Google Street View sends cameras into Namie, an abandoned town... [feedly]

 
 

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Google Street View sends cameras into Namie, an abandoned town...

Google Street View sends cameras into Namie, an abandoned town in Fukushima where once 21,000 people lived - Asia - World - The Independent

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New Quilled Paper Portrait from Yulia Brodskaya | Colossal

New Quilled Paper Portrait from Yulia Brodskaya | Colossal:

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That Internet War Apocalypse Is a Lie

[Well, whaddya know? -egg]
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That Internet War Apocalypse Is a Lie:

Do GMOs yield more food? The answer is in the semantics - Boing Boing

Do GMOs yield more food? The answer is in the semantics - Boing Boing:

Today, on Twitter, I learned something new and interesting fromenvironmental reporter Paul Voosen. Over the years, I've run into reports (like this one from the Union of Concerned Scientists) showing that genetically modified crops — i.e. Roundup Ready corn and soybeans, which is really the stuff we're talking about most of the time in these situations — don't increase intrinsic yields of those crops. But I've also seen decent-looking data that seemed to suggest exactly the opposite. So what gives?

Turns out, this is largely an issue of terminology...

Andrew Weissmann: FBI wants real-time Gmail, Dropbox spying power.

Andrew Weissmann: FBI wants real-time Gmail, Dropbox spying power.:

“Despite the pervasiveness of law enforcement surveillance of digital communication, the FBI still has a difficult time monitoring Gmail, Google Voice, and Dropbox in real time. But that may change soon, because the bureau says it has made gaining more powers to wiretap all forms of Internet conversation and cloud storage a “top priority” this year.”

Spamhaus DDoS grows to Internet-threatening size | Ars Technica

Spamhaus DDoS grows to Internet-threatening size | Ars Technica:

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The Art In the Machine | Alison Jardine

[This artist has a pretty interesting process and some cool results. See also http://alisonjardine.com/sunlight-abstractions/ . -egg]

The Art In the Machine | Alison Jardine:

Disneyland Dapper Day: when Disney fans dress up [feedly]

 
 

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Disneyland Dapper Day: when Disney fans dress up

Disneyland fans have created many of their own theme days, some of which I've been lucky enough to happen upon or attend -- Bats Day (goths); Gay Days, and more. But I didn't know about Dapper Day, where 10,000+ people descend on Disneyland and Walt Disney World in natty outfits and style their way through the fun park. Just looking at the official gallery makes me want to mark this in my calendar for next year.

"People are looking for an excuse to dress up," said Justin Jorgensen, who started Dapper Day in 2011 and has organized five of the events, all at Disneyland. The latest Dapper Day — the same Sunday as the Oscars, Hollywood's own dress-up day — drew an estimated crowd of 10,000 to the Anaheim park and about 1,000 more at Florida's Disney World.

"Everything, including the workplace, pushes this idea of being casual," said Jorgensen, 38, of Burbank. "When do I get to wear my great stuff?"

Most of those in attendance that day were in their 20s and 30s. They had come of age in a time of shoulder-padded power suits, windbreakers in neon colors and frizzy hair — not exactly a time that will be remembered for its classic elegance.

"I think people like history, people love nostalgia," said Heather A. Vaughan, a historian studying 20th century fashions. "People love imagining a time they didn't live in."

Dapper Day at Disneyland, the nattiest place on Earth [LA Times/Rick Rojas]

(Photo: Christina House)

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#924; The Diagrammatical Dilemma [feedly]

 
 

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#924; The Diagrammatical Dilemma

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xkcd: Humming

xkcd: Humming:

Photographer David Orias Makes the Pacific Ocean Look like Rainbows and Gold | Colossal

Photographer David Orias Makes the Pacific Ocean Look like Rainbows and Gold | Colossal:

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Amazing Kinetic Sculptures by Bob Potts

Amazing Kinetic Sculptures by Bob Potts:





Kinetic sculptor Bob Potts creates beautiful kinetic sculptures that mimic the motions of flight and the oars of boats. Despite their intricacy the pieces are surprisingly minimal, Potts seems to use only the essential components needed to convey each motion without much ornamentation or flourish. There is very little information online about the artist, however blogger Daniel Busby managed to get a brief interview with the 70-year-old artist last year. If you liked this, also check the work of Dukno Yoon . (via devid sketchbook)

3D Graffiti and Paintings by Peeta

3D Graffiti and Paintings by Peeta:









Italian graffiti writer, painter and sculptor Manuel Di Rita (aka Peeta) lives and works in Venice where since 2000 he has risen to international fame for his unique 3D graffiti style. Using a variety of shading, gradients and shadows his work often appears to be hovering just off the surface on which it is painted. Peeta not only creates work in public spaces but also creates similar figures with paint on cavas as well as sculptures. Above is a mixture of artworks both old and new, and you can see much more over on Flickr and at Ayden Gallery.

