Time for Fun Stuff

Okay. No climate change or rantings on evolution today. Just fun stuff.

NASA's Image of the Day has some truly breathtaking pictures. Today's is of the Rho Ophiuchi dark cloud from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the closest star forming are to our sun. It's just really pretty.

There's an encyclopedia for all known species of life. I'm not sure how it's going to manage bacteria and such, since species boundaries may not apply. But the idea of a compendium of all known species is very cool. Of course, it was out of date the moment it was conceived but science is like that. Maybe they'll put up a website. The site is here.

The "Doomsday Vault" has opened its doors. The vault is a repository for keeping the worlds plant food seeds in a viable form. Consider what it might be like to be able to reference apples from the nineteenth century? Wheat from the Rome? Or pecans from last week? This is not just an idea for preserving against catastrophe. It's a viable new food source for the future.

For the first time a snake hunting its prey has been filmed. A timber rattler hunting a snake was caught on film as part of the British Life in Cold Blood series. Rattlesnakes are fast. Notice that in slowmo it's still fast. There's an old story I heard when I was a kid and have no idea if it's true or not. You know in all those old movies how the gunslinger would shoot the head off a rattler to show how good he was. Well, it actually happened but not the way one would think. Remember those old pistols were large, heavy and the bullets were slow-- much, much slower than a modern gun. And the bullets, after leaving the barrel, were hot. The rattlesnake sees heat. So there's this fast hot thing flying towards it. Naturally, it struck.

Tetrapod Zoology has an entry about the Big Cats in Britain. It's pretty certain that the early humans in England had more to worry about than those pesky Normans. Snorki the Giant is pretty cool as well.

Finally, a treasure: the artist, Ron Pippin, who makes art that reflects a world that should have been.

Some of you have heard of Steampunk, alternate world science fiction that uses (often) Victorian sensibilities with modern (somewhat) science. A good example is the Phil Foglio's comic, Girl Genius or Jake von Slatt's Steampunk Workshop. Or Doctor Julius T. Roundbottom. Brassgoggles. Game Studio's office suite. There is even Steampunk Magazine. And a blog.

These are all fine and good but Ron Pippin takes us into another world. I first heard of him via Bioephemera. Pippin creates works of art, ephemera, notebooks, skeletons, animals from this other world and presents them as if part of a traveling exhibit. I'm not going to talk about him. Here are the links:

Interactive work at the Obsolete. Other pictures from the Obsolete.
Relic notebooks from expeditions that never were.
A collection of museum boxes.
Works of his at the Trovelaguna.
More Pippin work at Bioephemera.

I have a big investment in the honesty of art and the fine line between illusion and reality. Here we have representative art of things that never were reflecting an popular idiom of things that couldn't be.

This is the part where my brain explodes.