Roslyn

I love the quiet elegance of this small loft in Taipei, Taiwan. Young creatives from A Little Design studio managed to build an airy and serene dwelling, with only 236 square feet to work with. The flow of this apartment contributes to the illusion of spaciousness. The narrow passage between the kitchen and the bedroom opens up to the living room, immediately creating a feeling to a much bigger room. The built-in couch is quite big to accommodate enough people, yet it is out of the way, tucked in next to the window. The bar tables, placed against the wall, also take very little space. They double as a desk, and, if guests are over, they can be put together in the middle of the room to create one full-size dinner table. The swing-arm lamp rotates between the desk and a couch. The loft contains a bed and another small desk. High shelves complete this interior, providing storage and an illusion of height.

Each year when summer comes along, we all look forward to different things. Some of us head to the beach, others to the mountains for camping. Some look forward to the epicurean delights like watermelon and ice cones. But for a select group of photographers in Japan, Summer signals the arrival of fireflies. And for very short periods – typically May and June, from around 7 to 9pm – these photographers set off to secret locations all around Japan, hoping to capture the magical insects that light up the night.

One thing that makes these photographs so magical is that they capture views that the naked eye is simply incapable of seeing. The photographs are typically composites, meaning that they combine anywhere from 10 to 200 of the exact same frame. That’s why it can look like swarms of thousands of fireflies have invaded the forest, when in reality it’s much less. But that’s not to discount these photographs, which require insider knowledge, equipment, skill and patience.

Fireflies live for only about 10 days and they’re extremely sensitive. They react negatively to any form of light and pollution, making finding them half the battle. Here, we present to you some a selection of our favorites from the 2016 summer season.

Good morning.

Nuclear is still the most common, but there are millions of households in the United States with a different family structure. Read More

Faroe Islands fit cameras to sheep to create Google Street View | Travel | The Guardian

Living across 18 tiny sub-polar islands in the north Atlantic, Faroe islanders are used to working in difficult conditions. So tired of waiting for Google Street View to come and map the roads, causeways and bridges of the archipelago, a team has set up its own mapping project – Sheep View 360.

With the help of a local shepherd and a specially built harness built by a fellow islander, Durita Dahl Andreassen of Visit Faroe Islands has fitted five of the island’s sheep with a 360-degree camera.

Wouldn't it be fun to color in the universe?

New comic: Erwin and the Method Demons. I hope you like it!

Pokemon is everywhere these days. I think it’s just something the world really needs right now. I know very little about the universe, but I do like it when people analyze fictional worlds and characters. Joshua Kunst grabbed a data dump about all the Pokemon (seriously, I don’t even know if I’m referring to them/it/thing correctly) and clustered them algorithmically. The t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) algorithm to be specific.

Tags: clustering, Pokemon

FLM writes:

A colleague (who has request anonymity) and I have developed a fondness for perfectly innocuous words which, to the linguistically unwashed masses, sound sexual. My colleague's example sentence is

Because her husband was intestate, she sought to dilate her fungible assets; despite cunctation for titivating, she managed to masticate and lucubrate far into the night.

A website of possible interest: Chuck Lorre Productions — words that confuse the CBS censor …

I'd be curious to see how your Language Log aficionados might augment this body of knowledge.

A cartoon I made for the Guardian a while back.

“

At the risk of taking Gingrich’s nonsense seriously, just imagine for a moment what translating his proposal into action would mean. The government would round up 3.3 million American Muslims, then “test” them to see “if they believe in Sharia,” a notion about which Gingrich doesn’t have the remotest clue. Sharia is the Arabic word for “law”; there’s no guidebook of official Sharia, and Islamic scholars have a multitude of ideas about how Koranic ideas could or should be translated into civil rules. But even if there were, Gingrich is literally proposing to prosecute thought crimes, as well as jettisoning the First Amendment to throw people in jail for visiting certain web sites. And where is he going to “deport” the Americans whom he decides believe in Sharia to?

Frankly, I think we need to ask just how Newt Gingrich got radicalized, and what caused him to reject the values of the country that gave him so much. Was it some radical cleric who did this to him? Is there a church somewhere in Georgia we need to be monitoring?

”

- On terrorism, Republicans reach for new heights of stupidity and moral repugnance.

I find myself needing to escape these dark times we live in. My instinct to withdraw from the present grows stronger; to retreat to a place lost in time where the world appears innocent and beautiful. If I could just close my eyes and find myself walking down the Promenade des Anglais, feeling the salty wind dance around me, hearing the sea birds overhead and seeing the joy on a little boy’s face as his father launches his brand new kite. I’d smile at the elegant women sitting under the white linen parasols and listen to the café chatter and the clinking of spoons stirring ice cubes and grenadine. An elderly man passes by with his walking stick and pauses to bow his head, wishing me a good day as our eyes meet. It’s a pure and peaceful place where time stands still, far away from the terror and tragedy. I hope the souls that we’ve lost wake up in this perfect place…

 

These are dark times for the human race. I’m hoping we will find the light again soon.

