“Materials & Applications is a non-profit organization that produces installations twice yearly and hosts open air discussions, workshops, performances and other public events. We also create outreach programs to educate and inspire property and business owners to make choices that increase the sustainability of their buildings and properties. M&A was created to experiment with public space at a scale proportional to a community, a space that can be understood, worked with, reconfigured and used. M&A is located in front of the offices of infranatural, and is a testbed for us to work with a community to realize new and important concepts in building. “
This music video was shot for Sour’s ‘Hibi no Neiro’ (Tone of everyday) from their first mini album ‘Water Flavor EP’. The cast were selected from the actual Sour fan base, from many countries around the world. Each person and scene was filmed purely via webcam.
As this is another dying custom of Ancient China it is difficult to find much about pigeon whistles and flutes.
The China Fancy Pigeon Conservation Center was created by its founder “Wang Shixiang” now ninety three years old. This center is dedicated to the breeding and preservation of as many ancient Chinese pigeon breeds as possible. It houses some 137 breeds and Wangs interest in many of Chinese cultures lead him to write the definitive book on Chinese Pigeon Whistles.
I was shown around the center by Mr. Hou the head technician and given a demonstration to the whistles in flight.
Go to the end of the website and see the video to understand how perplexingly amazing this is. CLICK HERE
“Located in southeastern Ecuador, near the Peruvian border, the Nangaritza River valley is mountainous, heavily forested and relatively inaccessible to most people. The upper river valley is known for its Tepuyes, or tabletop mountains, which are home to many species that are found nowhere else on earth, as well as other species whose populations are threatened in other locations but remain plentiful here.
Nangaritza’s isolation has not only helped to protect the mountain ecosystem from destruction, it has also long posed a challenge to detailed scientific study. Part of the region is under the protection of the Nangaritza Protected Forest, but wildlife experts believe that more land must be protected for this unique environment to thrive.
The Shuar indigenous association and a local farming organization have been granted management over much of the protected forest, but these groups are proposing that the lands be upgraded to a higher protection status, where they will be more sustainably managed. Before this step can be taken, however, more scientific data is needed.”
“The countries of the world in their own languages and scripts; with official names, capitals, flags, coats of arms, administrative divisions, national anthems, and translations of the countries and capitals into many languages”) to get to the meat of the site, a collection of links to various pages: Days, Months, Planets, Mountains, etc.; a huge list of languages with each name given in the original (with transliteration where appropriate); various other random items (including a small set of famous people: it’s fun to see the varying forms of Charlemagne); an Alphabets section; and finally a set of Glossaries, with a few hundred English words translated into, well, everything (divided into manageable sets: Albanian|Greek|Armenian, American|Polynesian, Asian, Balto-Slavic, Basque|Caucasus, Celtic, Constructed, etc.). http://www.geonames.de/
A mini cooper filled with cooking gas, the gas is release from 2 large tanks. in the window a small hole was drilled, letting the gas that is trapped inside escaping and burning as a small flame. An installation by Ariel Schlesinger.
Thomas Cole / Romantic Landscape, about 1826. Close-up of Rain on Butterfly Wings (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder. It’s embedded in our genes.
“Demonstrating that we have a biologically programmed positive response to nature is more difficult, because we don’t respond as dramatically to something that’s not a threat.
But numerous studies since the 1970s suggest the subtle power of natural scenery to heal both body and mind. Texas A&M researcher Roger Ulrich, for instance, has shown that people who watch a calming nature video after a stressful experience have markedly lower muscle tension, pulse, and skin conductance activity after less than five minutes. This translates into significant medical benefits.
Ulrich monitored patients after gallbladder surgery and found that those assigned to a room looking out on trees needed far fewer painkillers than patients in rooms that faced a brick wall.
Heart surgery patients in rooms with nature scenes on the wall experienced less anxiety and smoother recoveries than patients with blank walls or abstract art.
Likewise, cosmonauts confined for months in outer space quickly lose interest in video programs and other diversions. They prefer to stare out the window at the untouchable Earth.”
“The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use” (Arthur Koestler).
A University of Toronto study provides the first direct evidence that our mood literally changes the way our visual system filters our perceptual experience suggesting that seeing the world through rose-colored glasses is more biological reality than metaphor.
“Good and bad moods literally change the way our visual cortex operates and how we see,” says Adam Anderson, a U of T professor of psychology. “Specifically our study shows that when in a positive mood, our visual cortex takes in more information, while negative moods result in tunnel vision. The study appears tomorrow in the Journal of Neuroscience.
The U of T team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine how our visual cortex processes sensory information when in good, bad, and neutral moods. They found that donning the rose-colored glasses of a good mood is less about the color and more about the expansiveness of the view.
The researchers first showed subjects a series images designed to generate a good, bad or neutral mood. Subjects were then shown a composite image, featuring a face in the center, surrounded by “place” images, such as a house. To focus their attention on the central image, subjects were asked to identify the gender of the person’s face. When in a bad mood, the subjects did not process the images of places in the surrounding background.
However, when viewing the same images in a good mood, they actually took in more information — they saw the central image of the face as well as the surrounding pictures of houses. The discovery came from looking at specific parts of the brain — the parahippocampal “place area” — that are known to process places and how this area relates to primary visual cortical responses, the first part of the cortex related to vision.
“Under positive moods, people may process a greater number of objects in their environment, which sounds like a good thing, but it also can result in distraction,” says Taylor Schmitz, a graduate student of Anderson’s and lead author of the study. “Good moods enhance the literal size of the window through which we see the world. The upside of this is that we can see things from a more global, or integrative perspective. The downside is that this can lead to distraction on critical tasks that require narrow focus, such as operating dangerous machinery or airport screening of passenger baggage. Bad moods, on the other hand, may keep us more narrowly focused, preventing us from integrating information outside of our direct attentional focus.”
