COOP’s post and Flickrset caused me to dig out my (very) old box of Matchboxes, Corgis, etc. I took one set of photos, but the sun isn’t above the big pine tree in the back yard yet – I don’t have any fancy flash equipment – so I’m going to start over in an hour or two. The pictures will be uploaded here; in the meantime, something to prime the pump:
A very neat artist/caddis collaboration (via ectoplasmosis). I guess at nugget and wire scale the density of gold isn’t an issue. Any fisherpeople visiting New Hampshire in late June should make a point of getting up to Errol to catch the Alderfly hatch – Alderflies are medium-large caddis that emerge in huge numbers. Also – I’ve got to get a subscription to Cabinet!
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Goldfarming was a popular topic last week. I heard a reasonably good explanation on NPR in the context of South Korean gaming and some law-making around same. Then a BoingBoing post (great title – “Gold-farmers beat ad-ban by spelling URL in dead gnomes”) pointed me at this crazy video.
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Charlie Stross weighed in with a great little essay about explaining the video above to someone from the distant past – say, 1977. I can’t end a goldfarming item without a hat tip to Cory Doctorow’s great story on the topic – Anda’s Game.
Finally, on a personal note, things are going well (knock wood) with Luz, preparations are being made for the shorthair pup, and the summer is flying by. My energy has been very critter directed over the past few weeks – expect posts to be either linky (like this one) or snapshots of falcons, dogs, etc.
Steampunk.
Ink.
The only thing I’ve seen that might redirect my desire for a Pazyryk bird head-antlered elk:
Needs more Trieste!
Privacy.
In 2003 AT&T built secret rooms hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company’s popular WorldNet service and the entire Internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the Internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.
ATT + NSA makes a pack of shoggoths look benign. A palate cleanser:
I walked into the classroom across the hall from my office this morning to water my plants and saw some objects that were begging to be photographed. The middle school science teacher/friend/coworker whose room this is lets me keep some of my orchids, bromeliads and carnivorous plants in a sunny window; I like going in to check out the latest projects in process – kids working on rockets or IDing dragonfly nymphs – you get the idea…
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There were (and are) people who collected eggs. Not chicken eggs, but eggs from songbirds, raptors, cranes, waterfowl, and they did not collect casually, but voraciously, obsessively. A friend and coworker inherited a collection and he displays it to inform people about the practice and it’s effects. I took a few pictures of a representative sample today.
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Shed a tear for Martha, the last of a very gregarious species, as she waited out her time in the Cincinnati zoo almost a hundred years ago. Not her’s, but it is a passenger pigeon’s egg:
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I’m prone to wax a little, well, obsessive over bits of nature and outdoor pursuits; I am relieved to report that this mania does absolutely nothing for me, except to make me sad and a little wistful. Others continue the chase – bah!
‘Bookshelf’ as a title for the post wouldn’t cover it. Books, bones, blankets and more from Steve and Libby’s home in New Mexico:
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Notice the thimble in the upper right (at least that’s what they’re called up here – would not be surprised to find there’s a great Spanish word that would be more appropriate in this case).
Another great bookshelf shot can be found here (click it, dammit). A range of interests? Yes!
If other folks have posted book-shots, I’d love to know – leave a comment or something. Technorati is only so-so at tracking links to a low traffic blog like mine…
Later – to clarify, picture credit belongs to Steve – he emailed the picture to me for posting here. Though I wouldn’t mind spending some time in the southwest (understatement!), the last time I was there (assuming that hill country Texas and front-range Colorado don’t count) was a looooong time ago.
I like maps – old, new, fanciful, technical, you name it. I was very happy to stumble across the strange maps blog this morning (thanks, Bruce); this one’s going to get added to my netvibes portal and to the blogroll.
