Thank you
You may have figured this out by now, but I have been neglecting this blog for some time. I have decided to officially retire this blog. I have been so inspired by some of the artists, scientists, and other creators I have stumbled upon over the course of this blog. I’ve also been excited by the support and excitement about the material I’ve covered, and I hope that it has inspired people to see the integration and collaboration of art and science.
You can continue to follow my newer blog, mentalflowers.wordress.com, which looks at creating better work and living personal environments and communities through design, art, and play. I am also online as @mentalflowers on Twitter.
Thank you to everyone.
Draw on your iPad
Just like few grown-ups my age even know what a rotary phone is (I do only because my dad still had one into the 1990′s), our children will never know a time when they couldn’t draw directly on a computer screen:
Crayola allows tots to doodle on the iPad using its iMarker just as they would a crayon on a coloring book. Tweens are able to belt out their favorite Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez tunes on a Disney microphone that turns the tablet into a karaoke machine. And technology accessories company Griffin enables teens to fly its toy helicopter by using the iPhone as a remote control. This holiday season, toy makers have turned Apple’s pricey tablet and smartphone into playthings for kids. They figure in this weak economy, parents will be willing to splurge on toys for their children that utilize devices they already have — or want — themselves.
Tiffany Fessler of Gainsville, Ga., certainly was willing to do that even though when she initially bought her $829 iPad she never imagined she’d be sharing it with her 20-month-old son. But whenever she sat down to check emails on the iPad, he’d climb into her lap wanting to use it.
So, Fessler decided to get him the $29.99 Crayola iMarker, which transforms the iPad into a digital coloring book using a Crayola’s free ColorStudio HD application that parents can download. Kids can draw and color using the iMarker, which has a soft tip so it doesn’t scratch the tablet’s glass screen.
"When you have a screaming toddler in a restaurant or any public area, you want to have something to calm him down with," says Fessler, 39. "This is just another way to keep him entertained."
See the full story at USA Today News.
The Kinect Effect
Posted on www.kinect.com and a TechNet blog:
Post-modern, paleontological art
http://boingboing.net/2011/11/10/post-modern-paleontological-a.html Boing Boing recently posted a story about the work of Michael Bahl.
Dressed in a white lab coat, Bahl bills his work as "post-osteological interpretation." Basically, he’s built both skeletal monsters, and an ostensibly real research history to go with them. This creature, for instance, is a Chalicotherium laurentian. She is an adult female, part of a trio of fossil animals that includes an adult male and a juvenile. Here’s Bahl’s statement on the C. laurentian family.
Discovered in 1887 by Harold Vanselow, a maverick dinosaur hunter and at one time a member of the Othniel Charles Marsh team from the Yale Peabody Museum, this Chalacothere was named appropriately enough after the Laurentian Divide in Northern Minnesota where tributaries of the St. Lawrence River divide and flow in two directions.
Dating from the Miocene era, the bones of these creatures retain the rich, deep color of the Iron Range where they once roamed in large herds. The purpose of the male’s secondary head has been much debated, some experts believing it to be fully functional while others maintain it was most probably used in the mating ritual.
Research indicates that the family grouping seen here was first exhibited in the late 19th Century at a private museum in London and assembled by Walter Vernon, the well-known enfant terrible of those early years of prehistoric osteological display. Vernon’s philosophy was explained in a lengthy article which appeared in 1901. He stated that he felt his specimens acknowledged not only the accurate presentation of a skeleton, but the millions of years that the bones had been part of the earth itself and the impact the internment had on them. "Tribute must be paid to the beauty given to these beasts by the greatest of artists — time."
The exhibit caused a furor in scientific circles largely because no other specimens or even fragments had been unearthed. It was both hailed as a work of art and villified as "expressionistic". Matters were complicated further by the disappearance of Vanselow’s notebooks and meticulously detailed maps. The exhibit vanished in 1904 after fire destroyed the hall in which it was housed, and as if by unspoken agreement it was quietly forgotten.
Then, in 1994, the bones were rediscovered embedded in the foundation of a home in South St. Paul, Minnesota. They had been packed in crates originating in Prague circa 1914 and, since the house had been built in 1939, it is not known where the remains of this might species had been kept. Although some structural repairs were necessary, the specimens are otherwise presented here in the splendidly ancient condition in which they were found.
art of instruction + contest | DesignSponge
Design*Sponge is featuring a very cool book today that contains illustrations from science textbooks and educational charts over the 19th and 20th century, curated specifically for their aesthetic value.
illustrations of flowers from old science textbooks
Design*Sponge contributor Amy Azzarito writes:
I’m 100% certain that if the education charts in my junior high science class looked like those found in this book, I would have gotten a much better grade. A few years ago, I hunted down a chart of sea plants in Paris found at the most magical of natural history stores, Deyrolle. It is still one of my favorite pieces of art. Katrien Van der Schueren, owner of voila! Gallery in Los Angeles, has been collecting educational charts for over a decade. In this volume, Katrien compiled over 100 of these vintage educational posters for the Art of Instruction. The book’s charts cover subjects ranging from the anatomy of a tulip or apple tree to that of a hedgehog or starfish. The book is just now available for pre-order.