Gigeresque corset: "Spine" [feedly]

 
 

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Gigeresque corset: "Spine"

Spine, an amazing, gigeresque corset, is a Shaun Leane design that was displayed at NY MOMA in the 2011 show Alexander McQueen show Savage Beauty.

Shaun Leane: He was always fascinated by the spine. So he asked me to create a corset, which was the spine with the rib cage, so that the girl could actually wear this as a corset on the outside of her body, so we would see the beauty of these bone structures on the outside, attached to the dress.

And as we were doing it, Alexander came to me and said, "Will you put a tail on this?" And where he got that idea was out of the film The Omen. When the mother of the omen was discovered—her skeleton—she was half-raven and half-dog, and he was quite inspired by this.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (via Kadrey)

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High Voltage Erosion: 15,000 Volts Travels Through Wood

High Voltage Erosion: 15,000 Volts Travels Through Wood:

Pratt student Melanie Hoff connected cables carrying 15,000 volts of electricity to a large plank of wood and then documented the results. Surprisingly the areas around each contact point don’t simply catch on fire or burn in a circle, but rather traverse outward in a fractal-like pattern, like lighting in slow motion. Watch it all unfold above. (via colossal submissions)

Giant Ocean Waves of Wood and Glass by Mario Ceroli

Giant Ocean Waves of Wood and Glass by Mario Ceroli:





According to the New York Times sculptor Mario Ceroli is one of the least known yet most influential artists of the Italian post-war scene. His work spans over forty years and I encourage you to take a deep dive into his website to explore his wide range of installations and sculptures. Two of his most beautiful works depict crashing waves sculpted from thin layers of precisely cut wood and glass titled La Vague and Maestrale. The energy present in the works is remarkable as if any moment the materials are going to crash into the gallery floor. Also, if you’ve ever been to the Adelaide Botanic Garden in Australia you may have seen a similar piece by sculptor Sergio Redegalli called Cascade. (via connaissance des arts, claudio, and tate_ellen)

The case of the poison potato [feedly]

 
 

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The case of the poison potato

Frying a potato is a tricky proposition. Doing it right isn't just about your skill as a cook, but also your partner, the potato itself. Waxy potatoes — high in sugar, low in starch — brown a little too easily as the sugar in them is altered by heat. By the time the interior is cooked through, the exterior is burnt to a crisp.

Good potato chips come from starchy potatoes. But to get just the right chip color — that perfect, buttery golden brown — you have to pay attention to a lot of different factors, from the types of sugar found in the potato, to the internal chemistry that happens as the potato sits in a sack post-harvest.

In the late 1960s, researchers from the US Department of Agriculture, Penn State University, and the Wise Potato Chip Company teamed up breed a very special potato, which they named the Lenape. More than 30 years later, one of their colleagues still thought fondly of that spud. "Lenape was [wonderful]," Penn State scientist Herb Cole told journalist Nancy Marie Brown in 2003. "It chipped golden."

Yes, the Lenape made a damn fine potato chip.

Unfortunately, it was also kind of toxic.

Despite an almost boring reputation as the squishy white bread of the plant kingdom, potatoes actually come from somewhat nasty roots. Their closest relatives are innocuous enough. Potatoes have strong genetic ties to tomatoes and eggplants. But their more distant cousins include tobacco, chili peppers, deadly nightshade, and the hallucinatory drug-producing flower, datura.

This is a phylogenetic family that is ready to throw down, chemically speaking. Called Solanaceae, its members are known for producing a wide variety of nitrogen-rich chemical compounds, called alkaloids. Nicotine is an alkaloid. So are caffeine, cocaine, and a host of other plant-derived chemicals that humans have taken a liking to over the millennia. Depending on the dose, and on the specific compound, alkaloids can have effects ranging from medicinal, to far-out crazy hallucinatory, to deadly.

Potatoes produce an alkaloid called solanine. All potatoes have it, and it's a feature, not a bug — at least as far as the potato is concerned. Like a lot of other plant-produced alkaloids, solanine is a natural defense mechanism. It protects the potato from pests. Think of potato blight, the fungus-like disease partly responsible for the Irish Famine of the 19^th century. The more solanine a potato contains, the less susceptible it is to blight. When a potato is put into a compromising situation — when it's young and vulnerable, for instance, or when tubers get uncovered and, thus, more exposed to things that might eat it — solanine production can rev up.

