+ wall paper

Harry Napper, Hemlock design, 1899

+ quote of the day

"I hope that one day I will have the capacity to translate my frequent daydreaming into an art form." Quentin Wynaar

check out his artistic statement video at stylelikeyou.com

+ bunny of the day

dailybunny's Aug 22nd choice from Caitlin

+ Playing Cards by Vladislav Erko

+ food diary update

ive been making lots of smoothies and taking one with me to have on my morning commutes. when i dont have OJ for the mornings blending up a melon with alittle water and ice makes amazing fresh juice for breakfast. Cantaloupe and watermelon are out of this world. jewish style bagels with cheese and veggies, wild mushroom tacos...

+ word of the day

apotropaic - having the power to prevent evil or bad luck

what things do you keep in your house to ward off evil and bad spirits? here is a artifact from the british museum:



From Thebes, Egypt
Late Middle Kingdom, around 1750 BC

A magical 'knife' intended for the protection of a mother and child

Childbirth and early infancy were felt to be particularly threatening to both mother and baby. Magic played the primary role in countering these threats; various evil spirits needed to be warned off, and deities invoked to protect the vulnerable. These magic knives, also known as apotropaic (that is, acting to ward off evil) wands, were one of the devices used. They are usually made of hippopotamus ivory, thus enlisting the support of that fearsome beast against evil.

The term 'knife' is inappropriate, and the shape may be related more to the throwstick (similar to a modern boomerang). Throwsticks were used to hunt birds, and flocks of birds were seen as a symbol of chaos, hence the appropriateness of the shape.

The depictions on this knife encompass a range of protective images. They include a grotesque dwarf, probably known as Aha at this date, but later the more famous Bes, and Taweret (a pregnant hippopotamus carrying a knife), both of whom are associated with childbirth. Lions, the scarab of rebirth, serpents, and other fantastic protective demons also feature.

Archaeologists have found that many of these 'knives' seem to have been deliberately broken before being placed in the tombs. One explanation is that this was done to destroy some of the object's powers, which would have been inappropriate in the context of death and burial.

link: www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/aes/a/apotropaic_wand.aspx

+ Quote of the day

"i dont think you know how unattractive hate is" Steve Martin, LA Story.

+ public art goes public

Trying to define street art isn't easy, mostly because the definition depends on who you ask. People in law enforcement consider it a crime and city government call it a nuisance. The director of Los Angeles MOCA has deemed it worthy of its own exhibition. Ask Alfie Dennen, the British creative technologist behind the startup Big Art Mob (currently in beta), and he'll tell you that at the very least, the definition needs expanding. "Under the [UK’s] legal definition the only art that can ever be considered public are architecture or works that have been created through an institutional hierarchy," Dennen says. He defines public art a bit more broadly: "Any work in public view created by a person or group whose aim was to create what they believe to be art, irrespective of genre or style." Launching publicly next week, the Big Art Mob app and accompanying website aim to expand awareness and appreciation of public art by inciting users to upload pictures of it in all forms—graffiti, tagging, public art, and institutional art. These images are then integrated into a user friendly map and a unique bank of well-categorized metadata. Dennen, whose body of creative work combines technology and mass collaboration, says the Big Art Mob concept is different from most startups—it focuses on creating a "point-of-interest data base." "Most startups say 'this is my commercial model and we will have ongoing revenues of x,' but we have a much more complex position on what its eventual and current value is," Dennen said. "[Big Art Mob] combines elements of public utility and documentation around art in a way which isn’t directly commercially exploitable." While the app and website are designed for international use, the rich tradition and appreciation of street art in London makes it a fitting birthplace. Some local councils in the UK, particularly those in the capital, are taking a progressive stance when it comes to street art clean-up, such as only removing a work deemed offensive. Dennen hopes that a wide user base of his app will serve as proof for why local governments should invest in, rather than shun, art in the public realm. "We have a global treasure in public art," said Dennen. "Part of that is the ephemerality of street art and graffiti and we should capture that because we can, because now is the digitized future. We have a responsibility to do that." article by Rosie Spinks Freelance writer and journalist www.good.is

+ new mexico

Our adventure began with Zapata Falls and the mysterious Sand dunes of Colorado. Then it was down to Ojo Caliente, Arroyo Seco, Taos, and the northern rio grande wilderness. I am in love with the dark red rocks that are crumbled along the Rio Grande and the intoxicating air after a hard desert rain pummels the sage plants. the highways are small, and the vistas are desolate and quietly beautiful. there is a magic in the southwest that if you slow down enough, and want to believe, you will find more than what you came for.