Van de Schueren, the author of the book, is also hosting a giveaway:
To celebrate the book’s launch, Katrien is gifting one lucky reader the chart depicted on the book’s cover! To enter, just leave a comment below describing your favorite poster from childhood; it doesn’t have to be an instructional poster.
check out closeups and more previews of the book via art of instruction + contest | DesignSponge.
Glass Beach – nature shapes trash into beauty | Kuriositas
Oh my god, am I dreaming?! This beach full, FULL, of beach glass looks too magical to be true!
Ever since I was a little girl I have loved to collect beach glass. I found these images at Kuriositas, and I was amazed! Amazed that I had never heard of this place as a California native, and amazed at how mastefully and quickly the ocean had beaten the glass down into shiny beach pebbles.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that a rubbish dump being created would, in the space of a century, become a protected area. Yet that is exactly what happened to what has come to be known as Glass Beach, just outside Fort Bragg in California.
Apparently residents used to just chuck their trash over the cliffs into the ocean below. Over the years the glass broke down, and washed back up onto the shore, better for wear.
The waves and the weather had smashed, pounded and ground the glass in to smooth, small, rounded objects – million upon million of them.
check out more pictures via Kuriositas: Glass Beach – Nature Corrects Another of Our Mistakes.
This is such a HUGE testament to the power and physics of nature, how it can take objects of various sizes, shapes, and weight and break, sand, and mold them into beautiful rounded beach pebbles.
Plus it’s just so pretty!!!! 
Have you been here? Have you seen this place in real life? Do you know of similar beaches? Let me know in the comments below!
Related articles
- Garbage Can Be Transformed Into A Beautiful Beach [Factoid] (gizmodo.com)
- Accidental Glass Beach (buzzfeed.com)
- Nitty Gritty: The Wonder & Glory of Magnified Beach Sand (webecoist.com)
Inspiration: Cascade Volcano Elevation Maps @Craftzine.com blog
Topographic quilts inspired by Cascadian volcanic mountains. Photo credit Craftzine.
The mountains in the Pacific Northwest are incredibly breathtaking, often snuggled up in clouds and snow. Now somebody has come up with a way to let them snuggle us back; topographic quilts!
A Craftzine blogger “came across these neat elevation maps of the Cascade volcanoes, on the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point website. The sharply contrasting colors indicating the different elevation intervals are really cool looking. I wonder how hard it would be do do a Cascade Range quilt?”
more via Inspiration: Cascade Volcano Elevation Maps @Craftzine.com blog.
I would love to see the different volcanoes of the United States represented as quilts in one place: the Hawaiian Island chain of volcanoes, Alaska, the Cascades, or maybe throw Japan in and make it a Pacific Rim themed quilting fest! Too bad I can barely sew anything trickier than a pillow case.
One misconception of solar power is that it can only be used in bright, constantly sunny places. But that’s not entirely true; even places like Seattle or cloudy, drizzly Edinburgh, there are lots of opportunities for solar power. And what better way to celebrate the sun than through art?
As a dazzling addition to the Edinburgh Arts Festival, artist Karen Forbes designed and built this glittering glass pavilion to celebrate the sun, light and optics. Situated at the base of the Melville Monument in St. Andrew Square Gardens, the Solar Pavilion is composed of nine segments forming a semi-circle in the center of the park. On display for the month of August, the pavilion works in conjunction with the obelisk tower as an informal sun-dial to mark the passage of time. The prismatic temporary pavilion will serve as the focal point of the festival and a space for artists talks and gatherings for the rest of the month.
more pictures via Edinburgh’s New Prismatic Solar Pavilion Acts As A Giant Sun Dial | Inhabitat – Green Design Will Save the World.
An image of the wearable texting frock
Talk about wearing your heart on your sleeve (hooray bad puns!):
A smart textile dress has been unveiled by Microsoft Research.
Made almost entirely from black and white rice paper, the Printing Dress comes equipped with a laptop, a projector and four circuit boards, with functional elements including buttons and the hem.
The wearer can type messages on a keyboard laced into the bodice, which are then projected on to the skirt, says the Microsoft News Centre.
The dress won Best Concept, and Best in Show, at the 15th annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers in June.
more via LATEST: Microsoft presents wearable electronic dress – +Plastic Electronics.
Related articles
- WIMM Labs unveils wearable Android-based computing platform (gizmag.com)
- The Rise of Wearable Electronics (neatorama.com)
Building a model ecosystem out of mall trash
I love the idea of creating a model ecosystem using materials from another, entirely different ecosystem:
Fish made of bubble wrap swim beneath lily-covered ponds made of plastic bottles in Montreal’s Eaton Centre mall. Cardboard trees adorn the walls, and water, made of yet more empty bottles, pours down the sides of the escalators. ‘Fragile,’ a new installation by artists Peter Gibson (AKA Roadsworth) and Brian Armstrong, has transformed the mall into an ecosystem of discarded items found in the mall’s trash bins. The numbers are pretty astounding: Roughly 20,000 water bottles and more 10,000 square feet of cardboard was used to create the artificial landscape. (It took the artists about eight months of dumpster-diving to come up with all of that stuff.)
According to the artist’s statement, the Fragile ecosystem wasn’t intended to look or feel like a perfect copy of nature. Instead, its beauty lies in its artificiality, emphasizing the difference between the manufactured and natural worlds.
