Art of balance

[Thanks to Phil]

Apart from the balance, it must take a bunch of raw strength, no wonder he's so ripped.


Tobias Hutzler - BALANCE from Tobias Hutzler.
Artist Maedir Eugster.

Update: DeltaCubed said:
It may take strength, but you don't need to be "ripped":



I'll be durned, it's the exact same performance! Even looks like the same branches. I'm guessing it's a traditional Eastern one.

Graveyard photos

This is a good collection, some pretty, some scary.

I like angels, and have sometimes used them in my own drawings. I'm sure that a human with wings as a symbol of a spiritual being is much older than any specific religion on Earth, and it's so engraved in our collective consciousness that it just works very well, even though logically there's no reason to assume a creature more spiritual just because it has wings. But many angel sculptures are just very beautiful.

Astounding desk

[Thanks to Mark]

I'll bet this took more than a week to make!
I especially like the drawing/writing easel which folds out with a bang.

Banks, out

Iain Banks has died, alas.
Who will replace him and Terry Pratchett who is also very ill? Oh wailey, wailey, wailey!! Crivens, it's a hard wold. (Sorry those are Pratchett quotes rather than Banks quotes, but I happen to be reading a Tiffany Aching book at the moment.)

From Banks' last message:
...an ex-neighbour of ours recalled (in an otherwise entirely kind and welcome comment) me telling him, years ago, that my SF novels effectively subsidised the mainstream works. I think he’s just misremembered, as this has never been the case. Until the last few years or so, when the SF novels started to achieve something approaching parity in sales, the mainstream always out-sold the SF – on average, if my memory isn’t letting me down, by a ratio of about three or four to one. I think a lot of people have assumed that the SF was the trashy but high-selling stuff I had to churn out in order to keep a roof over my head while I wrote the important, serious, non-genre literary novels. Never been the case, and I can’t imagine that I’d have lied about this sort of thing, least of all as some sort of joke. The SF novels have always mattered deeply to me – the Culture series in particular – and while it might not be what people want to hear (academics especially), the mainstream subsidised the SF, not the other way round.

To me, the Culture books have also always been very important. You can say stuff in SF that you simply can't in mainstream novels. You can colorfully dramatise speculation about the nature of reality and consciousness, whereas mainstream novels tend to be either just thrillers or about the wee issues between a guy and his dad.

---

By the way, how do you find new good authors? I’ve read many many authors, and there’s a looooooong haul between finding the ones with the special high-awareness, high skill, aesthetic and humorous qualities of a Pratchett, a Banks, or a William Gibson. Almost everything else I try is just blah. 

Vintage posters

[Thanks to Tommy]

Vintage posters, free, downloadable in high rez.

But; what *is* a safe distance??

... Maybe the photographer should have used this $200,000, 100x zoom TV lens!

U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program

U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program, Washington Post article.
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.
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Dubious music videos

Do you know any really bad music videos?
Admittedly it'll be hard to beat this one, but you don't have to.



No takers? OK, here's a couple more.

Just google for it

"The address Google.com does not exist. Try googling for it." 
Hahaha.

In the old days I thought it was funny, tragic, and lame that the computer could not tell the difference between a nonexisting address and a nonexisting Net connection. Then for some years it could. Now it seems we're back again to this ridiculous state.

By the way, I wonder if Google is going to sue Apple for making the Google name a generic verb?

Alison Brie a la carte

I guess this is funnier if you have seen Community and know how wonderfully innocent and naîve Alison Brie's character Annie is.



... Unfortunately I couldn't find the whole clip of the xmas-costume dance from which there's a couple of seconds at the end here, for it's one of the sexiest things I've seen, prob the hottest xmas song since Eartha Kitt.

I don't know where this is from, but she's very funny like usual:



She really is beautiful. Watch Craig Furguson here, he's so overwhelmed he has to scoot away from her!



====
Quote from the show:
"There will always be a reason not to follow your dreams."
That's great. And it's useful for going either way!

"The Facebook experiment has failed. Let’s go back"

The Facebook experiment has failed. Let’s go back, article.
Since everybody is on Facebook, one can expect that it will in some way mirror the behavior of society in general. In the real world however, people’s opinions only have a limited reach.
Facebook is godsent for people who love to talk, but have nothing to say. Here is a network that doesn’t care about originality or the quality of content. In the time it takes to create something original, they could share dozens of things.
Just like its features, Facebook algorithms are equally stupid. Share more, get noticed more. Originality be damned.
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Scansnap as art scanner

I've mentioned the Fujitso Scansnap before. (In the meantime I got a Mac model.) It's a wonderful, fully automatic document scanner. It rights up documents after scanning*. Does automatic OCR if you want (Optical Character Recognition, reads text off a scan and imbeds it in the file, so you can search for text later). It scans both sides at once! It really great for scanning in your paperwork and such.

It is not a flatbed scanner, and it's not expensive, so it's not meant to be an art scanner. (Art in the wider sense, meaning images.) (One weakness is that the art may shift as it passes through the scanner; and of course it only takes thin objects.) But on a whim, I tested it as such, and I'm impressed.
The durn thing automatically detects if a document should be scanned and treated as color, or greyscale, or B/W. And this quick, one-take scan of a brochure is as perfect as I could have expected in every way.
The font in the brochure is very small and thin, but it's fully readable in the scan. And the color pictures are perfect, the colors are spot on, and I can see at least as much detail in shadow and highlights as I can on the original. (It seems it also adjusts contrast automatically.)

Here's a link to the PDF which the scanner made. 

*Though not successfully in this case, probably because the brochure is cut around the images, no straight edges. BTW, I like the medium grey it fills in the background, much better than black or white.