Steampunk Octopus by Calder Kibyuk
wallacepolsom
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

⁂
Xuebing Du
YOU ARE THE REASON
trying on a metaphor

roma★
🪼
Sade Olutola

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
$LAYYYTER
Cosimo Galluzzi

Janaina Medeiros
occasionally subtle

@theartofmadeline
NASA

#extradirty

shark vs the universe

pixel skylines

oozey mess
seen from Lithuania

seen from France

seen from Spain
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Hong Kong SAR China

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
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seen from United States
seen from Australia

seen from United States

seen from Australia
seen from United Kingdom

seen from Canada
seen from United States
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@blam8o
Steampunk Octopus by Calder Kibyuk
US sage grouse policy heading back to square one
Federal scientists and land managers who’ve been crafting strategies to protect a ground-dwelling bird’s habitat across the American West for nearly two decades are going back to the drawing board under a new Trump administration edict to reassess existing plans condemned by ranchers, miners and energy developers.
Federal officials are wrapping up a series of public meetings with three sessions starting Tuesday in Utah ahead of a Nov. 27 cutoff for comment on Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s order last month to consider revisions to land management amendments for the greater sage grouse that were adopted under the Obama administration.
Zinke says he wants to make sure the amendments don’t harm local economies in 11 western states and allow the states to have maximum control over the efforts within their borders.
Conservationists say it’s a thinly veiled attempt to allow more livestock grazing and drilling, similar to Trump’s efforts to roll back national monument designations, but on a much larger scale. They warn it could land the hen-sized bird on the endangered species list in 2020 when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is scheduled to review its 2015 decision not to list it.
“They appear to be dismantling the whole land-planning amendment system and starting over,” said Patrick Donnelly, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Nevada state director.
“It’s revisionist history,” he told a Fish and Wildlife Service official during a scoping meeting-turned-brainstorming session at a Sparks hotel-casino Wednesday night.
Instead of recording public testimony, agency officials marked up easel pads with lists of criticisms, concerns and suggestions. About 80 participants moved between five breakout groups including “minerals,” “livestock grazing,” and “wildlife and vegetation.”
They treaded familiar ground. Disagreement reigned over the size of protective buffer zones around grouse breeding grounds, states’ role in setting federal policy and whether cattle or wild horses cause more habitat degradation. There was general agreement that invasive cheat grass is fueling one of the biggest threats - catastrophic wildfires - but little consensus on what to do about it.
Dear Students,
Today we had our 20th class together. I asked you to draw yourself as ‘the God of Hellfire’ today during attendance and this is the song I played.
This is what the dude looked like when he was singing it 1968. This is what people did half a century ago.
I was 12 years old.
FYI,
Professor Skeletor
Making Art Activates Brain’s Reward Pathway
Your brain’s reward pathways become active during art-making activities like doodling, according to a new Drexel University study.
Girija Kaimal, EdD, assistant professor in the College of Nursing and Health Professions, led a team that used fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) technology to measure blood flow in the areas of the brain related to rewards while study participants completed a variety of art-making projects.
“This shows that there might be inherent pleasure in doing art activities independent of the end results. Sometimes, we tend to be very critical of what we do because we have internalized, societal judgements of what is good or bad art and, therefore, who is skilled and who is not,” said Kaimal of the study that was published The Arts in Psychotherapy. “We might be reducing or neglecting a simple potential source of rewards perceived by the brain. And this biologocial proof could potentially challenge some of our assumptions about ourselves.”
For the study, co-authored by Drexel faculty including Jennifer Nasser, PhD, and Hasan Ayaz, PhD, 26 participants wore fNIRS headbands while they completed three different art activities (each with rest periods between). For three minutes each, the participants colored in a mandala, doodled within or around a circle marked on a paper, and had a free-drawing session.
During all three activities, there was a measured increase in bloodflow in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, compared to rest periods where bloodflow decreased to normal rates.
The prefrontal cortex is related to regulating our thoughts, feelings and actions. It is also related to emotional and motivational systems and part of the wiring for our brain’s reward circuit. So seeing increased bloodflow in these areas likely means a person is experiencing feels related to being rewarded.
There were some distinctions between the activities in the data collected.
Doodling in or around the circle had the highest average measured bloodflow increase in the reward pathway compared to free-drawing (the next highest) and coloring. However, the difference between each form of art-making was not statistically significant, according to analysis.
“There were some emergent differences but we did not have a large-enough sample in this initial study to draw any definitive conclusions,” Kaimal said.
