Check out this very interesting video of Lilly, the almost two year old master of the map. Apparently she showed off her incredible talent when she appeared as a guest on Oprah recently.
[The Original Video of Lilly: The World Map Master – YouTube]
MoMA Kills Art
One of the senior curators at the MoMA had to end the life of a tiny coat built out of living mouse stem cells after it grew so fast that the cells began to clog the incubator.
From the New York Times article:
One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The “victimless leather” was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is.
Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. “It was growing too much,” she said in an interview from a conference in Belgrade. The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat’s creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.
This is just a taste of the interesting kinds of developments we’re going to see from biological science in the near future.
(via)
Family News – The Good and the Bad
On the morning of Monday, May 12th, my sister and her husband Glen added a third baby to the family — another boy. I am very excited for them as are the rest of my family. Jackie and Glen named him Vaughn Patrick Hutchinson. He was a little over 10lbs and his low blood sugar levels meant he needed to be on I.V. for a day or so until things stabilized. They are both healthy and happy to be back at home.
Meanwhile, in some less happy news, on Monday my Mom’s brother Rodger, went into the hospital as well and was put on I.V. because he was unable to eat. It was only a few months ago he was diagnosed with cancer, and though we all realized his time was short, it is still very hard. He died this morning at around 7am in his home.
Here is a photo of him with his family in Waterton taken in 1991:
Jonathan Lebed the 15 year old stock trader
I came across this great article about Jonathan Lebed, and how he become one of the youngest stock traders to bring in a million. It also relates how the S.E.C. took $285,000 of it away—and that was after they tried to get more.
“Can you explain to me what he did?”
He looked at me long and hard. I could see that this must be his meaningful stare. His eyes were light blue bottomless pits. “He’d go into these chat rooms and use 20 fictitious names and post messages. . . . ”
“By fictitious names, do you mean e-mail addresses?”
“I don’t know the details.”
Don’t know the details? He’d been all over the airwaves decrying the behavior of Jonathan Lebed.
“Put it this way,” he said. “He’d buy, lie and sell high.” The chairman’s voice had deepened unnaturally. He hadn’t spoken the line; he had acted it. It was exactly the same line he had spoken on “60 Minutes” when his interviewer, Steve Kroft, asked him to explain Jonathan Lebed’s crime. He must have caught me gaping in wonder because, once again, he looked at me long and hard. I glanced away.
It’s a few years old now, but it’s still compelling reading: Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities.
IATT Bulletin 1147
What would you do first with the ability to travel through time? Desmond Warzel shares some clever writing, with Wikihistory, a message board by time travellers.
At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:
Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what’s the harm?At 18:33:10, SilverFox316 wrote:
Easy for you to say, BigChill, since to my recollection you’ve never volunteered to go back and fix it. You think I’ve got nothing better to do?
Color Wars Morph
Competing in Ze Frank’s Color Wars, people have been recreating their childhood photos and posting them to the youngnow gallery. Here are a bunch that I animated using a morphing program:
[Color Wars Young to Old Morph – YouTube]
MUTO a wall painted animation
If you’re looking for something arty, creepy, yet mysteriously compelling, check out MUTO, a short animated film that uses public walls as a backdrop for animated creatures.
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
(A segment of this film originally titled Fantoche, linked previously).
Gladwell on Innovation
A new Malcolm Gladwell article up at the New Yorker illustrates that inventions, scientific discovery, and ideas aren’t locked down in the minds of a few genius, rather they’re simply waiting for the initiated: In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?
In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies. He thought that if he brought lots of very clever people together he could reconstruct that moment by the Grand River.
The article focuses on a theme that his new book is going to cover (coming November 18, 2008), the difference in results between an individual genius working on a project and collaborative brainstorming by many intelligent people. It turns out, you don’t have to be a genius to come up with something brilliant, you just need to get in a room with a lot of other smart people and bounce the ideas around.
Ganstagrass
Ganstagrass: When bluegrass and HipHop collide.
Introducing block rockin’ honky-tonk, New American music for the 21st century, built with love in a little studio, hand crafted, running on inspiration and imagination and duct tape, calling on the spirit of Gram Parsons and Otis Redding and KRS-ONE and Dolly Parton and Nina Simone and Willie Nelson and Missy Elliott and Johnny Cash, to write about what we feel and play what our hearts tell us, because to make it happen is reason enough, and to share it with the world is all the reason you need, because we tell the truth with music and the truth is beautiful.
I’ve listened to the first few tracks and though I’m not a big hip-hop fan, the mixes are fun in that, “Hey, who knew those two seemingly incongruent genres would work so well together?”
Some lyrics may offend: You can take the gansta out of the Rap but he’s still going to swear like a pirate.
Excerpts from “Up Till Now”
I’ve grown out of my teenage fandom for all things Trek, but I found these excerpts from William Shatner’s new autobiography, Up Till Now, very interesting. They encompass a range of experiences from his time on Star Trek, where he confesses being the colossal jerk of legend, to his poignant recollections of the death of his third wife.
Within a few days of Nerine’s death I learned the National Enquirer was going to run a story asking, basically: “Did he or didn’t he kill her?”
I wanted to get the true story out as quickly as possible.
We called the Enquirer and offered them a deal: “Don’t run that story. Instead, we’ll give you the exclusive story of what happened that night.”
In exchange, they contributed $250,000 (£123,000) to what would become the Nerine Shatner Foundation, which helps addicted women.
I guess the question asked most often was why did I call 911 before diving into the pool to try to save her?
It took me years to fully understand, and even then it was only because of my fourth wife, Elizabeth.
Every year on August 9, Elizabeth and I would go up to the pool in the evening. The moon is in the same position, the lights are the same.On one of those nights I suddenly knew. The water in the pool had been still.
And somehow I had known that whether I dived in and rescued the body and then called 911, or called 911 and then did so, it would have made no difference.
Honestly, I always assumed he killed her, but now I’m not so sure. Either way, I find this kind of bear-all openness, from a legend such as Shatner, riveting.
Even if he never killed her, it seems psychopathic not to jump in and get your spouse out of the water immediately.