Rata Weekly

Fab Brian Brake documentary

2011-01-11T16:25:00.005+13:00

This episode of Artsville covers the career of Brian Brake, and attempts to recreate some of his photographic techniques. I particularly liked the interviews with his partner and collaborator.

If you missed it live, watch it quick! It's well worth the time.

And Brake's work is being showcased by Te Papa, who have a mini-site with pictures and information.

Total lunar eclipse, 21 December 2011

2010-12-22T15:14:00.001+13:00

A lunar eclipse at midsummer, on the shortest night of the year, is pretty awesome. It also doesn't leave a lot of darkness to view the eclipse! Here in Christchurch the moon rose already in total eclipse, and wasn't visible for some time as there was cloud low in the sky. But it was worth waiting for, a spectacular pale pink disk which became rusty red as it rose higher in the darkening sky. And even as sunlight crept across the moon's surface and clouds partly obscured the moon from view, it was still a freakish and beautiful sight.

9.56pm

2010-12-22T15:03:00.002+13:00

9.57pm

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10.02pm

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10.09pm

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10.11pm

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10.22pm

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10.24pm

2010-12-22T14:57:00.000+13:00

10.26 (1)

2010-12-22T14:56:00.000+13:00

10.26pm (2)

2010-12-22T14:55:00.000+13:00

10.30pm

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10.31pm

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10.44pm

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11.11pm

2010-12-22T14:50:00.000+13:00

Meara O'Reilly's Chladni singing

2010-08-04T11:35:00.001+12:00

"Chladni patterns were discovered by Robert Hook and Ernst Chladni in the 18th and 19th centuries. They found that when they bowed a piece of glass covered in flour, (using an ordinary violin bow), the powder arranged itself in resonant patterns according to places of stillness and vibration. Today, Chladni plates are often electronically driven by tone generators and used in scientific demonstrations, but with carefully sung notes (and a transducer driving the plate), I'm able to explore the same resonances." - Meara O'Reilly

Here is a video of O'Reilly making amazing, shifting geometric patterns by singing a sequence of notes:

Women directors, women screenwriters, and the Bechdel Test

2010-08-03T11:48:00.000+12:00

To pass the Bechdel Test, a movie has to fulfill these criteria:

1. It has to have at least two [named] women in it

2. Who talk to each other

3. About something besides a man

Doesn't sound too hard, does it? And yet about half of the movies in the Bechdel Test database fail the test. More than 10% failed all the criteria. Just to recap, that means they didn't have more than one named female character in the whole movie.

Here is a list of some of the IMDb's top-rated films, measured against the Bechdel Test. And here are some graphs.

So where are all the women? Well, probably the same place all the female screenwriters and directors are. In Hollywood, 19% of screenwriters are women. In television it's 28%.

And, far from getting easier, it's actually getting harder for women to get writing work in Hollywood. You can read more about that here.

As you'd expect, there's a connection between the number of women working as writers, directors and producers, and the number of female characters onscreen. More on that here.

From The Guardian:

"The irony is that women were in at the birth of cinema. The silent era was a golden age with female screenwriters writing half of all movies between 1911 and 1925. Jane Cussons, chief executive of the industry body Women in Film and Television, says: 'Just think of Alice Guy Blache, who was the first woman ever to direct a movie. She directed 400 films, produced hundreds more and ran her own studio. Then when sound came in, film making became big business. Men moved in and women just got sidelined.'"

[you can read the whole article here]

Mila's Daydreams

2010-08-02T10:53:00.005+12:00

Adele Enerson takes a little time while her baby sleeps to imagine dreams for her. The charm of the images comes from their spontaneity and the inventive use of whatever materials are to hand. You can see them all at Mila's Daydreams blog. And Adele is interviewed at Offbeat Mama:

"Like all the other mothers, most of my day I take care of my baby and her needs and when there's a "spare time," I wash a lot of tiny laundry, make food and try to keep our home clean. But it's all so much more fun when you can create something funny in your head. I hope this inspires other mothers to find something fun and satisfying in their day too!

Extremely scary jobs

2010-08-01T12:23:00.003+12:00

"The hazardous career field of commercial diving was once largely defined by the deep-water saturation divers working the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea. But saturation diving isn't the only dangerous diving job around. Someone has to dive the 150-foot-tall water towers on the blizzard-blown Kansas prairies where it's gravity, not gas saturation, that will kill you. Someone needs to slip quietly inside the tangled gloom of a tuna net to check on great white sharks. Someone needs to make sure those scientists chasing penguins under the Antarctic ice cap don't drift away from the hole. And yes, someone has to dive inside nuclear reactors. (But hey, we hear the tan you get is just fabulous.)"

Read the whole article here. It's fascinating, but could give you nightmares!

Thanks to the NZ Geographic for this link.

A lot of scary amazingness

2010-07-31T13:44:00.000+12:00

65 million years ago, a meteor at least 10-km wide impacted Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, causing global catastrophe. The force of the explosion was significantly bigger than any volcanic event in history and the shock waves probably triggered worldwide earthquakes, a megatsunami, a massive release of gas and dust and heating of the atmosphere which devastated the climate and caused mass extinctions, including most dinosaur species existing at that time.

The site of the impact, Chicxulub crater; is a circle 170km across, with half on the Yucatan Peninsula, and the other half in the water of the Caribbean Sea.

On land, a trough along the outer edge of the crater contains a vast semicircle of "cenotes", deep limestone sinkholes filled with fresh water.

This BBC clip explains:

Many of the cenotes are connected by an even deeper network of flooded caves which leads to the sea. Freshwater percolating down from rain on the surface and seawater flowing in from the Caribbean form "haloclines", distinct layers of water which don't mix. This clip shows the strange optical illusions caused at the boundary between the layers:

The first half of this clip shows another peculiar optical effect: a layer of hydrogen sulphide which appears to be the bottom of a cenote but is in fact a cloud of gas suspended deep below the surface:

Shoelace fanatic

2010-07-28T11:36:00.000+12:00

Thanks Andrew for this wee gem, if gem is the word I want...Ian's shoelace site shows you the many options available to you when lacing your shoes.

It also details why there are almost 2 trillion possible ways of lacing a 12-eyelet boot.

And there are some very pretty lacing patterns: check out the hexagram and pentagram, just for starters.

And for those among us who struggle with the basics, there is help to avoid slipping knots and crooked bows!