It was noted and tracked which participants in the study considered themselves artists so that their results could be compared to non-artists. In that way, Kaimal and her team hoped to understand whether past experience played a factor in triggering feelings of reward.
Doodling seemed to initiate the most brain activity in artists, but free-drawing was observed to be about the same for artists and non-artists. Interestingly, the set coloring activity actually resulted in negative brain activity in artists.
“I think artists might have felt very constrained by the pre-drawn shapes and the limited choice of media,” Kaimal explained. “They might also have felt some frustration that they could not complete the image in the short time.”
Again, however, these results regarding artists versus non-artists proved statistically insignificant, which might actually track with Kaimal’s previous research that found experience-level did not have a bearing on the stress-reduction benefits people had while making art.
Overall, though, the finding that any form of art-making resulted in the significant activation of feelings of reward are compelling, especially for art therapists who see art as a valuable tool for mental health.
In fact, in surveys administered to the participants after the activities were complete, respondents indicated that they felt more like they had “good ideas” and could “solve problems” than before the activities. Participants even said they felt the three-minute time spans for art-making weren’t long enough.
“There are several implications of this study’s findings,” Kaimal said. “They indicate an inherent potential for evoking positive emotions through art-making — and doodling especially. Doodling is something we all have experience with and might re-imagine as a democratizing, skill independent, judgment-free pleasurable activity.”
Additionally, Kaimal felt that the findings of increased self-opinion were intriguing.
“There might be inherent aspects to visual self-expression that evoke both pleasure and a sense of creative agency in ourselves,” she said.
Dear Students,
So there.
Prof. Skeletor
#10yrsago Homeless Channel: raw, smart comic about homelessness
I just read Matt Silady’s heart-rending graphic novel The Homeless Channel, a visually stunning story about the rise of a 24-hour cable network devoted to homelessness in America.
The Homeless Channel is created by Darcy Shaw, whose schizophrenic sister is herself living on the streets. Shaw sells the channel to a huge media conglomerate on the basis of her gutsy ideas and sharp pitching skills, and fights furiously with the network to stay true to her vision.
The shows are imaginative and disturbing, including an overnight program that’s just live camera feeds of homeless people on the streets, each hour sponsored by a different company – and Darcy’s struggles with the ethics of “sponsoring” homelessness are among the best parts of this book.
Silady is unflinching in his confrontation of the contradictions of homelessness, and that’s what makes this book so fine. It’s the kind of storytelling that is both thought-provoking and emotionally engaging. At the story’s climax, I found myself misting over and wiping my eye.
Matt Silady, the author/illustrator, creates his layouts by photographing real people and places in the poses he needs for his panels, then converts the photos to line-art. The result is expressive and moody, with a firm line that says an awful lot with very little. Silady’s site features a backstage view of how he does this neat trick.
Link
https://boingboing.net/2007/08/08/homeless-channel-raw.html
Can you spot Mufasa?
Today we learned that conches, the sea-dwelling mollusks who live inside those big, beautiful conch seashells in warm tropical waters, peer out at the world with cartoonish eyes on tiny eyestalks. They see you. They see everything. And what’s more, they can regenerate their peepers should they happen to lose one or both of them.
“One 1976 paper dug into the specific behind these animals’ alien eyestalks. Sitting at the tips of long stalks, they contain retinas with both sensory cells and colored pigment cells. But the story gets weirder because obviously, it gets weirder. After amputating the conchs’ eyes, a fully-formed replacement took its place 14 days later. Humans, we really are losing this evolutionary game.”
But wait, that’s hardly the only surprising set of eyes under the sea. Scallops have eyes too, LOTS of them:
Conch photos by Redditor buterbetterbater and via @shingworks.
[via /r/pics and Gizmodo]
Secretary Bird by Keith Park Photography on Flickr.
More fabulous than the Swan Queen.
Sometimes I feel just like this.
This is the most punk rock thing I’ve ever seen
kateendall: Not sure if this fits your blog, but if you have a love for birds and like to promote said love, I thought maybe seeing someone with a love for their parrot would be nice. That’s Oliver, now I’ll always have him with me. :D
Nice bird ink
The mantis shrimp is a tiny, clown-colored juggernaut of underwater physics. Some species have modified claws that serve as clubs for punching their prey, and the mantis shrimp swings that club fast - its acceleration is comparable to a bullet’s! Moving that quickly in water causes a drastic drop in local pressure, low enough to form a cavitation bubble. Such low-pressure bubbles themselves are not particularly dangerous, but their collapse is incredibly violent, especially near a solid surface, like the shell of the shrimp’s prey. Collapsing cavitation bubbles can send out shock waves, shatter glass, and even generate light. In the case of the mantis shrimp, it’s more than enough to stun, if not outright kill, its prey. (Video credit: Physics Girl)
Thanks for pointing that out! The mantis shrimp strikes its prey at an acceleration of a 22 caliber bullet—going 0 to 60 in 0.2 milliseconds!
Fact Check: 'Whatabout' Those Other Historical Figures? Trump's Question Answered
Another Reversal: Trump Now Says Counterprotesters Also To Blame For Charlottesville
Educate, educate, educate