Those triggers aren't always the most convenient for the potato's human predators. A sudden frost, for instance, can stunt the growth of tubers and promote the growth of vines and leaves, which mimics a younger stage of development and is accompanied by higher solanine concentrations. And if you leave potatoes exposed to the sun for too long after harvest, they start reacting as though they just got accidentally uncovered. They turn green and they produce more solanine. This is actually why you're not supposed to eat green potatoes. Those spuds, and especially their skins, are rich in solanine. How much solanine varies; it might just be enough to make your stomach a little upset. Or, it could lead to serious illness accompanied by vomiting, diarrhea, loss of consciousness, and convulsive twitching. In very rare cases, people who ate green potatoes have even died.

Poor post-harvest handling was not the problem with the Lenape, however. In 1974, after Lenape potatoes had been recalled from agricultural production and relegated to the status of "breeding material", the USDA published results of an experiment where they grew Lenape, and five other potato varieties, at 39 locations around the country. They carefully monitored growing and harvesting conditions and then compared the solanine content of all the potatoes.

The conclusion: Lenape was genetically predisposed towards producing an extraordinarily high amount of solanine, no matter what happened to it during growth and harvest. The average Russet potato, for instance, contained about 8 mg of solanine for every 100 g of potato. Lenape, on the other hand, was closer to 30 mg of toxin for every 100 g of food. That made it nicely resistant to a lot of agricultural pests. But it also explained why some of the people who were the first to eat Lenapes — most of them breeders and other professionals in the agriculture industry — ended up with severe nausea, like a fast-acting stomach bug.

What makes the Lenape really interesting, though, is its legacy as a cautionary tale. I first learned about it from Fred Gould, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, whom I met while I was working on a New York Times Magazine story about genetically modified mosquitoes.

He used Lenapes as an example of risk and uncertainty. Often, people frame genetically modified plants as this huge open question — a giant uncertainty, of the sort we've never dealt with before. There's this idea that GM plants are uniquely at risk of producing unexpected side effects, and that we have no way of knowing what those effects would be until average consumers start getting sick, Gould told me. But neither of those things is really true. Conventional breeding, the simple act of crossing one existing plant with another, can produce all sorts of unexpected and dangerous results. One of the reasons Lenape potatoes are so infamous, I later found out, is that they played a big role in shaping how the USDA treats and tests new varieties of conventionally bred food plants today.

In fact, from Gould's perspective, there's actually a lot more risk and uncertainty with conventional breeding, than there is with genetic modification. That's because, with GM, you're mucking about with a single gene. There are a lot more genes in play with conventional breeding, and a lot more ways that surprising genetic interactions could come back to haunt you. "You try breeding potatoes for pest resistance, but you're bringing in a whole chromosome from a wild potato," he said. "We've found interactions between the wild genomes and the cultivated genomes that actually led to potentially poisonous chemicals in the potato."

In 2004, a National Academies panel on the unintended health effects of genetic engineering reported that conventional potato breeders continue to try to increase the amount of solanine produced by the leaves and vines of their potato plants in hopes of making those plants more naturally pest-resistant. Because of that, the USDA actually has a recommended limit for solanine content of new potato varieties — but that limit isn't strictly enforced.

Gould's point isn't that genetic modification is always better than conventional breeding. It's not. Instead, they're both tools — imperfect technologies that could produce unintended side effects. Which one you choose to use depends on what you're trying to do. But, either way, you can't say that one is scary and one is safe.

CREDITS

• Photo: REUTERS/Hazir Reka
• Mendel In The Kitchen: A Scientist's View Of Genetically Modified Food [Google Books]
• Towards fewer handicapped children [bmj.com]
• Lenape: A new potato variety high in solids and chipping quality [springer.com]
• Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods: Approaches to Assessing Unintended Health Effects [nap.edu]
• Effect of Environment on Glycoalkaloid Content of Six Potato Varieties [Google Books]
• The Potato in the Human Diet [Google Books]
• A Review of Important Facts about Potato Glycoalkaloids [PDF, ucdavis.edu]
hFACTORS DETERMINING POTATO CHIPPING QUALITY [PDF, umaine.edu]
POTATOES' NATURAL DEFENCES [McGill.ca]

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Pitch Battles by Colin Dickey by Colin Dickey

[Wow, is this ever weird. A440 and right-wing fringe politics. -egg]
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http://longform.org/stories/pitch-battles