Why do I keep thinking of the art of Pierre et Gilles when I see this?
Year: 2005
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Pop-Up Books
I came across this site describing the history of Pop-up Books. Now, those who know me well, know that I love books – and pop-up books are a particular weakness of mine.
I have been collecting them for a little while. Most of them are from the 1980s and later – for example – Jan Pienkowski’s Robot. Actually, I think that that is the book that got me started. Along the way, I’ve been collecting Nick Bantock’s series of Nursery Rhymes and books for the "older" reader such as the Pop-Up Book of Phobias. I don’t have any examples earlier than about 1950 – the one book that I have using the mechanisms of Lothar Meggendorfer is a 20th Century reproduction with a foreword by Maurice Sendak.
I do like the creations by Ron van den Meer – who has worked on a series of education books such as The Architecture Pack, The Art Pack and the Brain Pack. I have refused to acquire The Parascience Pack because I refuse to support Uri Geller’s pseudoscience rubbish.
But at the moment, I think one of the foremost paper engineers working in this field has to be Robert Sabuda. His Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland are magnificent examples of their kind.
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The Young Are A Foreign Country…
…They do things differently there.
Yes, I know that the original quote (L. P. Hartley, the Go-Between, 1953) had "Past" in place of "Young"), but it seemed absolutely aposite for the experience I’ve just had. I was idly perusing the statistics to see if anyone out there actually looked at my blog, and I came across a link that showed that a 14 year old girl in the East Midlands, England, had dropped in. I followed the link back, and found this:
Hiyaz today was funny at skul lata on but begginin was bad !
kirsty told every1 bout me n chris lol n now every1 nos
but in english me n kirst were playin catch wid ma pen n kirstys rubber lmao which den got tuk offf us by chelsea cuz i hit her wid it lmao
but den we managed to get anotha one loln den in science we had to do an experiment n i was washin dese goggles unda da tap lmao n i flicked water at kirsty n miss caught me lol n den we was messin bout wid da acid n stuf n we all had to sit down n get a lesson on how to behave in a lab lmao
n trust me ! i dun sumut rly dangerous acordin to miss lmaoso now im very bored on msn talkin to chris bout stuf
i dno wot to say god help me lol ! ! !
amy tried to help but i cant do it man seriously !anywayz im gonna go now laters
xxxx bye xxxxHello? Does one need any more evidence that evolution exists? This is clearly not a strain of English that I was brought up on. I remember in primary school sitting in a class, and another boy came in to ask the teacher something. He said something along the lines of "The headmaster wants to know if any of the kids saw [an incident in the playground] this morning".
The teacher drew herself up to her full height and said: "Child, ‘kids’ are the offspring of goats – there are children in my classroom".
Deckchairs on the Titanic, anyone?
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Where’s the NSPCA When You Need Them?
I hold onto just one thought – the person who makes these photographs may be heading down the road trod by Louis Wain.
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Why I Have No Patience with “Alternative Medicine”
Read the story of the Orange Man and understand why alternative medicine that is ineffective is not harmless.
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A Riff on Vending Machines
Seeing that Boing Boing posted a sighting of a vending machine for iPods got me thinking.
Last week, in the Barcelona Metro, I saw a vending machine selling paperback books. Not understanding Spanish, I could not judge whether the books represented literature (haut cuisine) or Jeffrey Archer (fast food trash). I would like to believe the former.
And I remember a few years ago in the neighbourhood was a vending machine selling bunches of flowers (only in Holland?). Alas, long since gone the way of me-tooism – the beige-coloured global culture that I sometimes think I’m drowning in.
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Oh, F*ck – it’s the Day After Tomorrow
According to The Sunday Times (OK, stop sniggering at the back), climate researchers have detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream – the "mighty ocean current that keeps Britain and Europe from freezing".
If this is true, perhaps our future plans should not be merely to move to higher ground within the Netherlands, but to up stakes and head south to Spain… Quick, where’s that Spanish course?
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Bad Science
And hard on the heels of Phil’s paean to Science and the scientific method, comes a perfect example of really bad science (courtesy of Skeptico).
Laydeez an genelmen, I give you: Femo2 – the "water with more". More what? – you ask… Well, apparently, according to the web site, it’s "pure food-grade oxygen to levels up to 120 mg/litre". Golly gee, and what, precisely, is "food-grade oxygen" when it’s at home? It’s clearly something different to "industrial-sludge-grade" oxygen, that’s for sure. Sounds to me more like the marketing department were smoking something when they worked on this campaign.
But wait! There’s more! Along with the food-grade oxygen (I have to confess that’s so bad, it’s good), Femo2 is energized and magnetized (you will note the North American spelling – I thought that this meant that the US was to blame for this nonsense as usual. But no, in the deathless phrase of South Park: Blame Canada). Er, excuse me, what do these terms mean when applied to Dihydrogen Monoxide? Oh, look, there’s a FAQ (frequently asked questions). Let’s take a look:
Q: What is energization? A: Answer coming soon.
