Bits and pieces on the internet: size edition

Big or small?  It is all about scale, and this is fantastic.  I could play with this power of ten website for hours. (by Cary and Michael Huang)

These are the most amazing spider macro photos I have ever seen. (by Thomas Shahan, on the Flickr blog)

IKEA things come in different sizes, but I doubt they have made a some-assembly-required dinosaur yet.  But there is how the assembly manual might look. (from CollegeHumor)

If you haven't yet, you can waste some time online, draw a stickman, and enjoy the creativity of this website (and it is fun too!)

The smallest thing I saw in Costa Rica was a tick crawling on my finger, and the largest - hmm - the largest animal was probably a 4+ meter long crocodile.  Nasty things, those ticks and crocs.

Testing my new little gadget

US quarter coin: Colorado, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

What do you think? It is a piece of a US quarter (aka a 1/16, I guess), and the photo is taken with a digital USB handheld microscope.

OK snapshot food review: Pizza Anonymous

[LS is blogging this restaurant report on behalf of OK, just to make you all confused. A while ago, OK found this note below stuck to a door, without a sign, but somehow indicating that there probably was a pizza place behind that door. Now the place has been visited. So, here is OK's snapshot report from the anonymous pizza place in Stockholm, Sweden.]

Menu (in Swedish. tomat = tomato; oliver = olives; skinka = ham; surkål = sauerkraut; champinjoner = mushrooms; sardeller = anchovy; aubergine = eggplant; lufttorkad = airdried; ask about the rest in the comments if you want to know more)

So JU and I went to that nameless pizzeria with the strange sign tonight, and it was very good. Unfortunately they were out of the sauerkraut and timmerman sausage-pizza, so I ended up with the buffalo mozzarella and dried entrecôte pizza.

 JU had the buffalo mozzarella, bayonne ham and mushroom pizza. 

JU also had the dessert pizza with apples, jam and stuff... You can have a three course meal there, all pizzas!

 

 Some say that you can judge a place by their bathroom. I'm not sure what this tells you...hehe. 

Another interior pic from the bathroom. Nice lightning.

So all in all, I'll say it was an e on a scale to pi. 

Costa Rica - a green place

I am back home after a week in Costa Rica, where I spent gorgeous times in rainforests, tropical beaches, mangrove swamps and star-filled nights.  Here are some of the things I saw at the La Selva Research Station, northeast of San Jose in the sloping foothills(click on photo for larger pictures):

The colorful bracts of Heliconias always fascinate me. The flowers are hidden inside, and only extend when they are flowering, a few at the time. Hummingbirds are the pollinators.



Lots of leaf-cutter ants, carrying leaves of the Costa Rican guava called 'cas', which makes great juice (the guava fruits, I mean!). These ants work 24 hours a day, so when you are out walking at night they are still there, toiling away in the dark. Their nests are in the ground, and they enter them through big openings. It is easy to find the nests since their trails are all cleared from any vegetation. The ants carrying the leaves are bigger, and then there are small ants sitting on the leaves, protecting the carrying ant from parasitic flies, which tries to lay its eggs in the head of the carrying ant. Evolution is really fascinating, indeed. Underground the leaves are then chewed and become part of big chewed-leaf-fungus gardens.



Two-toed sloth with a baby. These move really slow. A friend told me that once a sloth gripped his arm, and he thought he would loose his arm, the grip was that strong, and the sloth would not let loose. No wonder, if you spend your life in a tree, you better not fall down, ever.


The Montezuma oropendula birds (one of the weirdest birds I have seen, they sit and fall downwards on their branches on purpose; video here), are now making their nests at the tips of long palm-leaves. Poor chicks, they were being bounced around in the wind all the time. (I can't figure out if it should be oropendula or oropendola... both spellings are used.)

OK snapshot: Skandinaviska (Scandinavian)

Nu med egna vokaler...
a new language, Scandinavian, now with its own vowels? The umlaut o got
both dots (from Swedish and Finnish), and a slash (from Danish and
Norwegian). Well, whatever works, right?
What is in the bag? Strawberry-flavored candy that looks like long string.

OK snapshot: Ordföljd (word order)

Den hårfina men betydande skillnaden mellan "endast tillsatt" och "tillsatt endast"... ;)

English explanation:
Supermarket sign for dried fruit ('torkad frukt') with the addition 'Endast tillsatt socker' = only added sugar. I bet it should have been 'Endast socker tillsatt' = only sugar added. Sometimes the best order of words is a bit hard to figure out!