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An interesting coincidence: I’ve been on a bit of a soma jag recently (research, not use) because of a brief mention of it in Helen Macdonald’s excellent Falcon. I started by re-reading Brave New World for old time’s sake; back in high school it added soma to my vocabulary; college brought R. Gordon Wasson and the idea of entheogens. Soma has been off the back burner and on a slow simmer in my head for a while; there seems to be a connection between the bowls found in Central Asian burials and either soma or Amanita muscaria use (allowing that A. muscaria might not be soma). The picture at the top of the post is a handle for one of these bowls. Falcon brought the simmer to a boil, so – in preparation for (maybe) writing a long soma post – I’ve been spending the past couple days reading things like The Soma-Haoma Problem. Now comes the coincidence – last night I was lying in bed reading The Areas of my Expertise and laughing my head off (not a great way to get to sleep, I discovered); page 87 consists of the following:
WERE YOU AWARE OF IT?
The famous Cole Porter tune “I’m In, You’re In” was actually Porter’s typically wry response to the urine-drinking craze of the 1920s.
The practice originated with the fierce reindeer herders of Siberia known as the Koryac, who centuries ago had devised a means of purifying the hallucinogenic toadstool known as fly agaric. A local shaman would eat the mushroom, using his body to filter out the poisonous muscarine; its mood-altering compounds were preserved in his urine, which was then ritually consumed by other Koryac and also some of the more favored reindeer.
Marco Pensworthy, a monocled young libertine and staff member of the American Museum of Natural History, who was later dismissed for seducing the skeleton of a giant ground sloth, introduced the custom to New York. During Prohibition, many a tuxedoed, thrill-thirsty swell attended one of Dr. Marco’s private “Siberian Tea Parties,” beneath the frozen gaze of the stampeding elephants of the Hall of African Animals, where, wrote Porter…
There isn’t any shame in
Meeting with the Shaman
And making like the reindeers do…
It’s just a little wonder
That will unfreeze your tundra
I’m in, you’re in. You’re in too.After his disgrace, Pensworthy would wander Central Park humming Porter’s tune and offering passersby swigs from a suspicious flask. Finally arrested and institutionalized, he trepanned himself to death in 1952.
Like a lot of good tall tales, there’s a grain of truth in there – the Koryac references are accurate regarding the mushroom and the urine (I’d be surprised if they shared their pee with the reindeer – but I could be wrong).
I’m running into these kind of coincidences more and more frequently (the one before this was putting Lost World of the Moa down, flipping the teevee to Animal Planet, and falling into the middle of a segment on Haast’s Eagle). I’m developing a hypothesis that rests on two factors – both Internet related – the immediate availability of information and the number of personal contacts with like-minded people that communication technology provides us with. I’ll do some more thinkin’ on it – perhaps a later post.
Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I’m in a coma:
Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny;
Love’s as good as soma. *
Okay, so I click over to the Kircher Society site to grab a link for my post below and what to my wondering eyes should appear? A post on one of my heroes, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. Click through and read the post, then click on the links from there to the beautiful watercolors of Walton Ford. Hmm – Brooklyn isn’t too far away, but there’s not much time left before the exhibition comes down…
Some interesting stuff from the late Syd Barrett’s estate is being auctioned off. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how this works, but it looks like you can place absentee bids via an eBay account. The auction itself is tomorrow at 7AM EST. I’m tempted by a couple of items… (via MeFi)
This doesn’t need any comment from me…
A movie taken by Cassini’s camera over a three-hour period reveals winds around Saturn’s south pole blowing clockwise at 550 kilometers (350 miles) per hour. The camera also saw the shadow cast by a ring of towering clouds surrounding the pole, and two spiral arms of clouds extending from the central ring. These ring clouds, 30 to 75 kilometers (20 to 45 miles) above those in the center of the storm, are two to five times taller than the clouds of thunderstorms and hurricanes on Earth.
Eye-wall clouds are a distinguishing feature of hurricanes on Earth. They form where moist air flows inward across the ocean’s surface, rising vertically and releasing a heavy rain around an interior circle of descending air that is the eye of the storm itself. Though it is uncertain whether such moist convection is driving Saturn’s storm, the dark “eye” at the pole, the eye-wall clouds and the spiral arms together indicate a hurricane-like system. *