What a wonderful site. :-)

The night sky in Tekapo. Wowee!

2010-07-17T19:53:00.001+12:00

Asking the right questions on climate

2010-06-20T16:13:00.003+12:00

"national surveys released during the last eight months have been interpreted as showing that fewer and fewer Americans believe that climate change is real, human-caused and threatening to people.

But a closer look at these polls and a new survey by my Political Psychology Research Group show just the opposite: huge majorities of Americans still believe the earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it"

Apparently, it comes down to the wording of the question.

"When respondents were asked if they thought that the earth’s temperature probably had been heating up over the last 100 years, 74 percent answered affirmatively. And 75 percent of respondents said that human behavior was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred."

This is in contrast to some previous polls, such as:

"consider a widely publicized Gallup question: “Thinking about what is said in the news, in your view, is the seriousness of global warming generally exaggerated, generally correct or is it generally underestimated?” This question asked about respondents’ perceptions of the news, not the respondents’ perception of warming. A person who believes climate change has been happening might also feel that news media coverage of it has been exaggerated."

read the whole NYT article, here. Thanks to Leigh for the link.

Whales, Tuberculosis, Monarchs, etc.

2010-06-15T21:40:00.001+12:00

This is also from the 1886 Goldsmith book, this time the outside back cover.
The text reads : Woodhouse's Balsam of Spermaceti or Pectoral Cough Drops for Consumptive or Other Coughs, also for Colds, Shortness of Breath, Asthma, Wheezing and other Afflictions of the Chest.

Spermaceti is produced by whales, you can read about it here. If swallowing bits of whale for the sake of your chest sounds silly, the discovery of streptomycin (the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis) had to wait until 1944. If you'd like to read about the history of tuberculosis and its treatments, the Wikipedia article is interesting.

In former times, the touch of your King or Queen was thought to be efficacious:

"Persons of royal blood were thought to have the 'God given' power of healing by this condition by touch, and sovereigns of England and France practiced this power to cure sufferers of scrofula, a form of tuberculosis of the bones and lymph nodes, commonly known as the "King's or Queen's Evil" or "Morbus Regius". In France it was called the "Mal De Roi". Curiously William the Lion, King of Scotland is recorded in 1206 as curing a case of Scrofula by his touching and blessing a child who had the ailment. Charles I touched around 100 people shortly after his coronation at Holyrood in 1630. It was only rarely fatal and was naturally given to spontaneous cure and lengthy periods of remission. Many miraculous cures were recorded and failures were put down to a lack of faith in the sufferer. The original Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican Church contained this ceremony."
"The custom lasted from the time of Edward the Confessor to the reign of Queen Anne, although her predecessor, William III refused to believe in the tradition and did not carry out the ceremony."

"Queen Anne, amongst many others, touched the 2 year old infant Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1712 to no effect, for although he eventually recovered he was left badly scarred and blind in one eye. He wore the medal around his neck all of his life and it is now preserved in the British Museum. It was believed that if the touch piece was not worn then the condition would return. Queen Anne last performed the ceremony on 30 March 1712. George I put an end to the practice as being "too Catholic."'
"The monarch himself / herself hung these touch piece amulets around the necks of sufferers. In later years Charles II only touched the medalet as he unsurprisingly disliked touching diseased people directly. He 'touched' 92,107 people in the 21 years from 1661 to 1682, performing the function 8,500 times in 1682 alone." [Wikipedia]

So now you know. The whole bizarre Wikipedia article on "touch pieces" (=healing talismans) is here.

Parental leave for men

2010-06-14T12:14:00.001+12:00

Sweden was the first country in the world to introduce paid parental leave, open to either parent, in 1974, but it's only since further incentives were introduced in the 1990s, that many fathers have taken advantage of it.

"From trendy central Stockholm to this village in the rugged forest south of the Arctic Circle, 85 percent of Swedish fathers take parental leave. Those who don’t face questions from family, friends and colleagues. As other countries still tinker with maternity leave and women’s rights, Sweden may be a glimpse of the future."

"laws reserving at least two months of the generously paid, 13-month parental leave exclusively for fathers — a quota that could well double after the September election — have set off profound social change."

'“Many men no longer want to be identified just by their jobs,” said Bengt Westerberg, who long opposed quotas but as deputy prime minister phased in a first month of paternity leave in 1995. “Many women now expect their husbands to take at least some time off with the children.”'

Read the whole fascinating story in the NYT. Thanks to N for the link.

Piglet squid. No really.

2010-06-13T12:36:00.001+12:00

Sometimes nature comes up with something so funny-looking you can't quite believe it. Funny-looking to us, anyway. I wonder what we look like to them?

Check out this item on piglet squid. And Google offers a range of other images almost as funny.

In other crazy nature news, jaguars are attracted to Calvin Klein's Obsession for Men fragrance. This is a boon for animal biologists trying to study the elusive big cats, but you might want to think twice before wearing it on your rainforest holiday.

Fascinating story on NZ Scrabble genius

2010-06-12T11:51:00.005+12:00

Ever heard of Nigel Richards? Neither had I, but he's the reclusive Kiwi who's been world champion in Scrabble for the last 12 years.

'"Without a doubt he's the greatest player in our sport, ever," says national Scrabble representative Warner, who, like many serious exponents of the game, considers it a sport."

'"You go to international tournaments and everyone's sitting around at the end of the day telling Nigel-stories," says Warner. "Of course, he's never there, so the legend grows."'

"Richards' only two interests are obsessions: Scrabble, and cycling. He cycles 600km a week, including long rides before the 8am start of each day of tournament play. Everyone in Scrabble knows the story of Richards' first appearance at a New Zealand championship, when he knocked off his job in the Christchurch City Council's water department at 5pm, cycled for 14 hours to Dunedin in atrocious conditions overnight, played all his games over the weekend, then cycled home having won his division, spurning offers of a lift."

Read the whole Stuff article here.

Head Soap - now there's an idea

2010-06-10T21:29:00.002+12:00

This is from the inside cover of an edition of Goldsmith's plays dated 1886.

Carnivale

2010-06-01T10:42:00.002+12:00

Cult TV series Carnivale is movie-like in its complexity and attention to detail: you need to watch every episode in order to have any idea what's going on, and even then there are mysteries. But it's hugely rewarding if you pay attention.