Loosing and finding my shoes at the end of a gravel road. running into a friend in the dark at a campsite 5 hours from denver. seeing the burning stars while in our sleeping bags. soaking in arsenic and iron pools all day, and then doing it again the next morning. spying on frogs in riverbeds. chasing wild rabbits. eating new mexican food. sleeping in a tipi while its raining. playing dominoes with wandering strangers. seeing georgia o'keeffes' heart and mind spilled out on canvas. taking walks in quiet neighborhoods. happy hour in historic hotels. and of course, wild horses.

+ Handmade Instruments

Harm Goslink Cooper is a musician and artist who combines his two passions to produce whimsical yet functional musical instruments. His homemade piano is his most ambitious effort yet. The rustic wood case and colorful keys look great together! See more of his instruments (and listen to his terrific songs) at Goslink. (article Via Shelley Rickey, an amazing musical instrument maker and musician in her own right)

link to english translation of the Dutch Artists' Blog:
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=nl&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.goslink.nl%2Fnl%2Fblog

source:
http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2011/08/homemade_piano.html

+ the Wizard of the West

Nikola Tesla did as much to electrify the second industrial revolution as any man. If only his legacy weren’t marred by his portrait as a mad scientist.

When the 28-year-old immigrant Nikola Tesla arrived in New York City in 1884, he had with him four cents, a letter of recommendation for a job with Thomas Edison, and a brain possessed of revolutionary ideas. When he died alone in the New Yorker Hotel in 1943 (of heart failure), he was penniless and in debt. Although he left behind a wealth of innovation that changed the course of history, he has often been remembered more for his eccentricity than for his work on electricity, which he, as much as his early employer and later rival Edison, made a mainstay of American life.

The dashingly mustachioed Tesla stood 6 feet 4 inches tall and dedicated himself to the promotion of health (and eventually vegetarianism), though he rarely slept more than two or three hours a night. He credited his inventiveness to his mother, a housewife with a penchant for DIY engineering—she built appliances like mechanical eggbeaters to improve housework—and spent the hours of his youth studying the books of his father’s library. If his father had gotten his way, young Nikola—dubbed Niko—would have followed him into the Orthodox priesthood. It was only after Nikola survived a near-fatal bout of cholera that Dad relented and allowed him to pursue engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic Institute at Graz.

He excelled in his studies, but also occasionally clashed with educators. Motors of the time relied on direct current, meaning that the current of electricity always traveled in the same direction and thus needed to be constantly reversed by “commutators.” Tesla’s teachers were puzzled by his insistence that this arrangement could be ditched in favor of what we would later come to know as an induction motor that relied on more efficient alternating current.

According to PBS’s Tesla: Life and Legacy, it was a few years later, when he was working at Budapest’s Central Telephone Exchange, that a vision of his induction motor appeared to him. Tesla writes:

“One afternoon, which is ever present in my recollection, I was enjoying a walk with my friend in the city park and reciting poetry. At that age I knew entire books by heart, word for word. One of these was Goethe’s Faust. The sun was just setting and reminded me of a glorious passage:

“‘The glow retreats, done is the day of toil; / It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring; / Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil / Upon its track to follow, follow soaring!’

“As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.”

It wasn’t long afterward that Tesla stood before his idol, Thomas Edison, handing him a letter of recommendation written by Edison’s associate Charles Batchelor. It read, quite simply, “My Dear Edison: I know two great men and you are one of them. The other is this young man!”

At the time, New York was powered by Edison’s DC power station, which, while remarkable, was also dangerous. PBS notes that “residents of Brooklyn became so accustomed to dodging shocks from electric trolley tracks that their baseball team was called the Brooklyn Dodgers” (though others would argue they were simply dodging the cars themselves).