Field report from Philadelphia International Flower Show 2012

Each year there is a massive flower and gardening show in Philadelphia, a giant pompous event on par with the Chelsea Show in England.  This year I went with neighbor and friend JL, and we had a blast.  The theme was Hawaii, which means that they invite garden designers to design and mount exhibits with flowers, structures, and other gardening features on this theme.  You would think Hawaii wouldn't be that hard - just think lava, lava, silverswords, rainforest, pineapple plantations, ocean, and some more lava.



Unfortunately, it seems like most designers never had been to Hawaii, nor looked up some basic facts. I don't have any good photos from the "Hawaiian" exhibits because I had set the ISO on my camera wrong, but if I had to categorize these ca 10 different garden designs I would say:  stuff a square on the floor with palms, anthuriums, orchids, all in a variety of chaotic colors, and maybe have a little lagoon, sand, and a surfboard - always a surfboard.  The native Hawaiian species were absent.  Lava, who cares about that!?  Not hint of volcanism.  And the exhibits all looked the same.  Stuffed full with the same artifical-looking tropical plants from any tropical island, nothing Hawaiian specific at all.

It really was rather painful, I think. I like the tropics, but I like people to design from real things and real plants, not pick things out from a hotel planting in any tropical country.  But then, the designers care very little about botany, history, geology, soils, and what can actually grow together for real.  They just stuff things together in some artificial design, in a unnatural and I would say, messy and illogical chaos.



This was pretty cool though - put an upside down Tillandsia on a stick, glue a sand dollar (sea urchin shell) on top, and wow, you have a jellyfish in your coral reef plant design.



This was the only exhibit we saw that actually built on the lava theme.  A patio dinner table set for dinner, and then the lava comes and disturbs the scene.  I wonder how the lava was made, it was very real-looking, it was even glowing with red lights.



At the show are also many other exhibits and exhibitors, some of which where really great. People compete over the best dinner centerpiece arrangement, best bonsai, largest flowering cactus, nicest tiniest flower design, and so on.

 
I bet 90% of the contestants are women.  The Asian women rule the pressed plant art exhibits, and their artwork is amazing.


In some cases the organizers tell the contestants to make a flower design containing specific things. These two were under the category "bamboo, cheap ugly glitterish stuff from Michaels, and then throw some orchids on it". It was horrendous. Generally it was far too much orchids and anthuriums. Come on, was there a sale on these? There are tens of thousands of tropical flowers, why just pick what is popular? One exhibit got an award for having 'the best design with rare and unusual plants', but I didn't see any rare and unusual plants in it! Strange... maybe anything but palms, orchids, and anthuriums is considered rare by non-botanical horticulturalists? (OK, I know I am critical here, but come on! There are a quarter million plant species out there. And design is supposed to have a thought, a theme, a line, a pattern, not just be mish-mash of the plants you expect to see in front of a Caribbean hotel).


This was fantastic on the other hand. A simplified model of central Philadelphia, from the art museum to Center City, with xerophytic succulents as the model plants. Wonderful, and done by the Philadelphia Parks department. Innovative, beautiful and educational, all at the same time. 5 stars!



The tropical wedding dinner table was a bit too much, and a bit too yellow in its filtered yellow spotlight, but still interesting. There wasn't much space to actually sit, eat, and talk, but who cares. And they covered the cycad stems with tubes of red flowers - cool, but why?


One of the things that bothers me most is how artificial all the designed gardens look like. For example, here the plants are spaced far too evenly, like if they were measured out with gauge blocks ('måttsats' in Swedish, which is a Swedish invention from my hometown!), and not just grown there for a while. It is nearly like having a Lego garden - the plants can only sit on the Lego knobs, not in between. It gives you this feeling of it not being real, not being alive, not being natural. One exception was a garden with spring bulbs, which was gorgeous, and there they had also used dried old oak leaves as mulch, not the regular ugly cedar mulch that was in most exhibits.



Lots of funny and nice things were for sale. Morel pottery. Seeds in packets designed by local artists. Weeds dried and sold as fancy flowers. Pottery vases from Maine.



Lots of very ugly, tacky, and cheap-looking (but not cheap) things were for sale. Metal palm lamps that looked like they belonged in some NJ mafioso home on the sea shore. Oils lamps with silk and plastic flowers made from oil-based plastic. Here you dig up oil from the Earth to make flowers with the Earth while it is full of living flowers? And glass fountains that would break if a bluejay was just looking at it, I bet.





In case you didn't know it, the sponge holder is the latest thing to have! You might think I spent the day being upset and disgusted, but not at all. It was a great show, a great trip, I just feel I don't really relate to some of the things the garden designers and horticulturalists do. I know, I am 'miljöskadad' as we say in Sweden, i.e., damaged by my career choice and education... :)

(And here is a link to all photos at the Flower Show 2012 - there was much more to look at)

Bits and pieces on the internet: itchy edition

Fossil discovery: Giant fleas from the Jurassic, that might have sucked blooded from dinosaurs (NY Times). How about meeting some of these 2 cm long creatures on the inside of your wool sweater?