Here is the Season 1 trailer (try and ignore the Spanish subtitles!):

And here are the award-winning opening credits:

Amazon has a good deal on box sets of the whole series. Click here to see them.

Swindon's Magic Roundabout

2010-05-31T13:05:00.006+12:00

OK I'm posting this here because I try to describe this to people and they either don't believe me or I can't explain it properly. Swindon boasts the original Magic Roundabout, built in 1972, which consists of one counter-clockwise roundabout fed by 5 clockwise roundabouts. That's hard to picture, so have a look at the Wikipedia diagram.

Or watch the animation:

Seed banks and biodiversity

2010-05-25T10:15:00.002+12:00

The BBC recently had this nice story of a minute waterlily brought back from extinction through stored seed:

"Two years ago, this delicate bloom went extinct in the wild due to over-exploitation of its habitat.

Luckily its seeds were kept in storage - and were used by Carlos Magdalena to regrow the plant at Kew Gardens - just outside London.

It took him months to find the ideal conditions for growth. He hopes now that the Thermal Lily will flourish once again in the hot springs of Rwanda...." (read more)

There is also a passionate piece on the urgency of banking seed as a way of safeguarding species for the future:

"Kew's Millennium Seed Bank is a unique, global asset. It is the largest facility of its kind in the world and contains the world's most diverse seed collections.

Over the past 10 years, more than 3.5 billion seeds from 25,000 species have been collected and stored in their country of origin and in Kew.

Species are chosen by country partners according to whether they are rare or endangered or of particular potential use - for example as medicine, food, animal fodder or shelter.

Described by Sir David Attenborough as "perhaps the most ambitious conservation initiative ever", the partnership will announce on 15 October the banking and conservation of 10% of the world's plant species." (read more)

And if you thought cities were a desert, in terms of biodiversity, you couldn't be more wrong:

"There are four bodies lying and crouching in our tiny back garden. The ecologists from the Natural History Museum (NHM) got here only minutes ago, but, while the kettle boils, they are already grubbing about behind our bins, under our windowsills, in the lawn, flowerbed and log pile.

They are doing a "bioblitz" – trying to find as many species of animal and plant as possible in this small, suburban south-west London garden. Our back garden is only 12 paces long and seven wide, with, now I look at it through the eyes of ecologists, pitifully few flowers. Happily, they appear undaunted. "The great thing is, even with gardens like this that look fairly sterile, there's always something there," says the museum's insect specialist, Stuart Hine. "We'll move plant pots, and we'll have a look through your log pile . . . Lots of spiders, centipedes, woodlice, slugs – they'll all be there."" (read more)

Richard Dawkins in The Times

2010-05-24T18:25:00.002+12:00

"Imagine that you are a teacher of Roman history and the Latin language, anxious to impart your enthusiasm for the ancient world — for the elegiacs of Ovid and the odes of Horace, the sinewy economy of Latin grammar as exhibited in the oratory of Cicero, the strategic niceties of the Punic Wars, the generalship of Julius Caesar and the voluptuous excesses of the later emperors. That’s a big undertaking and it takes time, concentration, dedication. Yet you find your precious time continually preyed upon, and your class’s attention distracted, by a baying pack of ignoramuses (as a Latin scholar you would know better than to say ignorami) who, with strong political and especially financial support, scurry about tirelessly attempting to persuade your unfortunate pupils that the Romans never existed. There never was a Roman Empire. The entire world came into existence only just beyond living memory. Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Romansh: all these languages and their constituent dialects sprang spontaneously and separately into being, and owe nothing to any predecessor such as Latin...."

Read the rest here. Thanks to N for the link.

Gogoyoko

2010-05-21T10:41:00.007+12:00

You'd think that online music sales would be more financially rewarding for artists than traditional music sales involving a physical product such as a CD, record or tape. Unfortunately, that's mostly not how it works. Information is Beautiful has statistics and a graph.

Here is a video of Georg from Sigur Ros talking about Gogoyoko, a new music store designed for artists to sell directly to their fans.

Check out Gogoyoko here. It looks very smart.

Update: The Information Is Beautiful figures have been questioned as they exclude a number of important factors, such as marketing costs, recording costs (if these are paid for by the artist they get a much bigger share of the final proceeds, if not costs may be recouped before any royalies go to the artist). And a statutory royalty payment is always made to the writer(s) of a song whether or not the performers receive one. So remuneration in the music business is really very complicated!

The good news is that the Internet offers a multiplicity of options for artists. Some that seem to offer a very good return to artists are: CDBaby, which charges artists a flat $4 per CD sold, and allows them to set the retail price as they wish; Bandcamp, a site which currently delivers 100% of the digital download fee to artists who own their own recordings, less PayPal transaction fees; and Amplifier, which takes a 20% cut on music sold (this compares with the about 85% cut taken by itunes)

I'm indebted to Russell Brown, Simon Grigg, and Samuel Scott for explaining some of these matters to me.

If you're interested, this ars technica article graphs the market shift from albums to individual tracks and from download to streaming content. Things are changing in the music business, that's for sure.

Snap, crackle, pop!

2010-05-17T23:56:00.006+12:00

Thanks to Andrew for pointing me to this wonderful electrical rendition of the Doctor Who theme.

The device used here is sometimes known as a "Zeusaphone", because of the, uh, lightning bolts!

According to Wikipedia:

"Zeusaphone, also called a Thoremin, is trademark for a high-frequency, solid state Tesla coil, when its spark discharge is digitally modulated so as to produce musical tones. The high-frequency signal acts in effect as a carrier wave; its frequency is significantly above human-audible sound frequencies, so that digital modulation is able to reproduce a recognizable pitch. The musical tone results directly from the passage of the spark through the air.

This is a variant of the plasma arc loudspeaker, designed for public spectacle and sheer volume rather than fidelity."

If you fancy the musical sparks, you can buy one, here.

Now there's an eruption!!

2010-05-11T11:24:00.002+12:00

Inter-species interactive

2010-04-16T12:38:00.004+12:00

Who knew that Apple was designing for cats? :-) (hat-tip: Russell Brown)

The hungry sheep look up

2010-04-05T11:45:00.001+12:00

Thanks to Mekayla for sending me pictures from the Museum for Communication in Frankfurt. By Jean Luc Cornec,These sheep are re-purposed telephones.
You can see more of the telephone sheep on Flickr, here.

Setting us straight!

