{ The Sun’s motion about the centre of mass of the Solar System is complicated by perturbations from the planets. Every few hundred years this motion switches between prograde and retrograde. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }
Lancey Howard: Gets down to what it’s all about, doesn’t it? Making the wrong move at the right time.
Cincinnati Kid: Is that what it’s all about?
Lancey Howard: Like life, I guess.
{ 1. Unsourced image | 2. Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2000 }
In a series of posts, I’ll review the current state of the field of the Evolution of Colour Categories. It has been argued that universals in colour naming across cultures can be traced back to constraints from many domains including genetic, perceptual and environmental. I’ll review these arguments and show that if our perception is affected by our language, then many conflicts can be resolved.
photo { Laurent Nivalle }
{ Green can contain more yellow which makes it warm but if more blue is added then green falls to the cool side. | Decorating with Warm Colors | Continue reading }
{ Red expresses intermediate degrees between the infernal and sublime. | Johannes Itten, The Elements of Color }
images { Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC }
Body Image Distortion
In their study, Longo and his colleagues asked volunteers to place their left hand palm-side-down underneath a board and to then estimate the size of their hand. (…) As it turns out, volunteers consistently overestimated the width of their hand—sometimes by up to 80%.
artwork { Geneviève Gauckler }
A few years ago I decided that I’d be happy as long as I spent most of my time doing my three favorite things: reading, writing, and fucking (the three R’s).
image { e-Baby | watch the video | More: Pleix.net }
{ The Social Art Collective is proud to present Heroin Stamp Project, an exhibition focusing on the branding of heroin in New York City. At once beautiful and unsettling, the images in the exhibit illustrate a complex narrative around public health and preventable consequences of injection drug use. | White Box, 329 Broome Street, NYC | June 23rd - June 29th, 2010 | Thanks Ser Gee! }
{ Apple’s iPad Competition | Related: Apple, AT&T Cite Record iPhone Sales }
{ Eizo: Pin-up Calendar 2010 | EIZO medical imaging high precision displays for the examination and diagnosis of radiographs. Whereas craftsmen are showered with pin-up-calendars at the end of every year, this kind of present is less popular among medics. EIZO breaks this taboo. This pin-up calendar shows absolutely every detail. | Advertising Agency: Butter, Berlin/Duesseldorf, Germany. | Thanks JJ }
Tracing paper is a type of translucent paper. It is made by immersing uncut and unloaded paper of good quality in sulphuric acid for a few seconds. The acid converts some of the cellulose into amyloid form having a gelatinous and impermeable character. When the treated paper is thoroughly washed and dried, the resultant product is much stronger than the original paper. Tracing paper is resistant to oil grease and to a large extent impervious to water and gas.
Tracing paper is named as such for its ability for an artist to trace an image onto it. When tracing paper is placed onto a picture, the picture is easily viewable through the tracing paper. Thus, it becomes easy for the artist to find edges in the picture and trace the image onto the tracing paper.
…being green really is tough, so tough that the color itself fails dismally. The cruel truth is that most forms of the color green, the most powerful symbol of sustainable design, aren’t ecologically responsible, and can be damaging to the environment.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” said Michael Braungart, the German chemist who co-wrote “Cradle to Cradle,” the best-selling sustainable design book, and co-founded the U.S. design consultancy McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. “The color green can never be green, because of the way it is made. It’s impossible to dye plastic green or to print green ink on paper without contaminating them.”
This means that green-colored plastic and paper cannot be recycled or composted safely, because they could contaminate everything else. The crux of the problem is that green is such a difficult color to manufacture that toxic substances are often used to stabilize it.
Take Pigment Green 7, the commonest shade of green used in plastics and paper. It is an organic pigment but contains chlorine, some forms of which can cause cancer and birth defects. Another popular shade, Pigment Green 36, includes potentially hazardous bromide atoms as well as chlorine; while inorganic Pigment Green 50 is a noxious cocktail of cobalt, titanium, nickel and zinc oxide.
If you look at the history of green, it has always been troublesome. Revered in Islamic culture for evoking the greenery of paradise, it has played an accident-prone role in Western art history. From the Italian Renaissance to 18th-century Romanticism, artists struggled over the centuries to mix precise shades of green paint, and to reproduce them accurately. (…)
Green even has a toxic history. Some early green paints were so corrosive that they burnt into canvas, paper and wood. Many popular 18th- and 19th-century green wallpapers and paints were made with arsenic, sometimes with fatal consequences. One of those paints, Scheele’s Green, invented in Sweden in the 1770s, is thought by some historians to have killed Napoleon Bonaparte in 1821, when lethal arsenic fumes were released from the rotting green and gold wallpaper in his damp cell on the island of Saint Helena.
images { Erwin Redl, Matrix II, 2000 | light-emitting diode installation }