Tesla hoped to wow Edison with his prototype for alternating current, but Edison merely put him to work around the clock refining the existing DC motors. The Wizard of Menlo Park did promise to pay Tesla $50,000 should the immigrant manage to build a practical AC motor. However, when Tesla accomplished just that, Edison not only refused to pay, but embarked on a smear campaign against Tesla’s system—thus begetting the infamous War of the Currents, in which Edison depicted Tesla as an unreliable dreamer and alternating current as dangerous. Ultimately, after Tesla’s Westinghouse Corporation–backed AC-powered “City of Light” wowed onlookers at the 1893 World’s Fair, his model became the dominant electrical paradigm. Since then, 80 percent of U.S. electrical devices have used variants of his alternating-current model.

“My Dear Edison: I know two great men and you are one of them. The other is this young man!”

During his life, Tesla struggled to maintain financial health, and he was acutely aware of his persona as a dreamer.

When Guglielmo Marconi earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909 for the invention of radio—giving the Italian scientist the name the Father of Radio—Tesla was livid. He had been poised to send radio signals using his eponymous coils as early as 1895, though a fire at his studio set him back a few years, and he only filed a basic radio patent in 1897. For the next few years, he and Marconi worked independently of each other, but it was Marconi who sent and received the first successful transatlantic radio signals, using 17 of Tesla’s patented inventions, most notably the “Tesla oscillator.” The U.S. Patent Office, however, refused to enforce Tesla’s claim.

“My enemies have been so successful in portraying me as a poet and a visionary that I must put out something commercial without delay,” Tesla famously said in response to Marconi’s award. In fairness to those who called him a visionary—which held a far less flattering connotation than it does today, suggesting someone prone to naive optimism or cockeyed schemes—few scientists claim to have been divinely inspired with their most towering inventions while quoting Goethe in response to an eye-catching sunset.

It wasn’t until 1943, after Tesla’s death, that the Patent Office reversed its decision, and recognized him as radio’s true father. That outcome is perhaps fitting, as the story of his life unfolded more like something out of Nathanael West than Horatio Alger—his financial troubles at times rising in direct proportion to his ambitions.

Tesla’s other innovations include the first version of modern hydroelectric power (a dramatic and successful harnessing of Niagara Falls), an early version of radar (too ahead of its time to be immediately implemented), the first examples of neon and fluorescent lighting, and the first instance of wireless remote control. Rarely is Tesla credited as the father of robotics, but it was his invention, a battery-powered “tele-automated” boat that responded to wireless radio signals, that gave birth to the discipline.

He envisioned an era in which man could harness energy from the sun and a “‘world system’ of
wireless communications to relay telephone messages across the ocean.”

His dreams sometimes became nightmares—the costly and mysterious experiments with lightning and the transmission of wireless power in Colorado Springs suggest there was at least some madness to his science—though that didn’t stop the man from dreaming. He envisioned an era in which man could harness energy from the sun and a “‘world system’ of wireless communications to relay telephone messages across the ocean; to broadcast news, music, stock market reports, private messages, secure military communications, and even pictures to any part of the world.” The notion seems far less shocking today, especially if you’re reading this online.

When The New York Times ran Tesla’s obituary, on January 8, 1943, the article included a subtitle in all capital letters, reading “CLAIMED A ‘DEATH BEAM,’” followed by “He Insisted the Invention Could Annihilate an Army of 1,000,000 at Once.” The story dedicated as much ink to Tesla’s end-of-life eccentricities—fear of germs, sensitivity to light, living in relative isolation in the hotel, his never-developed “death beam,” which he imagined would prevent war rather than to accelerate it—as it did to his genius.

Today we can thank Elon Musk, who named his electric automobile company after the Wizard of the West, and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which prominently displays massive Tesla coils in the middle of its grounds every year, for aiding a resurgent appreciation for the inventor. Those two images offer a fitting dichotomy of the man—at once a creator of game-changing technology and a wide-eyed onlooker at the spectacular poetry of human life.