This is a tiny area from a large piece of a wonderfully-named American Flame-tail Rooster Agate. The brilliant-red ‘vegetation’ is the source of its generic name, moss agate, and is formed by crystalline growths of impurities such as iron oxide. Size: 3cm.
This image, scanned with transmitted light from the perimeter of a banded agate, shows an island of quartz framed by the concentric rings of agate ‘eyes’, which are generally the result of slicing through hemispherical formations that typically develop near the outer surface. Size: 3cm.
This Madagascan agate shows many classic features: concentric banding; ‘eyes’ sliced through hemispherical formations; the ends of hollow tubes that formed around inclusions of other minerals such as rutile or geothite; and areas of crystalline quartz. Size: 7cm.
Agate frequently frames a quartz-filled void, but here this is reversed. The whole slice consists of a very narrow band of agate framing a large area of quartz at the centre of which is this exquisite formation, seen in more detail in AG170. Size: 10cm
All photographs and captions are copyright by Professor Richard Weston of Earth Images.
Professor Richard Weston is a renowned architect and author as well as Professor of Architecture at Cardiff University, UK.
As part of the FutureWorld exhibition, he designed and built Radiant House, which was conceived as an inhabitable walled garden with a plywood roof floating on structural glass. He has also designed a wonderfully original Triangular House, and many of his works have been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition. His books include Modernism, winner of the International Book Award of the American Institute of Architects, and what has been described as possibly the finest monograph ever produced about an architect, on the work of Jørn Utzon, architect of Sydney Opera House.
His passion for mineral images began when he bought an ammonite that cost more than his scanner: the results were dreadful – and the scanner now used cost rather more than many ammonites – but the results are wonderful. They often demand a great deal of time to produce: preparing the minerals, taking scan after scan, and then digitally removing blemishes left by polishing powder and dust. Only a tiny minority have made it into his online collection and without his passion, Richard could not possibly have amassed such a large collection of world class images for you to enjoy. He invites you to his website to view an online collection of 200 mineral images. (thanks to Geology.com)
You’ve read the news—everyone wants to be green now. But do you really know how your personal choices are adding up? What about the choices of your fellow citizens? How well are people around the globe adopting behaviors that can make the world a more environmentally sustainable place? How have they changed over the past year? National Geographic and the international polling firm GlobeScan have just conducted their second annual study measuring and monitoring consumer progress toward environmentally sustainable consumption in 17 countries around the world.
Why? We wanted to give people a better idea of how consumers in different countries are doing in taking action to preserve our planet by tracking, reporting, and promoting environmentally sustainable consumption and citizen behavior.
This quantitative consumer study of 17,000 consumers in a total of 17 countries (14 in 2008) asked about such behavior as energy use and conservation, transportation choices, food sources, the relative use of green products versus traditional products, attitudes towards the environment and sustainability, and knowledge of environmental issues. A group of international experts helped us determine the behaviors that were most critical to investigate. (text by Greendex)
At 18.00 on Tuesday 26th May, Weather Projection will commence transmission of the rest of the world.
Light from the Americas will be piped into Sydney’s dome and then retransmitted live by the webcam. An online roll-call clarifies the schedule, highlighting the chronographic star of the moment, shifting start time minutely with each new day.
As Smart Light Sydney begins, the sun first hits landmass in remote north-eastern Canada and the eastern shores of Brazil, slowly sweeping across the Americas until its sole terrestrial glint is seen at the western tips of Alaska and a few sparse Pacific islands. This sparsity is infilled by a review of the evening – a final rapid uber-time-lapse playing back the whole evening’s activity, crescendoing at midnight.
http://www.weatherprojection.co.uk/
During the Milan Furniture Fair, Maarten Baas presented his latest project called “Real Time”. He made 3 clocks, actually he made 3 movies, which are each 12 hours long. For the first one “Grandfather Clock”, he filmed a man drawing the hands of clock during 12 hours. This is also the only clock for which he made an object: a standing clock with a screen displaying the video. It gives you the impression that there is someone inside. The second one, called “Sweeper Clock”, shows you 2 actors wiping garbage 12 hours long. The garbage forms the hands of the clock. In the third one, the “Digital Analoge Clock”, you can see an actor painting the segments of a digital clock black and wiping them clean again.
Eleven Heavy Things«, 2009, a series of eleven outdoor sculptures by 
Thomas Cole / Romantic Landscape, about 1826.
Close-up of Rain on Butterfly Wings (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey) 
This is a tiny area from a large piece of a wonderfully-named American Flame-tail Rooster Agate. The brilliant-red ‘vegetation’ is the source of its generic name, moss agate, and is formed by crystalline growths of impurities such as iron oxide. Size: 3cm.
This image, scanned with transmitted light from the perimeter of a banded agate, shows an island of quartz framed by the concentric rings of agate ‘eyes’, which are generally the result of slicing through hemispherical formations that typically develop near the outer surface. Size: 3cm.
This Madagascan agate shows many classic features: concentric banding; ‘eyes’ sliced through hemispherical formations; the ends of hollow tubes that formed around inclusions of other minerals such as rutile or geothite; and areas of crystalline quartz. Size: 7cm.
Agate frequently frames a quartz-filled void, but here this is reversed. The whole slice consists of a very narrow band of agate framing a large area of quartz at the centre of which is this exquisite formation, seen in more detail in AG170. Size: 10cm
