About
I love NY.Links
Believe it or not, there is a method to the madness.
Why I spelled "nut" wrong.
CREDITS
I try my best to give credit where credit is due (even when I reblog), but if I can't find the original source or creator on Google within 5 minutes, I give up. For that, I apologize. My only excuse is that there are only 24 hours in my day. If you've got more hours in your day that you'd be willing to donate, please do. Otherwise, anything tagged my stuff is usually 100% me and preservative free. If it's not 100% me, I say so in the post. Thanks to Hunson for the sweet theme, to Streampad for the audioplayer, and to tumblr for the distraction I cannot afford. And thanks to you for randomly browsing my randomness.Following

Spring

Wild Ride

(part of) Guardian Angel of Mischief

(part of) White Fang

Invitation

Swimming Lessons

Preserved
A selection of ice sculptures I saw at the 2009 World Ice Art Championships when I was in Alaska. I was actually lucky to see this. Normally the exhibit would’ve been over before I arrived, but it was so cold at the time that they extended the showing. :)
I didn’t get a chance to see the ice sculptures at night, but if you ever get a chance to go, it’s nice to see them during the day and night. At night the sculptures are lit up with colored lights, so they look really cool. H.E. Pherson took photos of them during both times, so check it out.
More info about the sculptures:
There was another DNA sculpture I really liked called Beautiful Chemistry by Dawson List and David Fong. They made a DNA molecule look like a dancer. Super cool! But it was partially broken/melted by the time I saw it.




When I was in Alaska last March, I ended up being stuck in the airport for more than 2 days (slept there for 2 nights - all the hotels were full because everyone’s flights were canceled) because a nearby volcano kept erupting and spewing ash into the air. So the planes couldn’t come into or go out of the airport because visibility was so poor. It was the first time in like decades that it had erupted that badly. Not like lava pouring down the streets or anything like that. But big enough to cause a big mess. When you went outside, you could see everything covered in a layer of gray ash.
Anyway, I took the photos above when I was in the airport because what else are you gonna when you’re stuck? You can see how quickly the visibility changed. It wasn’t even an hour between the times I took those pics. Nature is crazy.
Puu Oo Vent Photo, Mount Kilauea (National Geographic Photo of the Day)by Bryan Lowry:
When Kilauea volcano’s Puu Oo vent was active I visited it often. On this particular cold January morning the winds were light, which allowed the superheated gases and steam to rise straight up into the sky from the glowing and spattering vents within Puu Oo. The cold air pushed the hot plumes back down in a swirling motion at sunrise. This allowed for the beautiful colors. Shot with a Nikon Dslr and the Nikon 10.5 lens from the north rim of Puu Oo vent. 30-second exposure.
Tokyo Manhole - Escher Droste (via Sam Rohn - Location Scout)
This image is an example of Escher’s Droste Effect, and was created using a program called MathMap. You can download the program for free, so go ahead and play around with it. :)
Photo source.


Photo: Bob Jagendorf

Photo: Carl Neufelder

Photo: Stephen Johnson

Photo: Stephen Johnson
According to the Energizer site, the Hot “Hare” Balloon is the tallest hot air balloon in the world - 15 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. Who knew?
Photo sources:
The image is from cuteoverload.com, but I couldn’t find it.
Artist Eduardo Kac commissioned a French genetics lab to implant an albino rabbit named Alba with green fluorescent protein (GFP) (the people who discovered this protein won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year). As a result, Alba glows green when under a certain type of blue light.
Photo by Chrystelle Fontaine
(via Environmental Graffiti)
Blind spots occur because of design quirk in the architecture of our eyes. Cells at the back of the eye, in a layer called the retina, gather light focused through our lens from everything that’s in front of us.However, where a bundle of nerves connects our eyes to our brain these light-sensitive cells cannot grow. Hence, light that hits this bundle is not sensed and a blind spot is the result.
The famous “rubber hand illusion” - in which a fake hand and a real hand are stroked simultaneously and in the same way. After a couple minutes, the subject will feel as though both of his/her real hands are being touched even though in reality only one of the stroked hands is real.
And even more fascinating…when the subject closes his/her eyes and is asked to use the real hand that was stroked to touch the other real hand, he/she ends up touching the fake hand, not the real one.
Wow.
The article.
AND…there is a related illusion in which people feel like they have three hands. It’s called the Beeblebrox illusion.
AND…there’s another illusion in which people think a virtual arm is their real arm - to the point that when the virtual arm is rotated 90 degrees, they experience shoulder spasms because their brain thinks their real arm is being twisted.