Bacon bits and pieces on the internet

Oh, hi again everybody!

Life is going on as usual, and some new and old things on the internet...

knit bacon (yes!) and hamburgers [Core 77]

others make fantastic art out of subway maps [Core 77]

or octopi out of sausages,

make food out of the throw-away parts (which reminds me of the one time my grandfather tried to make porridge out of potato peels, not a success, and I was retold the story as a little kid by my mom) [NY Times]

some whiskey needs special fungi... great science story [WIRED]

and as usual, Shorpy manages to find the best end photos.

PS.  This is post 2050 on this blog.  That is a good number too, as is 44 and 33. Right LA?

The meaning of brands...

If you want to know what a 5-year old thinks about some of the brands and symbol that common companies use. Check it out, it is great!

Failed ad: cat tails

Maybe I am a stickler, one that loves things to be correct too much, but ads, news, and writings that get things botanically or scientifically really wrong bothers me tremendously.  Such as this ad for allergy medication Singulair.  Someone came up with the great idea to base an ad on 'cattails or cat tails'.  Well, if only... cattails, the plant (Typha), was allergenic (it is not or only mildly so), or looked like a grass (it does not). The photo is of a grass (timothy probably, Phleum, also sometimes called 'cat's-tail', but that is not common knowledge) spreading its pollen.  Having a common cattail plant there wouldn't have been a great design, I guess... So now, readers of this ad think that 1) cattails are allergens, and 2) look like grass, because of this miseducation from Merck.  Sorry guys, this will be one of my prime examples of lack of botanical knowledge in the advertising community. Embarrassing. 'Pinsamt', as we say in Swedish.  Would anybody put a sheep in an ad and call it a pig?  Didn't think so. But that is what happened here, but with plants.

Oh, no, it is not just this ad, I just found some more with similar issues.  They are doing the same thing with thistles (not allergens), and willows ('catkins', true, but not allergens either...).  This is like when people think they are allergic to goldenrods because they happen to flower at the same time as the ragweeds.... 

My son's allergy doctor didn't like when I asked her exactly which weeds my son was allergic too, because all she could say was 'weeds', that is what was written on the test results.  Same with 'trees', another positive allergy test.  I tried to explain to her that insect-pollinated plants didn't have large amounts of wind-dispersed pollen, so not all weeds and trees are allergenic...  Why are we letting ourselves be dumbed down in the flow of information? Isn't it better to know the truth even if it is slightly more complicated? Or am I just a cranky scientist?

Book review: Lost & Found by Jaqueline Sheehan

I have always loved books when people live on islands, and especially if they are suddenly there and have to create a new life for themselves.  When I was a kid it was Robinson Crusoe, later more modern day tales of people running away from something or seeking solitude or a new kind of life.  This book fits that trend as well, and takes place on an island outside the city of Portland in Maine in the US. 

A woman is suddenly widowed and decides to change her life, at least temporarily, by moving to a tiny island where nobody knows her.  She applies for, and gets, the part-time Animal Warden job, which is mostly catching the cats the summer tourists left behind when vacation is over, but also dealing with skunks and racoons. 

One day an injured dogs shows up, shot with an exquisite homemade old-fashioned arrow in the shoulder.  Nobody claims the dog, so the animal warden takes it in and fosters it back to health.  The mystery deepens and eventually the story is sorted out.  There are many wonderful characters in the book, including an older woman with synesthesia and a teenage girl with anorexia.  I won't tell you more about the story here, because then I spoil it for you.

This is a really well-written book, and it could have become a shallow, sappy, and superficial romantic story, but it is not.  The descriptions of the characters are great, and describes how people think and feel in depth.  The author is a psychologist and it shows (in a good way).  Even if part of the book is really sad, in the end it is a feel-good book that is easy and fast to read. 

Just two things bother me, and it has nothing to do with the author and her writing.  Whoever put a brown labrador on the cover hadn't read the book, or just wanted any good dog photo on the cover.  The dog in the book is a black lab.  And, the symbol at the beginning of each chapter in the book is a golden retriever, not a lab. I grew up with labradors, and there is a big difference between the two breeds. Goldens are more air-headed, and were never good hunting dogs.   Another major design flaw.  Harper Collins, shape up.  Details like this matter - I like factual accuracies, not sloppiness.