2010-04-04T19:26:00.000+12:00

A lot of physics as taught in school and printed in textbooks is not just oversimplified but actually wrong. If you want your illusions shattered, read this page! Highlights include:

SCIENTISTS USE THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD? not quite.

LAKES AND OCEANS ARE BLUE BECAUSE THEY REFLECT THE BLUE SKY? No.

CLOUDS REMAIN ALOFT BECAUSE WATER DROPLETS ARE TINY? Wrong!

THE SKY IS BLUE BECAUSE OF COMPLICATED PHYSICS No, it's simple.

A LEMON-BATTERY CAN LIGHT A FLASHLIGHT BULB? doesn't work!

SOUND TRAVELS BETTER THROUGH SOLIDS & LIQUIDS? No it doesn't.

GRAVITY IN SPACE IS ZERO? It's actually strong.

A WING'S LIFTING FORCE IS CAUSED BY ITS SHAPE?, no, by trailing edge angle.

FOR EVERY ACTION, THERE IS AN EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTION? Newton said otherwise.

BEN FRANKLIN'S KITE WAS STRUCK BY LIGHTNING? He'd have died.

These and many other points are discussed and explained. Some take a while to get your head around, but it's worth the effort! Thanks to Niels for the link.

2010-04-03T14:02:00.000+13:00

The Kindness of Strangers: (Kitchen Memoirs) by Shonagh Koea

I have been savouring this wonderful book in which Shonagh Koea's essays about food allow her to discuss many other things about her life, writing, and experiences. Sometimes she is frivolous, sometimes deadly serious; often she makes droll anecdotes out of horrifying things, and finds amusing details even in the saddest parts of her story. Many of the recipes she includes make something good out of unpromising ingredients, and the same goes for her life story: she makes a witty and magnificent tale out of adversity and hardship.

And the recipes are wonderful! Her "Air India" samosas are the best I've ever had.

Here are some samples:

"When I was in High School my mother sometimes used to make marmalade. There were grapefruit trees growing out the back of the house we lived in and they fruited generously, but the fruit was a pale colour, thin-skinned and possibly not suitable for marmalade. She used to mince the fruit using and old metal mincer that screwed on to the kitchen table and I think she added grated carrot to make the mixture more orange. the results were stiff, extremely opaque and they sat in jars with a sort of grimly globular intensity that was almost alarming. I never ate any of it but my mother would spread it dutifully on her toast, saying meanwhile, 'You don't know what you're missing.' In a culinary sense I do not think I missed much, but the point I missed at the time was that there was nothing else for her to do but make the best of what she had and she did so with scant encouragement."

"I have cultivated quite wild and spreading plants so there is an atmosphere of largess and tropical wildness in my garden and through this I walk carefully with a cup of coffee in one hand an a doorstep of homemade bran loaf spread with marmalade in the other, once I tripped on a low-lying leaf of my big flax plant and fell flat on my face, so I have walked through my garden with greater care since then. I had thought, as it was my very own garden, that I would be able to do anything there and be unharmed but this was just a fanciful thought -- I am apt to have such fancies and think that because it is me that everything with be all right. it mostly is but sometimes not, like the time I tripped over the flax leaf."

"If you are a writer people always imagine that what you write is true, particularly if they know you. Of course it is not because fiction is fiction and can be manipulated to make a good story, and truth often has no resolution of horrors and terrors so is useless to place upon a page masquerading as a tale simply because there is not one. The truth is mostly a jumble of unresolved and sometimes very unrelated facts that collide in a meaningless way. People would not pay good money to read it. They have difficulty enough living it, I imagine. After I wrote The Lonely Margins of the Sea I lost count of the number of times people sidled up to me and said, in a hasty aside, 'You can tell me who you stabbed -- I won't tell a soul' The novel was about a woman who had stabbed her married lover and had gone to prison. [...] It was flattering, I suppose, to be considered so dangerous when I cannot, in real life, even dismember a chicken from the supermarket. My carving of meat is so inexpert that once, in the days when I used to make some pretence of having people to dinner, I hacked at a piece of beef with such a blunt knife that the candles fell out of the candlesticks and nearly set fire to the tablecloth."

Victorian women surveyed on sexuality

2010-04-02T10:22:00.000+13:00

The value of primary historical sources is that they can correct wrong assumptions and interpretations made by scholars in a later era. Stanford professor Clelia Mosher conducted surveys from 1892 to 1920 asking women for their views on sex and reproduction . The results seem surprising to modern eyes:

"The Mosher Survey recorded not only women's sexual habits and appetites, but also their thinking about spousal relationships, children and contraception. Perhaps, it hinted, Victorian women weren't so Victorian after all. Indeed, many of the surveyed women were decidedly unshrinking."

Stanford Magazine has a fascinating article about both the survey and the woman who compiled it, here. It concludes:

"In her own writings, Mosher was acutely aware of her foresight, and of the possibilities that lay ahead for women once sex became less of a secret and gender less of a burden. "Born into a world of unlimited opportunity, the woman of the rising generation will answer the question of what woman's real capacities are," Mosher wrote in 1923. "She will have physical, economic, racial and civic freedom. What will she do with it?""

Thanks to N for the link.

Marvellous Missie Moffat

2010-04-01T17:56:00.003+13:00

Check out this video of Taranaki singer-songwriter Missie performing live with The Gentle Kings. And there are more tracks on her MySpace page, including the brilliant For You.

missie & the gentle kings- live at spiegeltent

missie | MySpace Music Videos

Hey, Missie, you rock :-) Let us know when we can buy the CD.

Dominoes are only the beginning!

2010-03-27T14:15:00.002+13:00

I can't imagine how many hours were needed to set this up, but it's crazy and clever and fits the song perfectly! Thanks to Mark for pointing me to it.

Classic Hugh Laurie, "Mystery"

2010-03-26T20:43:00.001+13:00

Kingfishers in action

2010-03-22T13:05:00.003+13:00

The Telegraph has these incredible shots of kingfishers fishing, taken by National Geographic photographer Joe Petersburger.

Migratory birds (the aluminium kind)

2010-02-04T13:17:00.002+13:00

check out this scary little video tracking global air traffic! Thanks for the link, John.

Below is a link to something cool posted in the hope it will make you think I'm cool, too

2010-02-02T12:17:00.005+13:00

This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post which is also a link so click on it.

(this is a parenthetical reminder to be sure to also read the comments too, as they are very funny)

And this is a hat-tip to Grant Jacobs with a link to his blog.

