Wierd underwater statues

I’m not sure what the point is, but I like the statues. Jason DeCaires Taylor makes them by taking life moulds of ordinary people, then using the moulds to make statues of special, alkaline concrete that encourages the growth of corals. You can find them off the coast of Mexico. Environmental statement or tourist attraction?

Guido Daniele’s Handimals

Check out Guido Daniele’s hand-painting on the artist’s own site or here in a concentrated lump on Bored Panda. I have his old book “Handimals” but the paintings are primitive puppets compared to what he’s doing now.

Fractals—gotta love ’em!

Fractal flames make leaf patterns

Speaking only for myself, and not being a mathematician, I love fractals for their beauty and intricacy. I don’t understand them. I understand that they are repeating patterns that get smaller and smaller and for some, anyway, go on doing so infinitely.

As a child I recognized that the beauty of nature embraced both randomness and pattern. Although I did not know the term, in many cases, that pattern was fractal. The branches of a maple tree and the veins in a maple leaf diverge at the same angle, about 41.5 degrees of a circle. Small twigs, large boughs, and veins in the leaf thus harmonize.

The fractal that made the news was the Mandelbrot curve, which maps how quickly a series goes to infinity, or its limit. It is infinitely fine: you can keep expanding the curve and going further into it, finding repeated patterns, and never reach the end. Programmers have given us the tools to generate and display them. But there are other types of fractals. There are fractal flames, waves, and something the author calls gnarls.

Gnarl?

One site where you can enjoy them is UltraGnosis Fractal Art. You can order calendars with images of fractal leaves. They’re very appealing to the nature-lover in me.

Centre for Inquiry conference with added art!

"Ammonite vs. Trilobite" by Glendon Mellow

Canada’s first national CFI conference started Thursday and is continuing until Sunday. Its theme is “The Intersection of Art and Science,” with the major attention-grabbing sessions on Saturday.

The very first session is an exposition on the relatively recent discoveries that connect the evolution of art with the evolution of humanity and language and reducing the suddenness of the “Cro-Magnon Explosion.”

Some of the evolutionary art of Glendon Mellow will be on exhibit, with a few pieces for sale.

Another Kinkade-Cthulhu mashup

Here’s another mashup of images from an idealized landscape with the the horror of the deeps.

Origami octopus by Joseph Wu

Octopus (hunting) take 5, originally uploaded by Joseph Wu Origami.

If anyone has a paper anniversary coming up, such as a year of blogging or a year since a creationist promised to “get back to you” about their debunked claim, one of Joseph Wu’s origami octopods might be the perfect gift—to themselves.

Using the Web: factory cats project

Clever people are using their skills plus the web to generate publicity and resources to pay for the care and adoption of rescued cats in the Factory Cats Project. The first project, Foreclosure Cats, was to rescue sixty cats perforce abandoned when a man was evicted from his home. I hope that someone helped him, too! That encouraged the people to use the same plan for the Factory Cats project, a colony of forty feral cats.

Adopt a cat

Local artists have created artworks that represent the cats, and the money is being used to pay for the cats’ care. Click on the link for the Animal Rescue Art Project. The original artworks are being auctioned on eBay and you can buy copies of the images on Cafepress.

Elements of art

Anasazi Bowl c.1100-1250 A.D., originally uploaded by mindtalk.

You are looking at an Anasazi Bowl from around 1100-1250 CE. So it was made several hundred years ago. But it looks both modern and sophisticated. The pattern uses repetitive elements and gently teases the eyes to rove over it.

It’s in the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian at Evanston, Illinois, U.S.