In 1716, the King of Prussia gave Russian czar Peter the Great a gift of a 180-square foot room encrusted with six tons of amber panels backed with gold leaf, aptly known as The Amber Room. Invading Nazis looted the room in 1941, packing the amber into crates and hightailing it back to Germany. The missing panels have never been found.
Blackbeard the Pirate was a total badass. His real name was Edward Teach, but nobody is sure if he was born in London, Bristol, Philadelphia, or Jamaica. His reign of terror lasted only about six years, from 1713 to 1718, in the seas between the Bahamas and the Carolinas. In particular, he spent a lot of time terrorizing the coast of North Carolina, and even delivered booty to governor Charles Eden in exchange for protection and an official pardon. In 1718, he blockaded Charleston Harbor in South Carolina, plundering five merchant vessels before he was through. Later that year, Blackbeard met his end at the hands of British Lieutenant Robert Maynard when a price of 100 pounds was put on his head. According to legend, in his final battle Blackbeard was shot five times and stabbed more than 20 times before he went down, and his headless body is said to have swum circles around his ship seven times before it sank.
However, it is unclear who would have won had he done battle with ninjas. Arrrr!!!
Artist Kent Rogowski turns teddy bears inside-out and restuffs them. I love these plucky little freaks!
In addition to being the most awesome-looking piece of machinery I have ever seen, the Large Helical Device is billed as the “largest superconducting stellarator in the world”. This Japanese fusion research device consists of intertwined coils of superconducting material, and is designed to contain a 100-million-degree nuclear fusion plasma. The research aims to solve the many engineering challenges that must be overcome in order for fusion reactors to produce more energy than they consume.
The Latter Day Saint movement was founded in 1827 by New Yorker Joseph Smith, Jr. In the early 1820s, Smith was paid to (mostly unsuccessfully) attempt to find lost items and buried treasures by peering into stones and finding the necessary information contained in the stone’s reflections.
Smith said that an angel visited him in 1823 and told him of a set of inscribed golden plates buried in a hill near his home in Western New York, which he unearthed in 1827. Smith transcribed them as the Book of Mormon before returning them to the angel. To translate the inscriptions, which were written in 400 AD by a pre-Columbian prophet in a language Smith called Reformed Egyptian, he used two stones bound by silver bows which he found along with the plates. He would place the stones in his hat, bury his face in the hat, and dictate the text to his wife. Meanwhile the plates themselves lay wrapped in linen, sometimes in another room.
Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830. According to the book, Israelite tribes traveled by boat to America before the birth of Jesus, and Native Americans are actually descendants of Israelites. They brought horses and steel and other things not known to exist in the Americas at that time. After the death and resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament, Jesus came to America to repeat his teachings to the lost tribes of Israel and to establish a peaceful society (which didn’t last). God lives on a planet called Kolob, where a day lasts a thousand years (according to transcriptions Smith made of Egyptian scrolls that came through his town in an 1835 traveling mummy exhibition).
Mormons who have participated in a special temple ceremony to prepare themselves to be “kings and priests” or “queens and priestesses” in the afterlife wear sacred knee-high undergarments under their clothes at all times. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has over 13 million members worldwide. There exists some criticism of the Mormon movement.
In the middle of the 15th century, Korea was still using Chinese characters for their written language, despite having a very different spoken language. King Sejong argued that the Chinese script, with its thousands of characters, was too complicated for commoners to learn and was awkward due to the differences between spoken Chinese and Korean. So in 1446 he published a document demonstrating a new writing system, Hangul, which used only 51 characters, making it much easier to learn. 24 of the characters map closely to letters of the Latin alphabet. The most interesting part is that the characters are drawn to show the way the lips and tongue are positioned to form the sound, enabling non-native speakers to sound out words without extensive training.
Indromia, Quard, Conistate, Vercurelince, Quiniferphose!
In an inexplicable fit of word geekery, I wrote a program to generate new words via a statistical analysis of existing words. First I generated a histogram to count the number of times each possible three-letter combination occurs at the beginnings, middles, or ends of existing words. Then, to generate a new word, the program tries random overlapping three-letter combinations until each of their frequencies of occurrence in the histogram is above a specified threshold. Isn’t that idimogous?
Go ahead and give it a try below! You can specify a “normalness” scaling factor (5 gives very daisewisfasy-sounding words, 95 gives very conistate-sounding words), a maximum word length, a minimum word length, the source text for the statistical analysis (choose from the dictionary, the Bible, the complete works of William Shakespeare, etc), and an optional “seed” word for the generator to build upon (seeding with “muffin” could yield the wonderful “Muffinetry”).
Oh, and I also made a variation that uses U.S. Census data to generate new baby names (just click on “names”).
Flam3 is a fractal art generator written by Scott Draves. It’s also the heart of a collaborative screen saver called Electric Sheep (named after the Philip K. Dick novel). While a beautiful fractal animation plays on the user’s screen, their computer is simultaneously rendering a few new frames for a future animation. Each computer uploads its new frames to a server, and in return downloads new animations that were created by the distributed network. These “electric sheep” are the “dreams” of the sleeping machines.
A program called Oxidizer (Mac) lets you edit those animations and create your own - or render single frames as high-resolution artwork. (You could also use Apophysis for Windows, or Qosmic for Linux). To get started, browse the current flock of sheep. Click on one you like, download its “genome”, load it up in Oxidizer and start playing around with its genes (here’s a nice tutorial). You can even cross-breed multiple sheep to create a hybrid. When you come up with something you like, you can render it as an animation or still frame. There are infinite variations to be made, so have at it! Oh, and did I mention that all of this software is free?
Update: Scott Draves just pointed me to a preview of the next version of Electric Sheep, featuring even higher quality animations. Thanks, Spot!
I’ve posted some new photos on Flickr that I took on Christmas Eve. Little details, warm colors, silhouettes, backlighting… Enjoy!
Ferrofluid is a magnetic liquid. Bay Area natives may remember playing with an exhibit at the Exploratorium in which you pass a powerful magnet underneath a black fluid and watch as smooth spikes arise and merge. Japanese artist Sachiko Kodama uses ferrofluids and electromagnets to uncover the surprising creative possibilities of this medium. I’ve just received my own bottle to experiment with.
