggs with clean-peeling shells, and you can too!

Read more.

Born in Hanoi, artist Phan Thu Trang paints decorative landscapes inspired by images of the city and Northern villages of Vietnam. In her colorful yet minimalistic paintings she works with limited colors and textures, focusing on only bare essentials to create each piece centered around billowing, pointillistic trees. See more of her work over at ArtBlue Studio in Singapore, and if you enjoyed these also check out Lieu Nguyen Huong Duong. (via Art of Animation)

Wes Anderson interiors

Space is the place, John Harris

Nothing

…using a unique animation technique involving traditonal animation cels and his iphone 5s, Hombre_mcsteez turns everyday life into an odd creature infested cartoon universe.

New Comic: Nipping

image via flickr user nebbie

image via Fordite.com

image via Fordite.com

Old car factories had a harmful impact on the environment, releasing toxic chemicals into the air, land and water. But it wasn’t all ugly. Oddly enough, one of the by-products of car production was Fordite, also known as Detroit agate. The colorful layered objects take their name from agate stones for their visual resemblance. But instead of forming from microscopically crystallized silica over millions of years, Fordite was formed from layers of paint over several tens of years. Back in the day, old automobile paint would drip onto the metal racks that transported cars through the paint shop and into the oven. The paint was hardened to a rock-like state thanks to high heats from the baking process. As the urban legend goes, plant workers would take pieces home in their lunch pails as a souvenir for their wife or kids.

Since then, car production has modernized and Fordite has been rendered a relic of the past. Artisans have been using the colorful material for jewelry but it’s not a stretch to imagine a future when these pieces sit behind glass in a museum. The colors can also be used to judge how old they are because car paint was subject to different trends. In the 1940s cars were mostly black or brown enamel while the 1960s ushered in an age of colorful lacquers. (via My Modern Met, Fordite.com)

Update: The Michigan State University Museum confirms they have a fordite sculpture in their collection.

Photo above: Digernes


Photo: WNDR.BE — G. DE SELYS


Photo: Sylvie Monharoul


Photo: Svetlana Shupenko

Might as well

Jim Kazanjian

Architecture of Doom

Treehouses of the Pacific NW

School of Life

Created by Israel-based designer Amit Sturlesi, these animal desktop night lights and lamps are made from laser cut acrylic glass that is lit from below with hidden LEDs. They have a number of different geometric designs available, see more here. (Lost at E Minor)