On disability and caring

2010-01-29T17:02:00.000+13:00

Philip Patson writes in a guest post on Public Address:

"A wise society would accept the potential inevitability that through birth, accident, illness or aging we're all functionally incompetent or incapacitated at some point in our lives. We would design environments, systems and structures that accommodate functional diversity."

Read the whole post here. And Patson's own website, Diversity New Zealand, is here.

What's wrong with TV news?

2010-01-29T12:39:00.000+13:00

This sums it up so well.

Hard times for honeybees

2010-01-25T11:07:00.000+13:00

The BBC's Richard Black compares the plight of frogs with that of honeybees:

"While the chytrid fungus has blown whole [frog] populations away single-handedly in a season's shooting spree, many species undergo a slow, inexorable decline more akin to starvation or an ancient torture; squeezed into corners by the expanding human habitat, poisoned by farmland chemicals, eaten by bigger invasive neighbours, hunted for meat, stressed by temperature rise and stalked by viruses - or any combination of the above."

"As the plot of that detective story becomes clear, it seems that scientists are beginning to write another with a very similar narrative, but this time with bees cast as the victims."

"Bee populations - wild and cultivated - have always had their ups and downs, their years of plenty and years of absence. But about five years ago, commercial beekeepers in the US began reporting total wipe-outs of hives on a scale not documented before, leading to the term colony collapse disorder (CCD)."

Read the whole article here.

Martian sand art

2010-01-24T15:55:00.000+13:00

Does anyone remember those sand pictures that looked a bit like landscapes and the landscape changed when you tipped them up the other way? Well does this look at all familiar?

Larks and owls

2010-01-23T13:47:00.000+13:00

The Guardian has a nice piece on variation in circadian rhythms, which makes some of us bright early in the day and others bright in the evening:

"Shiftwork is endemic (involving more than a quarter of workers) and keeps increasing with the demands of our 24/7 consumer society. People with a natural rhythm of getting up late and going to sleep late ("owls" as opposed to "larks") are discriminated against. Adolescents, who have a biological tendency to follow an owlish rhythm, are forced to attend school at early hours when they are still half asleep. Managers and other presumably important people are shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic as if jet lag was just a fairytale."

"There is always going to be a certain amount of night-time work that is essential. A big part of it could be covered by intelligent use of the natural variation between peoples' biorhythms. The larks among us will be happy to start work at 6am, while the owls don't really mind being out until 2am. For the most unpopular hours in the middle of the night, science can help workers adapt."

Read the whole thing here.

Papercuts

2010-01-22T19:38:00.004+13:00

Thanks to Matthew for pointing me to this incredible stop-motion animation of cutouts from the pages of a novel. This story sure does leap off the page :-)

Warning: Total Perspective Vortex!

2010-01-21T13:23:00.003+13:00

Douglas Adams thought up the Total Perspective Vortex, a fictional device which shows you exactly how tiny and insignificant you really are. This isn't quite so extreme (it only shows the bits of the universe we know about), but it's hard not to feel humbled by this video.

Fairy cake, anyone?

A riot of flavours

2010-01-18T19:25:00.003+13:00

From the BBC comes this hilarious report of a trip to an ice-cream parlour in Venezuela where 860 different flavours of icecream are made. The selection caters for all tastes, many of them non-traditional.

"The selection includes chilli, tomato, gherkin, onion, mushrooms in wine, garlic, and cream of crab."

"To put out the fire on my tongue, I go for the plantain flavour which is incredibly realistic. As is the cheese, which I would not at all recommend."

"Perhaps some things, like cheddar, should not be made into ice cream." observes the reporter.

Read the whole thing here.

Photosynthesising sea slug

2010-01-18T16:33:00.000+13:00

Usually only plants can make food directly from sunlight, but a sea slug has been discovered which incorporates algal chloroplasts into its own cells and is performing photosynthesis:

"Some related slugs also engulf chloroplasts but E. chlorotica alone preserves the organelles in working order for a whole slug lifetime of nearly a year. The slug readily sucks the innards out of algal filaments whenever they’re available, but in good light, multiple meals aren’t essential. Scientists have shown that once a young slug has slurped its first chloroplast meal from one of its few favored species of Vaucheria algae, the slug does not have to eat again for the rest of its life. All it has to do is sunbathe."

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/green-sea-slug/#ixzz0cfzARcr9

Thanks Matthew for the link.

Giant crystals

2010-01-17T14:18:00.004+13:00

National Geographic has a photo feature of the cave of giant gypsum crystals at Naica, near Chihuahua, Mexico. Click through for more images and information. Thanks Matthew for the link.

Update: there is a BBC video clip of the cave here which is quite mindblowing.

PS National Geographic is selling complete DVD-ROM sets of every National Geographic issue since 1888! That also does my head in. When I was a child my family had a shelf with about 6 feet of National Geographics, but that was only a few years' worth....

I hate scrabble, but....

2010-01-16T11:10:00.002+13:00

I like Clockwords! Found on Dictionary.com.

(No-one's paying me to say this. I am not a spambot.)

Top 50 albums of 2009

2010-01-15T22:57:00.004+13:00

Hype Machine has compiled this top 50 albums of 2009 by automatically comparing many music blog lists; you can listen to any and all of the music streaming online. There's also a special radio show of users' favourite tracks, downloadable as an MP3. It's a great way to discover artists you didn't know. Today's discovery for me: The XX. Hat tip: Russell Brown.

Falling in love with great poetry

2010-01-12T13:43:00.001+13:00

from Falling in love on the way home by Fiona Farrell

"a hill stretched
out its brown arm and
drew me close I could
smell the sweat of its
crevices at every turn

then a harbour licked
my ear whispering the
things harbours say
to all the girls about
other places they have
touched but you’re the
one babe hey you’re
the one"

read the whole thing online here (click the tab that says, "from Fugacity 05 Online Poetry Anthology")

Plus-sized ladies looking fabulous

2010-01-11T14:12:00.001+13:00

V Magazine chose 4 beautiful plus-sized models for their feature photo shoot. See the pictures and read all about it here on Jezebel. And there are more, larger images here.

Bicycle with extras

2010-01-10T10:45:00.001+13:00

Made in Christchurch, this hybrid vehicle runs on a combination of pedal and solar power, and seats 2 adults and 1 dog. Read all about it here.

