Maico Akiba carries the world (“sekai”) on the backs of the animal world, using train set dioramas as a source of material to make their awesome creations.
Artist Maico Akiba.
Sekai on the Backs of Animals
Reply
Monthly Archives: August 2014
The Man Who Walked Among Gnomes and Trolls
John Albert Bauer (4 June 1882 – 20 November 1918) was a Swedish painter and illustrator. His paintings dealt with Swedish nature, mythical creatures, and magical places; he also composed portraits.
He is best known for his illustrations in the early releases of Bland tomtar och troll (Among Gnomes and Trolls)
[P]ublisher Carl Adam Victor Lundholm decided to publish a new illustrated book on Lappland. Lundholm asked Bauer to participate in illustrating the book, but to ensure he had made the right decision he sent Bauer to do some test drawings of Sami people at Skansen.
On 15 July 1904, Bauer left for Lappland, where he stayed for a month. Coming from the dense, dark forests of Småland he was overwhelmed by the open vistas and colorful landscapes.
He took many photos, sketched and made notes of all the tools, costumes and objects he saw, but he had difficulty becoming close to the Sami. Details from the Sami culture, such as the bent knives, shoes, spears, pots and belts, became important elements in the clothes and ornamentations of Bauer’s trolls.
Kind of sadly, Bauer was always quite deprecating about his fantastical works, calling it “a nice pat on the head for making funny pictures for children”. For his entire life he dreamed of working instead on the more respectable oil paintings he had been trained on.
Despite this, his friend Ove Eklund was quite certain that Bauer always harbored a belief that the strange peoples of wilds he drew were perhaps not as mythical as many believed.
On November 19, 1918, Bauer, his wife Ester, and their two year old son died in what became an infamous ship disaster. The overloaded steamer they were traveling in capsized in a storm on route to Stockholm, killing all 24 people on board, most while trapped in their cabins.
The papers added fuel to the fire, suggesting that the creatures of the forests had claimed Bauer by sinking the ship, a grisly analog to the tale of the Sea King who lures a maiden into the depths.
Illustrator John Bauer via Wikipedia.
One Thousand Twenty-Four Self-Assembling Kilobots. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
[R]esearchers — Michael Rubenstein, Alejandro Cornejo, and Professor Radhika Nagpal of Harvard’s Self-Organizing Systems Research Group — describe their thousand-robot swarm in a paper published in Science.
Each Kilobot is a small, cheap-ish ($14) device that can move around by vibrating their legs and communicate with other robots with infrared transmitters and receivers.
There are so many robots here that the importance of any individual robot is close to zero: robots can screw up, robots can break down, but there are so many of them that their collective behavior prevails.
There is a lot you could do with these, but one of the more interesting usages is to create self-assembling structures that are dynamically self-repairing, even to the point of phoning home when they need replacements.
What could possibly go wrong with this line of research? One word: Skynet. Just saying.
Via IEEE Spectrum for the full article.
The Loneliest Whale in the World
For years he has roamed singing unrequited songs of yearning, searching for a soul to share his solitary world. His plaintive love songs have been heard by many yet he has never been seen. He is the loneliest whale in the world.
But although he swims in waters that are populated by thousands of other whales no female ever responds because his voice is unusually high for a whale – about 52 Hertz – which is what researchers have named him.
“We don’t know whether he sounds that way because he’s a hybrid of a blue whale and a fin whale or if he’s a blue whale with a physical deformity that causes him to sing at 52 Hertz,” says [marine biologist Mary Ann Daher].
There are a lot of theories as to what 52 Hertz is: Possibly he is a blue whale from the Atlantic who somehow found himself in the Pacific. Possibly he simply has a morphological physical mutation or injury that has resulted in his call being so distinct. We’re not even sure what his species is, whether fin, blue whale, fin-blue whale hybrid (as happens ), or some rare, undiscovered species of whale.
Regardless of which it is, he swims up to 42 miles a day and in one year covered more than 6,873 miles. Since the U.S. Navy only releases data days after an appearance, scientists haven’t been able to actually spot him in person to determine his species.
Top photo of a blue whale such as 52 Hertz is thought to be, though he has never actually been seen – only heard.
Via Express. Also, check out 52 Hertz’s call, sped up x10 on the PMEL Acoustics Program website.
Wasps Nesting in a Bed. Aw, how cute…
Birkett said he got a call from the homeowner’s son on Sunday about a nest that had taken over a bed in a spare bedroom in the home in Worchester, Hampshire. The colony was devouring the bedding.
The nest had grown so large because the family rarely uses the room on the second floor of their five-bedroom home, he said.
The wasps snuck in through an open window and used the bed as their home for nearly three months, chewing through eight inches of the mattress and two pillows.
The exterminator was a little remorseful about having to remove the nest: “That would be quite nice to keep. They’ve worked really hard at this. But [the homeowner] didn’t think that was a great idea.”
Humans. You guys are such damned spoilsports sometimes.
Via ABC News.
Relics from the Japanese Occupation of the American Continent
Kiska Island, in the Aleutians far west of Alaska is also the site of a deadly World War II battle in which only one side fought.
In the early hours of June 7, 1942, 1,200 Japanese soldiers stormed the island. Just 10 Americans were living on the island, operating a weather station.
After killing two of the Americans, the Japanese settled into Kiska and stayed for more than a year, carving out tunnels, building machine gun bunkers, and even planting gardens.
On August 15, 1943, shortly after the Japanese lost Attu Island back to the United States, 34,426 American and Canadian soldiers landed on Kiska Island, only to find the Japanese had evacuated only weeks earlier under cover of fog.
Even so, almost 200 Allied soldiers died due to a combination of friendly fire from soldiers twitchy over fears of Japanese holdouts and booby traps.
In the case of the worst of the friendly fire incidents, U.S. and Canadian forces fired briefly on each other for a loss of 82 men.
Admiral Ernest King reported to the Secretary of the Navy that the only things remaining on the island were “dogs and fresh brewed coffee”. Secretary Knox asked for an explanation, King replied: “The Japanese are very clever. Their dogs can brew coffee”.
Today, the island is a treasure trove of items and emplacements left behind by the Japanese after their withdrawal. Bomb craters, equipment dumps, concrete-lined tunnels, gun emplacements, shipwrecks, and tons of additional war material all remain in this remote island near the end of the Alaskan Aleutians.
Images by photographer Brendan Coyle.
Quoted text via War History Online. Additional info sourced from Wikipedia.
A Human Statistical History of Violence and Death
In the modern era of hyper-connection, it is easy to become too aware of violence, to a degree that is a gross distorting of reality.
This isn’t the first time this phenomenon has been brought up, either; while children in the developed world are in fact safer from the scourge of stranger abduction today than in any time in recorded history, in the United States the fear has been so ratcheted up in the minds of parents that children here have less freedom than ever – parents have been arrested for as innocuous an activity as letting their nine year old child play alone in the park.
Our World in Data decided to take an objective look at the history of this (well, as far as statistics can really be objective, but you get the point). Statistical arguments aside, the data is staggering, and despite the problems of today gives some measure of awareness at how much progress humanity has actually made.
Check out the full presentation at Our World in Data, but here are a few charts to get you started.
Via Our World in Data.