Some of the Republican presidential contenders appear to want to live in a different century.  Like the 1800's or something. This is both sad and upsetting. (NY Times opinion piece by Charles Blow)

Did you know cashmere comes from goats?  And angora from rabbits? So, why are people OK with wearing the hairs from goats and rabbits, but not eating them? Eating the meat, not the hairs, I mean.

Itchy poison ivy doesn't let a simple fence stop it.  In fact, it enforces it and makes it its own fence.

So, what are you readers itching about?

Book Review: Om jag var din hemmafru av Lotta Lundgren (Swedish cookbook, English review)

Om jag var din hemmafru by Lotta Lundgren, is an amazing cookbook (in Swedish only, for now), by Lotta Lundgren, a former advertising copywriter who changed careers to become a food writer and chef.  I got this book as a present, and I love it, not only for the amazing gorgeous photos (which Lotta as the model!), but also for the food writing.  The recipes are fine, but the best is the intros to each dish and the irreverent humor that is everywhere, in every line. 

It is hard to explain this in English, but she has a fantastic tongue-in-cheek, silly, intelligent, and contemporary humoristic take on life, food, love, and eating in her Swedish text.  It is just GORGEOUS from both a visual, intellectual, and foodie viewpoint.  I have so far cooked two things out of the book, but I have read the whole cookbook, from front to back page.  And that is usually not the case!  Often Swedes are too serious, and this book just loosens everything up!

In many ways this is an anti-book book, a book that suggests that you don't take life, food, recipes and work so seriously - that you just let go and enjoy it.  Many of the recipes do not give exact measurements.  Lotta, THANK YOU! 

USA needs this cookbook, but I am not sure most people here would get it, considering the backwards, horrible trends among some groups here (anti-love, anti-good food, anti-birth control, anti-personal freedom - just thinking about the recent republican presidential campaign makes me shudder of disgust).  At least we Swedes have this book to be happy about. 

Sweden publishes the most cook books per year per capita, which is pretty amazing.  But Swedes care about food, good food, organic and local products, and they also travel near and far so they are used to many different cuisines.

(If you can read Swedish, here is a great review of the book from Kulturdelen)



[Large photos by Vilseskogen on Flickr, Creative Commons; book cover by Norstedts]

Giant insects rescued at the brink of extinction, literally

Amazing story from other side of the Earth, where the largest stick insect ('vandrande pinne' in Swedish) has been rediscovered living on an isolated island under a bush.  Link here to article.
[Photo by Granitethighs from Wikimedia, Creative Commons license. Thanks for letting us use it!]

OK snapshot: Meddelanden från andra sidan... (Messages from the other side)

...av kontorsfönstret mot gatan. :)
...from the office by the street. [Seen in Stockholm, Sweden]

What is says? - oh!

Don't despair nightinggale!

Out of the deep it grows

We are disguised.

And the night streams

from east to west with

the speed of the moon.

Pinterest = Internet Thievery, Unfairness, and Ugliness

(Long post but important)

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it.  Morals and ethics is all about this, making choices to do the right thing.  Humans are not just following insticts, we can think, decide, do or not do.  If you can steal something, should you?  If you can make money on someone else's efforts without giving them anything, should you?  If you can live without caring about others, should you?  Pinterest and many of its users do.

OK, I had not heard about Pinterest until a few days ago, and looked it up and fell in love.   Temporarily.  Very temporarily. So, I had a 20 hour love affair with Pinterest, and now we are partly separated (not totally, read on).  I know, this just happened AFTER I wrote that long thing about how we are too addicted to the internet, and I fell right into the addition to Pinterest trap. 

Pinterest is a great way to collect links and thumbnails to all the interesting things you find on the web so you can find them again, or to make pinboards of images for inspiration, education, or useful things. It is exploding on the internet right now.  So far so good, and that is what I loved about it.  So much interesting stuff!!!   

But then I clicked on an image to find out more and it linked back to Google Images, or I got a 404 error, or it linked me to Tumblr's home page, and something was obviously not right.  Where did the image come from?

When I signed up for Pinterest I read the rules for the site, and it says that you have to have the right to pin anything made by you or that you have the copyright for, so you can't pin things copyrighted by others.  But people do, 99% of people in Pinterest do, maybe more, and very few even give credit and source for each image.  A typical pinned image is a photo of a gorgeous room with the note "I love this". No facts on where that image came from.