Rocket-powered Christmas

2010-01-09T21:32:00.002+13:00

If you're wondering what to do with your old Christmas tree...

Thanks for the link, Peter.

Holly and Pohutukawa

2009-12-31T22:26:00.001+13:00

How could holly be any more spiky? Have a look at this wintry image by Jesper Grønne, here.

Here in New Zealand it's summer and the pohutukawas are in bloom. Known as "The New Zealand Christmas Tree", they have become something of a cliché in our visual media. However they are still jaw-droppingly magnificent! I snapped these two in Sumner, yesterday:

If you like pohutukawas, you may like to hear about the work of Project Crimson, which campaigns for the protection and propagation of pohutukawa and rata within their natural ranges.

2009-12-31T10:48:00.004+13:00

A green mother by Ted Hughes

Why are you afraid?
In the house of the dead are many cradles.
The earth is a busy hive of heavens.
This is one lottery that cannot be lost.

Here is the heaven of the tree:
Angels will come to collect you.
And here are the heavens of the flowers:
These are an everliving bliss, a pulsing, a bliss in sleep.

....read the poem in its entirety here.

One of my all-time-favourite poems, A green mother is from Cave Birds, my all-time-favourite Hughes poetry collection. You can read the whole book here, although you can't see the amazing Leonard Baskin drawings which accompany the poems. Sadly, Cave Birds is out of print, but your library may have it.

RIP Frank Davie

2009-12-30T22:16:00.003+13:00

Thank you for being such a friend to all the Dalleys.

2009-12-22T12:57:00.001+13:00

Natural History of Banks Peninsula

Hugh Wilson is legendary on Banks Peninsula for his tireless work creating and maintaining the Ohinewai Reserve, which is being re-vegetated to resemble its original natural state. In addition to his work on Hinewai, Hugh has spent the last 5 years conducting a grid survey of the flora and fauna of the entire Peninsula. This book is a report of his findings, lovingly illustrated with his own drawings and the stunning photographs of a number of other contributors. It's a slim, attractive volume, which contains a huge amount of information, and also overflows with Hugh's infectious enthusiasm. It would make a lovely gift for lovers of Banks Peninsula.

2009-12-21T13:46:00.001+13:00

Living with Natives: New Zealanders Talk About Their Love of Native Plants

The Canterbury University Press has put out this lovely book in which a wide range of enthusiastic New Zealanders talk about their experiences growing native plants. Their anecdotes and advice are fascinating and idiosyncratic. The people and their gardens have been lovingly photographed; my only complaint is that the colour and contrast rendition in the printing is poor.

Simon's Cat - Fly Guy

2009-12-20T12:14:00.000+13:00

Thanks to Dan for pointing me to this new and wonderful installment from Simon's Cat.

Where The Wild Things Are

2009-12-19T13:50:00.005+13:00

I think Spike Jonze's movie is amazing, although it's not at all what I expected, and not what you'd think from the trailer! It is joyful and whimsical, as you'd expect, but it's also moody and dark and confusing. When Max travels to the land of the Wild Things, where he can do as he likes, the Wild Things are doing just as they like, and the anarchic life is only happy some of the time. Like Max, the Wild Things are full of conflicting desires and emotions, and their life together veers from success to failure and back again.
It's no surprise that eccentric genius Dave Eggers co-wrote the movie with Spike Jonze. And Maurice Sendak himself was also involved in the project.

It's not really a movie for children, but it has a lot to say about being a child, and being a social creature.

There's a nice article discussing the making of the film here.

And if you've already seen the film, TV Tropes has some very interesting comments.

Oh, and best movie poster ever, here.

They say of the acropolis....

2009-12-18T11:56:00.003+13:00

With thanks to Emma Hart.

(I wish we had QI on tv!)

Clever octopuses

2009-12-17T13:53:00.000+13:00

For anyone who hasn't seen it, check out this amazing footage of veined octopuses in Indonesia improvising shelters for themselves out of coconut shells. Interestingly, along with cuttlefish and squid, octopuses are coleoidean cephalopods, molluscs which do without an external shell of their own.

More from the BBC:

"The shells provide important protection for the octopuses in a patch of seabed where there are few places to hide.

Dr Norman explained: "This is an incredibly dangerous habitat for these animals - soft sediment and mud couldn't be worse.

"If they are buried loose in mud without a shell, any predator coming along can just scoop them up. And they are pure rump steak, a terrific meat supply for any predator."

The researchers think that the creatures would initially have used large bivalve shells as their haven, but later swapped to coconuts after our insatiable appetite for them meant their discarded shells became a regular feature on the sea bed." -- read whole article

If you want to read more about octopuses, the Wikipedia page has lots of cool stuff.

Singapore's bird conference

2009-12-16T11:45:00.000+13:00

The BBC has this wonderful story about a regular gathering of caged birds in Singapore:

"I asked how much the birds were selling for, to be told that this was less a marketplace and more... he thought about the words... a conference of birds.

Every Sunday morning, the birds were brought down from their tower-block eyries so that they could talk to one another.

I had never really thought of birds in that way, but looking again at the rows of cages with birds chatting animatedly, I realised they were doing just the same as their owners, relishing a respite from a solitary life."

read the whole story here.

Landscapes of Mars

2009-12-15T12:32:00.000+13:00

Thanks to Andrew for pointing me to these astonishing photos of Mars, taken over the last 3 years by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They really are breathtaking, go have a look!

An excellent summary about climate change

2009-12-14T11:08:00.000+13:00

The BBC has this excellent animated feature explaining the process of climate change.

And there's this excellent short video demonstrating the warming effect of carbon dioxide...in a bottle!

Cat among the hens

2009-12-13T19:05:00.002+13:00

Plastic love

2009-11-27T21:24:00.001+13:00

The Perennial Wheat Project

2009-11-06T10:38:00.004+13:00

"We tend to think Earth can provide us with an endless bounty of food. But farming practices in most parts of the world can't work forever. Soil is constantly washing away, and what's left is gradually losing the nutrients it needs to sustain our crops.

"In the prairies of Kansas lives Wes Jackson, a man who has spent his long and rich career trying to invent a new kind of agriculture — one that will last indefinitely."

"To make progress on the biological problem, Jackson recruited a handful of young and ambitious Ph.D. plant breeders. Their mission: nothing less than to reinvent the world's most important crops.