To meet the daunting energy challenges of the 21st century, we’ll need to draw upon both the poetry and the technological diligence that characterized Tesla’s work. More than that, it’s incumbent on us as a nation to fork over the money for ambitious (even risky) energy research; Tesla found himself destitute after relying on fickle, profit-focused investors to fund his work.
Let’s just hope that when the next young dreamer proposes an energy solution that, rather than simply refining an existing model, asks us to believe in something fantastic, we’ll have the foresight—nay, the vision—to hear him out.


article by Patrick James: Writer and Former GOOD Managing Editor for GOOD magazine

picture: Nikola Tesla, with Rudjer Boscovich's book "Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis", in front of the spiral coil of his high-voltage transformer at East Houston St., New York.
en:Image:Teslathinker.jpg, www.teslasociety.com

+ land before time

Megatherium americanum - The Giant Ground Sloth

The skeleton of Megatherium set up in the London Natural History Museum, and a depiction of a possibility of Megatherium behavior in life.

Though the population was already decreasing when the first humans arrived in South America, the disappearance of the Giant Sloth was helped along by the new immigrants. Using mammoth-hunting skills, this large and lumbering creature was an ideal kill for a human tribe. It was one of the many Pleistocene megafauna that went extinct during the Quaternary extinctions.

Extinct monsters. H. N. Hutchinson, 1896.

+ native seeds

Glass Gem heirloom Corn

Native Seeds/SEARCH conserves, distributes and documents the adapted and diverse varieties of agricultural seeds, their wild relatives and the role these seeds play in cultures of the American Southwest and northwest Mexico. They promote the use of these ancient crops and their wild relatives by gathering, safeguarding, and distributing their seeds to farming and gardening communities.

Native Seeds/SEARCH is a non-profit organization based in Tucson, Arizona.

Native seeds helps Native Americans of the Southwest grow plants that are healthy and help reduce risk or diabetes, something that plagues around 250,000 Native Americans.

-nativeseeds.org

+ two year sentence for hooliganism

Pussy Riot is a Russian feminist punk-rock musical collective in Moscow, who stage politically provocative impromptu performances about Russian political life in unusual locations, such as on top of a trolleybus or on a scaffold in the Moscow Metro.

On February 21, 2012, four members of the group staged a performance on the soleas of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, motivated by their opposition to the Russian President Vladimir Putin and the politics of the Russian Orthodox Church.[1][2] Their performance was interrupted by church security officials. On March 3, after a video of the performance appeared online, three of the group members were arrested and charged with hooliganism aimed at inciting religious hatred.[3]

Their trial began in late July and raised much controversy in Russia and globally. According to a poll by the Levada Center, 44% of Russians supported the trial and believed in its fairness, while 17% did not.[4] Yet the band members gained the noticeable support of some in Russia and internationally because of allegations of harsh treatment while in custody and the risk of a possible seven-year jail sentence.[5][6]

On August 17, 2012, the three members were convicted of hooliganism (article 213.2 of the Criminal Code) and each sentenced to two years imprisonment.[7][8] The Russian Orthodox Church issued a statement appealing to the authorities to show clemency, within the framework of the law. The Church cast no doubt on the legitimacy of the court’s decision.[9][10] The trial and conviction have attracted international criticism.[11] The foreign ministries of Germany and Sweden, together with representatives of the European Union and the United States, called the sentence "disproportionate".[12]

-wiki news - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pussy_Riot

+ stunning daily dozen

check out NAT GEO's amazing new pictures everyday.
cut and paste this link:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/your-shot/dailydozen?source=hp_dl4_ngm_daily_dozen20120804

+ it fell from the sky

by Terry Fan


find affordable prints at society6.com

+ Bessanova from the Ukraine

ribbon dancing, were not at center camp anymore..

+

+ camping in Pike National Forest in Colorado

last week was my first camping trip of this summer. Me and my three best friends set up camp for two nights in the humid pine valleys of the Pike forest. The sun would rise in the morning, turning all the dew into a think mist, rising out of the ponderosas and aspens. it rained, it hailed, it fogged. the forest floor was abundant with fungus and mushrooms of all kinds. i enjoyed exploring the small details of the unique plant life. i still havent learned my lesson about how cold it gets at night in the mountains, and even in august my little self needs a 0 degree bag to be cozy. i wore every item i brought during most of the trip.