That can't be right, I thought, obviously this image wasn't taken by whatever house wife in Florida that pinned and loved it.  Then I started googling "Pinterest copyright" and found a large set of recent articles about how Pinterest is avoiding by getting into trouble by making all its users, not themselves, legally liable for any copyright infringement.  (Their own blog shows how upset some people are by this. Other info here, good post here, more, )

Pinterest takes no responsibility at all, and in fact, by using it you agree to give all the images you have pinned (and thereby downloaded to Pinterest as high-resolution photos, mostly illegally in my opinion) to Pinterest for free. Pinterest then have the right to sell these photos and make money of them, even if they are copyrighted by someone that had no idea that you pinned their gorgeous photo or art or craft idea, etc.

So, say that I pin my photos which are under Creative Commons license on Flickr to my board on Pinterest, and as soon as I have done that, I have no longer any control over them.  Pinterest could sell them to Target to use in their advertising and I would get zero dollars, and I would not be asked for permission.  This is so wrong!!!

Similarly, if a user pins an image of a new Porsche, Pinterest now has the right to use that image, even if it is copyrighted by Porsche. Simply put, Pinterest is fooling everybody, and stealing from everybody. And they let their users get away with it, and the users let Pinterest get away with it.  Just like drug addiction... They need each other, the users and the company.

Pinterest's solution is that anybody that finds their copyrighted image pinned onto Pinterest by a user can contact them and have it removed from Pinterest's website.  So it is up to the owner of the image to search the internet and complain. (This is unimaginable hard...)  Imagine this happening with actual items.  Someone comes into your house, robs you, and goes away with some of your stuff.  Now you have to look for your things wide and far, and they are not marked with your name, address or anything.  And if you find your things, then you have to fill out an online form and eventually you can get the stuff back.  And in the end, the stealing doesn't get punished at all.

In fact, Pinterest doesn't care that its users pin lots of copyrighted things, and if there is a problem (say, they get sued by Modern Museum of Art for some art images a user has pinned), then the user will have to pay the legal bills for both herself AND for Pinterest's lawyers.  It is all in the user agreement, and very clear.  How can this be right?  How can this be ethical?  The user could be a company too, so if McDonalds pins a photo of a burger, they could get sued.... but Pinterest wouldn't.  How crazy.

 So, removed my pins and boards and now I am only 'liking' things I see on Pinterest, so I can use the links and cool ideas here on the blog, after getting proper permission and linking to the original source.  I am all for sharing, but it has to be FAIR with PROPER credit.  It is very well explained on the Link with Love website, who made a special pinnable image for Pinterest (see left).  So, this is what I believe and think we should do, all of us.  Link with love, be fair, don't steal, and read more here.

So, what should Pinterest do, to get it right?  Well, only store thumbnails, like Google.  Demand that all photos are tagged with source (url), and source information (name, company, etc.), and mark all photos with the proper copyright license [public work, creative commons, all rights reserved, etc.].  And Pinterest should not have the right to use any of the pinned images by anybody. 

I predict that Pinterest will be hit with a giant lawsuit by some media company like Martha Stewart Magazine, AP, or an art organization on behalf of their members soon, and then it will be in big trouble. The company is doing everything according to US law right now, but only by putting all responsibility and liability on the users, most of which probably have no idea that they are doing something illegal or deeply unethical. As one user said "it is just a picture, who cares?"  This is just seriously wrong. It reminds me of gun manufacturers or cigarette makers that provide deadly weapons and then take no responsibility at all, because 'who could have predicted that someone would shoot with it at another person?", etc. Sigh...

Bacon bits and pieces on the internet: green stuff

I love green things, both alive and very dead. But not mold. Molded green glass is OK though. (From the American Glass Museum in Wheaton, photo Vilseskogen on Flickr - more glass photos here)

More green things:

Green sushi for cowboys, kind of: picklelicious by The Good Wife (check out the photo)

Nathan Strandberg and Katie Kirk has some really nice green illustrations, except those that know me know that I don't eat celery...  This is so retro 60s and 70s to me.  I never thought I would like these shapes and colors again, after a giant overdose when I grew up, and now I do.  Fads go in circles. Even orange and brown is back with a vengeance.

There are green book trees for your wall (from Shawn So in South Korea)

And I think I could live at Green Bridge Farm (if it wasn't in Georgia, USA, too hot!), but I like the idea of smaller houses with some privacy with a common vegetable farm and pond...   pick your house here (pdf file).

And here is something partly green that I do not want in my house, even if it is crazy in a way. 



And some very green chairs from a restaurant in Stockholm (photo Vilseskogen on Flickr).