"Jackson decided to figure out a way to breed grain crops so they can be planted once, actually replenish the soil, and be harvested year after year. One of the scientists Jackson brought to the Land Institute to work on this is a Minnesota farm boy turned plant breeder, Lee DeHaan.

"At the time I started here, they said, 'Let's put the youngest guy on wheat, because maybe he can see it through,' " DeHaan says. "We're not expecting it to be something that's real easy to do or something that we'll see the results of really soon."

A fascinating article on NPR, read the whole thing here. Thanks Jason for the link.

Sundogs

2009-10-29T22:34:00.001+13:00

Sundogs, also known as parhelia or mock-suns, are optical effects caused by the glint of sunlight hitting millions of ice-crystals within the atmosphere. Ice crystals can be present in high-level cirrus clouds at any time of year, because of the coldness of the atmosphere at that height.

Sundogs are relatively common, but because of their proximity to the sun, they tend to go unnoticed, and often disappear within minutes. Usually they are relatively faint, but occasionally they may be bright. I photographed this sundog late last year, and to my great regret, it was brighter before I took the photographs!

In the middle image there is a faint vertical rainbow-coloured smudge near the power lines that is probably a fragment of a supralateral arc. You can read more about spotting and identifying these fascinating phenomena at Les Cowley's Atmospheric Optics site here.

If you're new to halo-spotting, read this page about the 22-degree halo first. Once you've found the 22-degree halo, finding other haloes becomes easier, and this page also has important information about protecting your eyes.

Swishing and Swap-O-Rama-Rama

2009-10-28T13:39:00.002+13:00

Swapping second-hand clothes is becoming highly fashionable! Some enterprising North Shore ladies have come up with iSwish, a brilliant clothes-swapping website which facilitates cashless trading with a system of credits. It has all sorts of clever features such as Mirror match, which tells you of other members with similar dress-size and proportions, so you're more likely to find items that fit perfectly.

A more low-tech forum for clothes-swapping and making new things from old ones is the Swap-O-Rama-Rama, brainchild of New York woman Wendy Tremayne. Participants turn up with a bag of unwanted clothes and $10. The clothes are sorted into piles and anyone can select anything to take home, or to modify onsite using sewing machines and materials provided.

There's a longer video here. And Wendy Tremayne has a website giving instructions for setting up your own Swap-O-Rama-Rama here.

Manufactured beauty - the Dove Evolution ad

2009-10-27T12:34:00.000+13:00

Thanks to N for the link.

Performance drawing

2009-10-27T11:50:00.001+13:00

"Kseniya Simonova is a Ukrainian artist who just won Ukraine's version of "America's Got Talent." She uses a giant light box, dramatic music, imagination and "sand painting" skills to interpret Germany's invasion and occupation of Ukraine during WWII. "

Thanks to Lucy for the link.

Perverting the course of poetry

2009-10-26T14:35:00.004+13:00

"Let mit though hought lips com. If to rosy wheigh his ithought looks, But on heigh rosy looks, not is Adminders not is compests. Loveration th hought beark Thaken me mark Thakend wan ime's this neve removents. Loverief thought mar shat lov...ers ben."

"Let me no! it alters with his be edge of doom. If true marriage of doom. If though rosy lips and weeks, Or bending sickle's fool, the error and weeks, Or bends Admit is bends with his not with the star to remove alteration finds Admit although his thour"

- versions of Sonnet 116 via the Travesty Generator!

The Generator allows you to set the "travesty level" low, so there are only small changes, or high, so the words themselves are broken up. The second one was somewhere in the middle. I like the way the first one almost reads like dialect or archaic English - it looks like it makes sense if only you can figure it out! Like Robert Burns or Chaucer or something.

Rumour has it that They Might Be Giants and the Travesty Generator are jointly responsible for "Millennium hand and shrimp" in Terry Pratchett's Diskworld books.

Apologies to those who read this already when I posted it on Facebook!

Sam Harrison

2009-10-25T12:25:00.000+13:00

Christchurch printmaker and sculptor Sam Harrison seems determined to resurrect the art of portraiture, single-handedly if necessary! His dramatic, delicate woodcuts and his bold concrete busts demonstrate the strength of traditional media in skilled hands.

Have a look at his CoCA Artist Profile here.

Cirrus streaks

2009-10-25T11:51:00.000+13:00

I don't seem to have posted many cloud pictures lately, a terrible state of affairs! Here is some handsome wispy cirrus cloud. The first image also features the top portion of a 22-degree solar halo, visble as a bright arch in the middle of the image.

Sande Ramage writes on military chaplaincy

2009-10-24T10:23:00.001+13:00

"The sound of a rifle bolt being locked into position is distinctive. From my study adjoining the Linton Camp garrison church, I could hear dozens of them being activated as soldiers were being reacquainted with military life after the summer holidays.

"I don’t know what it sounds like when a bullet explodes into a human being but some of those soldiers may well find out. The trauma of being involved in armed conflict is well documented as is the compassion of padres who stand alongside soldiers as bullets fly. For me there is no argument that all people caught in the insanity of war need a special form of care for the spirit, but is the current model of military chaplaincy the method for the church to pursue in the 21st century?

"My year as an army chaplain has changed me. My initial, perhaps naïve, enthusiasm for the job diminished into gnawing anxiety as I struggled to come to grips with issues of institutional power and violence and the apparent collusion of the church and state in maintaining the status quo."

So writes Sande Ramage, in her blog Spirited Crone. Read her whole post here. It's a highly personal account of the dilemmas she faced as an army padre, and her reflections on the place of spirituality and mythology in an institutional context. It's an amazing piece of writing.

Belgian flashmob performs number from The Sound of Music

2009-10-23T12:53:00.001+13:00

Yes, really! I think they must have rehearsed it, separately or together, but it's still amazing! Thanks RH for the link.
It reminds me of an Improv Everywhere stunt.

Some geek humour

2009-10-22T10:38:00.000+13:00

If you thought academic papers were required to be dry and humourless, try this neatly self-referential piece on rhythm in language from Cognition. For best effect, read it aloud. Thanks to RH for the link!

And if you liked that, you might also like the classic self-referential story This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself by David Moser.

And if you want something shorter, I love this limerick, courtesy of Wikipedia's Metajokes page:

There once was an X from place B,
That satisfied predicate P,
He or she did thing A,
In an adjective way,
Resulting in circumstance C.