Images via Life Magazine, Zazzle

This article Nice, from Another Time was published by Messy Nessy Chic.

n. a state of exhaustion inspired by an act of senseless violence, which forces you to revise your image of what can happen in this world—mending the fences of your expectations, weeding out invasive truths, cultivating the perennial good that’s buried under the surface—before propping yourself up in the middle of it like an old scarecrow, who’s bursting at the seams but powerless to do anything but stand there and watch.

felidae-sapiens:

weavemama:

SOMEOME SPRAY PAINTED THE MUTE SIGN ON DONALD TRUMPS STAR LMAO

Reblog to empower the sigil!

Dedigitization as political street art.

Go home cartographer - you’re drunk.
http://geographical.co.uk/places/mapping/item/1726-wine-world

This is super cool: This Optical Illusion Changes the Way You See Famous Photos

publicdomainreview:

Max Brückner (1860–1934) was a German geometer, known for his collection of stellated and uniform polyhedra, which he documented in his 1900 book Vielecke und Vielflache: Theorie und Geschichte (Polygons and Polyhedra: Theory and History): http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/max-bruckners-collection-of-polyhedral-models-1900/

Drones Coloring Book | Next Nature Network

(via Eric Hu on Twitter: “This week in a single photograph https://t.co/rSVjboWwf4”)

Ben Orlin of Math With Bad Drawings explains the pitfalls of using summary statistics — mean, median, and mode — to make decisions in life. Aggregates like these are meant as wideout overviews. Look deeper for details.

Tags: humor

The post I think, if I were black, I’d start shopping for dash cams after watching this appeared first on Chris Blattman.

The limit of the view is the horizon, constant and linear; only its mood changes, never its form.

Located in San Jose del Cabo on the Sea of Cortez in Baja California Sur, Mexico, Mar Adentro is a fantastically minimalist and poetic hotel developed by renowned Mexican architect Miguel Ángel Aragonés. It’s a place where every detail flows and melds together beautifully.

The 198 guest rooms and additional private residences have been designed like boxes and chambers suspended over mirrors of sea water. Miguel Ángel explains:

I imagined floating houses, houses like boxes that I would harvest in order to trap light. At Mar Adentro, the houses are made of glass on the seaside, and of concrete where they meet both sun and desert. They are cubes in the middle of the ocean that use water not to navigate, but to sustain life.

All spaces are simple, comfortable, elegant and predominantly white, outfitted with sleek Poliform furnishings and top-of-the-line appliances, and always considering the two great protagonists of this work over all: the horizon and the ocean.

Mar Adentro also features different office buildings and public spaces like a private beach club, shopping plaza, restaurants, yoga and fitness facilities, a spa, and even an art gallery.

Photography by Joe Fletcher.

The post Advice on Choosing a Career appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

There are six main types of stories in fiction. That’s what computer scientists found after teaching a machine to map the emotional arc of a huge corpus of literature. The overall research they did is fascinating (I wrote about it in greater detail here), but several smaller components of the work are compelling in their own right.

To prepare a machine to carry out a sentiment analysis, for instance, computer scientists had to assign a happiness index to 10,222 individual words. That way, as the machine scanned passages from books, it could assess the emotional arc of the narrative.

But how do you decide how happy a word is?

In this case, researchers at the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide enlisted the help of the crowd. Using the website Mechanical Turk, where anyone can sign up for odd jobs—many of them related to academic research—researchers asked people to rate the happiness quotient of the words they encountered.

In the end, they had a huge list of words as ranked by happiness.

The happiest word: Laughter.
The least happy: Terrorist.

In the middle of the pack you’ll find words like particularly, list, brown, expectations, equation, index, and explain.

And though the results aren’t altogether surprising, it’s intriguing to see words grouped by happiness this way. Let’s start with least happy, so we can end on a high note.

Here are the 100 words that scored worst for happiness, beginning at the bottom of the heap:

Terrorist, suicide, rape, terrorism, murder, death, cancer, killed, kill, died, torture, raped, deaths, arrested, killing, die, terror, jail, kills, war, murdered, killings, fatal, tortured, abused, sickness, failed, cry, cruel, violence, sadness, diseases, abuse, wars, evil, earthquake, depressing, poison, fail, disaster, bomb, tumors, poverty, headache, depression, criminal, punishment, killers, illness, disease, dead, slavery, sick, motherfucker, rejection, injury, destroyed, crying, violent, tragedy, slaves, slave, prison, hates, failure, fails, bankruptcy, virus, suffer, robbery, rejected, racist, dies, worst, pain, funeral, dying, heartbreak, unhappy, unemployment, sorrow, painful, hurts, hated, crimes, corruption, pollution, homeless, drowned, agony, tsunami, robbed, hurt, divorced, depressed, loser, crime, cried, suffering, injured.