Q: What is magnetization? A: Answer coming soon.
Q: How do you keep the oxygen in the water? A: Answer coming soon.
Dear lord, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
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The Lure of Science
Over on the Bad Astronomy Blog, Phil (the Bad Astronomer) gives us his paean to Science.
Wish I’d written it. It’s damn good.
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Barcelona’s Public Art
Everywhere you look in Barcelona there is a piece of public art – either ancient or modern. Here are just a few examples.
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Barcelona’s Park Güell
Gaudí’s creations for Park Güell are one of the icons of Barcelona (his Sagrada Família being another). The park was originally intended as a residential garden city in the English style, but only one showhouse was ever built, and the venture failed.
Although you can walk to the park from the Lesseps Metro station (and it’s well signposted), the walk is pretty boring, along busy city streets and then slogging uphill through a side street. A better way (in my opinion) is to go to the Vallarca Metro station. After a short walk along a street, you turn into a pedestrian street that climbs steeply up towards the upper reaches of the Park. Thankfully, the municipality has thought to put in escalators to take the effort out of walking uphill. The other advantage of this route is that you don’t have to fight your way into the Park through the crowds that throng the main entrance.
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Barcelona’s Architecture – The School
This school building on the Via Laietana in Barcelona has the most hideously sentimental decoration seen outside of a chocolate box or stomach-churning oil paintings of wide-eyed waifs. It’s so bad, I couldn’t resist taking photos.
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Restaurant Can Fabes
When I retired from Shell, my colleagues presented me with the cost of a meal at our (Martin and I) favourite restaurant: Can Fabes.
It’s been almost a year, but last week we finally returned to this three Michelin star restaurant in Sant Celoni (a small town about 50 minutes by train out of Barcelona).
Well, folks, I have to tell you that your gift was thoroughly appreciated by us. We took the Menu Primavera – a 10 course (I think, but I lost count!) meal that started with “aromatic eggs” and ended with coffee and petit fours. The aromatic eggs were sublime – a hen’s egg filled with an egg foam flavoured with rosemary, and a quail’s egg filled with a egg foam flavoured with ginger. The quail’s egg in particular made me think I’d died and gone to Heaven. Along the way we had mackerel, a bouillabaisse flavoured with saffron, baby octopus with macaroni, sweetbreads, sorbet (pear, strawberry and mandarin), and peanut icecream with a caramel tart. To accompany this magisterial meal we had a bottle of Cuvée Santamaria Finca Montagut, a bottle of Alíon 2000 and a glass of Moscatel Soleado Colosia with dessert.
Thank you. We really appreciated it.
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Gaudi’s Casa Batlló
Gaudi’s Casa Batlló house in Barcelona is a magnificent machine for living in. The amalgam between organic design and technology is perfect. Since we were last there in 2003, the attic space has been opened to the public. The whole house is well worth a visit. Pure genius.
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La Boqueria
The La Boqueria market in Barcelona (on the Ramblas) is well worth a visit. Here are a few photos taken last week. The range of foods available is vast. From eggs, nuts, fish, mushrooms, meat through to such interesting delicacies as rabbit tongue, maggots and scorpions covered in chocolate. I have to say that I passed on the last three.
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Twenty Questions
20Q.net is an experiment in artificial intelligence. It’s an eerie take on the old game of Twenty Questions, where you think of something, and the object of the questioner (in this case the neural net program) is to discover what you are thinking in 20 questions or less.
Try it. The more people that play, the better it gets.
There’s now even a portable version of the game, which contains a chip holding 250,000 synaptic connections to the most popular 2,000 objects that people challenge the game with.
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We’ve Been Here Before
Intolerance is on the rise again in The Netherlands. This incident is not the first, and I’m sure won’t be the last. The commentary on it by Bruce Bawer, reproduced by Andrew Sullivan in his blog, makes disturbing reading. That, coupled with the fact that I’ve just finished reading The End of Faith, by Sam Harris, has not put me in a sunny and relaxed mood.
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Cheating on the Brain
Carl Zimmer over on the Loom blog has a nice entry that covers a fascinating aspect of evolutionary psychology: Cheating on the Brain.
This whole field of evolutionary psychology is a fascinating one. One of the books I took to Barcelona was V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain – an absolutely riveting book about the workings of the brain. Professor Ramachandran has a wicked sense of humour – but also manages to convey the sense of wonder about the workings of the human mind, and how they are tied back to the mechanisms in the brain. Brilliant book – read it and open your mind.
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Darth Vader’s Blog
This is surreal and raises a wry smile or two.
Geoff Coupe's Blog 