The Comic Strip Presents: Didn't You Kill My Brother?

2009-10-21T13:10:00.002+13:00

Thanks to Jason for reminding me of this utterly brilliant Comic Strip show from the Thatcher era. Some of Alexi Sayle's best work, also featuring Beryl Reid and Graham Crowther! [how I miss A Very Peculiar Practice!] It's obviously dubbed here from an old VHS tape, but it's so good it hardly matters.

Inspired building design

2009-10-19T10:12:00.000+13:00

Many of the winners of the recent Auckland Architecture Awards left me cold, but I LOVE this one! It's the Ironbank Development by RTA Studio. There are more views of it in The Architectural Review, and it looks amazing from all angles! It manages to be boxy and organic at the same time, quite an achievement.

Feeding the World

2009-10-18T23:41:00.004+13:00

"Thomas Robert Malthus, the namesake of such terms as "Malthusian collapse" and "Malthusian curse," was a mild-mannered mathematician, a clergyman—and, his critics would say, the ultimate glass-half-empty kind of guy. When a few Enlightenment philosophers, giddy from the success of the French Revolution, began predicting the continued unfettered improvement of the human condition, Malthus cut them off at the knees. Human population, he observed, increases at a geometric rate, doubling about every 25 years if unchecked, while agricultural production increases arithmetically—much more slowly. Therein lay a biological trap that humanity could never escape."

"So what is a hot, crowded, and hungry world to do?"

"That's the question von Braun and his colleagues at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research are wrestling with right now. This is the group of world-renowned agricultural research centers that helped more than double the world's average yields of corn, rice, and wheat between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s, an achievement so staggering it was dubbed the green revolution. Yet with world population spiraling toward nine billion by mid-century, these experts now say we need a repeat performance, doubling current food production by 2030."

"In other words, we need another green revolution. And we need it in half the time."

- from the fascinating National Geographic article, The Global Food Crisis: The End of Plenty. It's long but it covers a lot of ground. Everyone should read it.

Matrix ping pong

2009-10-16T23:44:00.003+13:00

What can I say? Theatrical special effects are incredible! Thanks Kerry.

Buckyballs magnetic building spheres

2009-10-16T14:50:00.000+13:00

Buckyballs are spherical carbon molecules in which the carbon atoms are arranged in a pattern that recalls a geodesic dome. You can read more about buckyballs here.

Only a few scientists get to play with real buckyballs, but ThinkGeek has a new toy which allows the rest of us to play with round magnets and pretend they are carbon atoms, if we so wish! Have a look at the magnets here. And make sure you watch the video, it's awesome!

And no, ThinkGeek is not paying me to say this. :-)

Awesome Doctor Who toy

2009-10-16T10:40:00.000+13:00

Isn't this cute?!! It's a USB hub, and when you plug a device into one of the ports, the light flashes and it makes the "Whooop whooop" sound. Available at ThinkGeek.

Wheels within wheels

2009-10-15T21:44:00.004+13:00

N sent me a link to these incredible steampunk novelty cakes. And I don't know how, but they are 100% edible!

Flying hordes

2009-10-13T10:33:00.000+13:00

These amazing radar images show the night-time skies over the US are thick with migrating birds. Thanks to Mekayla for the link.

Hot Goths

2009-10-12T22:03:00.002+13:00

What happens to Goths in Summer? Blog Goths In Hot Weather exists to provide all possible answers to this intriguing question. Hat tip to Paul.

Jung's Red Book

2009-09-22T19:54:00.004+12:00

"This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.
...

[A] well-known literary type who glimpsed it...deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.

So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance." [NYT]

The book in question is Carl Jung's Red Book, still unpublished almost 50 years after Jung's death, and almost 100 years since it was written, a private dream diary he kept during a particularly difficult time of his life.

The Red Book is about to be published, and The New York Times Magazine has this long but rewarding article discussing its arduous journey into publication.

No joke

2009-09-16T12:04:00.002+12:00

If I was asked to name athletic celebrities, Eddie Izzard's name wouldn't have made my list, but I would have been quite wrong. Izzard has morphed into a marathon runner, and not just of a single marathon! He's run the equivalent of 43 marathons in 51 days. Read all about it on the BBC.

New New Artland!

2009-08-30T21:09:00.006+12:00

Each week TVNZ 7 show New Artland provides a New Zealand artist with the resources to make a new artwork involving their local community, and follows them around watching how it goes.

New Artland has just started it's second series, Saturday night at 9.35pm, TVNZ 7, and repeated Tuesday night at 9.35pm. It's hosted by music legend and art commentator Chris Knox, who completed filming the series before being incapacitated by a stroke from which he is still recovering.

Saturday night's show featured Wayne Youle organising a mass tattooing event where participants were tattooed with a NZ map marked with their particular home place or places. That episode is available online here.

All the shows from the first series are also available through the TVNZ On Demand website, here. Do have a look if you haven't seen them, they're such an amazingly diverse set of projects. And because all the artists are pushing the boundaries of what they've done before and also collaborating with their communities, the results are excitingly unpredictable.

The award for single most surreal idea must go to Phil Dadson with his project to send a brass band flying in a fleet of hot-air balloons drifting on the breeze.

The single funniest episode features painter John Reynolds wanting to personally mark and number all the road arrows on State Highway 1, before coming up with another idea which was equally amazing but less labour-intensive. If he ever gets sick of being an artist, I'm sure he could have a career as a stand-up comic.

The episode which moved me the most was Lonnie Hutchinson's Anzac Day work featuring thousands of pansies and tens of schoolchildren.

Hardest-working artists in series one would have to be Wellington duo Raised By Wolves (Amy Howden-Chapman and Biddy Livesey) with their project Popping the Tent, featuring their own handmade tent, 3,000 balloons, and a lot of campers talking about camping!

Some of the most interesting works involve teaching art to young people. Ans Westra's project recruited local Petone schoolchildren to record things that were important to them with disposable cameras.

Judy Millar coached a roomful of initially reluctant high-school students in painting on a large scale, using mops, buckets, and other unlikely implements.

There's lots of other great stuff. Go have a look, the list of programmes is here.

Monstrous cuteness!

2009-08-26T22:30:00.004+12:00

Tom pointed me to this giant rabbit. No, it's not a stuffed toy!
Read all about it here.

If that doesn't provide sufficient cuteness, try Nora the piano-playing cat:

You can read more about Nora here.