Ugh, that was brutal, right? I think we’re going to need twice as many happy words to make up for it. Beginning with the happiest, we have:

Laughter, happiness, love, happy, laughed, laugh, laughing, excellent, laughs, joy, successful, win, rainbow, smile, won, pleasure, smiled, rainbows, winning, celebration, enjoyed, healthy, music, celebrating, congratulations, weekend, celebrate, comedy, jokes, rich, victory, Christmas, free, friendship, fun, holidays, loved, loves, loving, beach, hahaha, kissing, sunshine, delicious, friends, funny, outstanding, paradise, sweetest, vacation, butterflies, freedom, flower, great, sunlight, sweetheart, sweetness, award, chocolate, hahahaha, heaven, peace, splendid, success, enjoying, kissed, attraction, celebrated, hero, hugs, positive, sun, birthday, blessed, fantastic, winner, delight, beauty, butterfly,entertainment, funniest, honesty, sky, smiles, succeed, wonderful, glorious, kisses, promotion, family, gift, humor, romantic, cupcakes, festival, hahahahaha, honour, relax, weekends, angel, b-day, bonus, brilliant, diamonds, holiday, lucky, mother, super, amazing, angels, enjoy, friend, friendly, mother’s, profit, finest, bday, champion, grandmother, haha, kiss, kitten, miracle, mom, sweet, blessings, bright, cutest, entertaining, excited, excitement, joke, millionaire, prize, succeeded, successfully, winners, shines, awesome, genius, achievement, cake, cheers, exciting, goodness, hug, income, party, puppy, smiling, song, succeeding, tasty, victories, achieved, billion, cakes, easier, flowers, gifts, gold, merry, families, handsome, lovers, affection, candy, cute, diamond, earnings, interesting, peacefully, praise, relaxing, roses, Saturdays, faithful, heavens, cherish, comfort, congrats, cupcake, earn, extraordinary, glory, hilarious, moonlight, optimistic, peaceful, romance, feast, attractive, glad, grandma, internet, pleasant, profits, smart.

Ah, that’s more like it.

RCA Design Products graduate Fiona O’Leary has made a handheld device that allows designers to scan printed material and detect the typeface, font size and exact colour. Spector has an integrated camera that takes a photo of the printed page and matches the font to a data base, or the colour to a specific CYMK, RGB or Pantone reference, and displays the information on Spector software.

Read more

Klezmer funk meets circus Chic. At least, that’s how we would describe the music of Charan Po Rantan in 5 words or less. The band of sisters, Koharu and Momo, have been rocking out since 2009 but their history dates back to a when elder sister Koharu went to see a circus at age 7. Impressed and astounded by the accordion player, she immediately ask for one too and has never looked back.

The duo’s unique sound and style, which blends the festive music of Ashkenazi Jews with theatrical atmospherics of a circus, are somewhat of a rarity on Japan, to say the least. And it’s become a source of attention both at home and abroad. They count Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey as fans, which has actually helped legitimize their unconventional antics in Japan.

They made their U.S. debut in 2013 at SXSW and then returned in 2015 to make their NY debut at Japan Society where they performed a crowd-pleasing rendition of the Super Mario Bros. theme song. In 2014 they surprised their fans by signing with Avex, Japan’s biggest recording label. But that hasn’t diminished their sound or style. Their 2nd major album, “Onna no yonju-ropun” (A girl’s 46 minutes) is as eclectic and enjoyable as anything they’ve made, packed into a dense – you guessed it – 46 minutes. Oh and their outfits? They design them, themsleves and then pass the sketches along to mom and grandma, who bring them to life!

One of our favorite tracks on the new album is “I can’t be Tailor,” a reference to Tailor Swift that even rifts on the pop-artist’s hit track “Shake it off.” (Here’s an English translation of the lyrics)

Like what you hear? You can find more of their music on YouTube. Charan Po Rantan is also on Twitter and Facebook. And be sure to check out our other Music Monday picks.

The French are already really, really good at beautifying their towns and cities, but not every façade can look like it’s straight out of a postcard– that is unless you enlist the services of Patrick Commecy. Let’s just say this guy is the Banksy, the Michelangelo (or the Frida Kahlo) of fakery…

This was the wall before:

A master of trompe l’oeil, since the 1970s, Commecy has been using ugly façades of France as his canvas. Working with a team of around 30 muralists, he breathes life into local eyesores, commissioned by townships, businesses or individuals. And just look at the detail…

Before:

Not a bad exchange right? I’m sure we can all think of a few walls in our neighbourhoods that could use a lick of paint like this. Take a look at some of Commecy’s past works picked out from his website…

Before:

Before:

Before:

Before:

Before:

Before:

Find all his work on A-Fresco.com

via Faith is Torment

This article The French Banksy of Fake Facades was published by Messy Nessy Chic.

Virtual Actors in Chinese Opera

Project by Tobias Gremmler visualizes motion capture of Chinese Opera actors with 3D renderings of intricate and abstracted graphics to great effect:

Created for a theatre production that fuses Chinese Opera with New Media, the virtual actors are inspired by shapes, colors and motions of traditional Chinese costumes and dance. 

Link

This image is horrifying enough, but the comments show a typical callousness about the loss of life, especially non-American life, that is repulsive and all too typical.