Numbers and words and the world of historic design.

You get different feelings from different size, colors, and fonts, don't you think?  All of these are photos from the Colorado Railroad Museum and depict typography used by the historic American railroads.

I love how they took the time to handpaint these so carefully, and the thorough design and thoughts that went into all decisions before they got painted on.  Power, delicacy, boldness, luxury, efficiency, mechanics, elegance, exactness, and mechanics is all there in these numbers and letters, to varying degrees.  Check out the stencil marks on some of them; can't you imagine the hand that held up the stencil to get it all correct?

Jazzy restaurant

This Asian sushi restaurant, Thelonious Monkfish, actually exist, in Cambridge, MA, USA.  I love the logo image. Do you think Thelonious Monk would have been happy or appalled?

The most gorgeous seed packets ever

At the Philadelphia Flower Show a new little start-up seed company had the nicest booth and the nicest seed packets. Hudson Valley Seed Library, I love you!   Every seed packet design (ArtPacks) is made by different local artists in the Hudson Valley and adjacent areas. Hudson Valley is that wide valley along Hudson River that stretches north from New York City up towards the state capital Albany. The packets are unique, gorgeous, personal, and artsy.  You can even buy the packs and use them as nice gifts, or frame them as art to put on the wall.  Wonderful.

All their seeds will soon be locally grown, while many other companies buy seed in bulk and repackage it.  Look at this corn package, isn't it marvelous? Or the spotted trout lettuce above. Things like this makes me happy. A nice thoughtful design for a nice thing based on ethical concepts that involve both nature and culture.

Their showbooth had nice wooden shelves with old rusty tagholders on it, like items reclaimed from an old grocery store or pharmacy.  The whole exhibit and design, from the seed packs to the metal tags on the shelves, looked more northern European than American to me. It was a wind of fresh design air at a show that mostly otherwise was about the biggest, colorfulest, and boldest combination of colors - and that is not usually the best thing.  More design and thoughts like this please!  Thanks Ken and Doug!

Meet Lynd Ward

 This is what I got for Christmas.  A boxed set of Lynd Ward's painstakingly made woodcut graphic novels (6 in total), without words, and published first in the 1920s to 1940s.  We saw his art for the first time at the James Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania in their great Graphic Art show (which we visited twice, it was that great).  His stories and art connect back in time to medieval church paintings telling bible stories for illiterate farmers, to revolutionary imagery such as Diego Rivera's and Japanese woodcuts.  Imaging making a story without any words, just pictures, and each picture has two colors, black and white, and has to be 'drawn' in reverse on woodblock, line by line, for later printing by hand.  He didn't make it easy for himself, but he sure did great art and literature.  His book God's Man is about an artist that leaves America for another country and tries to make a living, fails, and then sells his soul to the devil (marketing? commercialism?), finds the true love of his life, runs off with her to a foreign coutnry, but eventually his debtors catches up with him and meter out the punishment for not paying his debt.  A millenia old story, and still valid today.  There is a great foreword for this set of books by Spiegelman.
I wonder if those two flowers are gentians?  They could be!

It turns out that some of the woodblocks for his novels are here in New Jersey at Rutgers Universities Libraries, what a coincidence.

You can read more about God's Man here.

(Thanks PP for a wonderful Christmas gift) 

Help, I am pixelated!

Here is a really cool animation movie. Unfortunately you have to ignore an ad first for 25 seconds or so, be patient, and the fun will come.


PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. -

Fork in the road ahead

Evolution street sign, originally uploaded by Colin Purrington.

This innovative warning street sign by Colin Purrington (on Flickr) would fit well when you enter Texas och Kansas or some other place where science and especially evolution is incessantly questioned. Why next 3 billion years? Because about 3 billion years from now the sun will become a red dwarf and snuff out life on Earth, most probably. At least that is what the scientists predict. I wonder what the creationists are thinking - how long do they predict until Armageddon. When LA and I were in New York recently, we saw demonstrating people with signs saying "The End of the World will be October 21, 2010". Where do people get everything from?

Trapped on the screen

 A really, really cool animation.