from WAOW Wisconsin

Diamond dog returns missing wedding ring

By Rose Heaphy

STEVENS POINT (WAOW) – A Stevens Point woman found a special surprise in an unlikely place.

Five years ago, Lois Matykowski lost her wedding ring. Matykowski had given up all hope finding it, until her dog, Tucker, led her to a shocking discovery.

Tucker is your typical mutt. He likes playing with his frisbee and rolling on the grass on a hot summer day. “You wouldn’t think he’s ten years old by the way he acts,” said Matykowski.

Like every pup, he likes getting into trouble. “He’s known in the family to be the food burglar,” said Matykowski.

Two weeks ago, Matykowski and her granddaughter were eating popsicles outside.

“After I turn around and look at my granddaughter and the popsicle is gone and there’s Tucker smacking his jaws,” she said. The “Food Burglar” had struck again, swallowing the popsicle whole.

But the snatched food soon came back up and two days later, Tucker started vomiting again. Only this time, it wasn’t a popsicle stick.

“I look in the paper towel and here is my wedding ring,” Matykowski said. “I kid you not. My wedding ring was in Tucker’s puke!”

[ click to read full article at WAOW ]

from The Atlantic

Secrets of the Creative Brain

A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness. 

by Nancy Andreasen

Kyle Bean

As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut—dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut—will always be one of my favorites. Kurt was a faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1960s, and participated in the first big study I did as a member of the university’s psychiatry department. I was examining the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness, and Kurt was an excellent case study.

He was intermittently depressed, but that was only the beginning. His mother had suffered from depression and committed suicide on Mother’s Day, when Kurt was 21 and home on military leave during World War II. His son, Mark, was originally diagnosed with schizophrenia but may actually have bipolar disorder. (Mark, who is a practicing physician, recounts his experiences in two books, The Eden Express and Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, in which he reveals that many family members struggled with psychiatric problems. “My mother, my cousins, and my sisters weren’t doing so great,” he writes. “We had eating disorders, co-dependency, outstanding warrants, drug and alcohol problems, dating and employment problems, and other ‘issues.’ ”)

While mental illness clearly runs in the Vonnegut family, so, I found, does creativity. Kurt’s father was a gifted architect, and his older brother Bernard was a talented physical chemist and inventor who possessed 28 patents. Mark is a writer, and both of Kurt’s daughters are visual artists. Kurt’s work, of course, needs no introduction.

For many of my subjects from that first study—all writers associated with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—mental illness and creativity went hand in hand. This link is not surprising. The archetype of the mad genius dates back to at least classical times, when Aristotle noted, “Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.” This pattern is a recurring theme in Shakespeare’s plays, such as when Theseus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, observes, “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.” John Dryden made a similar point in a heroic couplet: “Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”

Compared with many of history’s creative luminaries, Vonnegut, who died of natural causes, got off relatively easy. Among those who ended up losing their battles with mental illness through suicide are Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, John Berryman, Hart Crane, Mark Rothko, Diane Arbus, Anne Sexton, and Arshile Gorky.

[ click to continue reading at The Atlantic ]

from The NY Daily News

Olivia Wilde responds to GQ film critic claiming she is too hot to portray a writer: ‘Kiss my smart a–’

Olivia Wilde has a witty response for someone who claimed she couldn’t have beauty and brains.

The actress portrays a writer in the romantic thriller “Third Person,” but GQ film critic Tom Carson didn’t find her believable in the role due to her looks.

“She’s supposed to be a writer … but your belief in that won’t outlast (Olivia) Wilde scampering naked through hotel corridors,” Carson wrote in his review of the film. “With that tush, who’d need to be literate? Who’d want to?”

When Jezebel tweeted about Carson’s backhanded compliment, Wilde responded with acerbic humor.

“HA,” she tweeted Tuesday. “Kiss my smart a–, GQ.”

[ click to continue reading at NYDailyNews.com ]

from artnet

Over 60 Artworks Trashed at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf

Alexander Forbes

A disgruntled janitor or group of janitors at the renowned Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Academy of Art) has destroyed over 60 artworks, the Rheinische Post (RP) reports. Mostly canvases, many of the pieces were slashed with a knife and stomped on to break their stretchers. They were then thrown in a dumpster in the academy’s courtyard.

Understandably, the students whose work was trashed are outraged. “The whole situation is extremely emotional,” their chosen representative, Sabrina Straub, told the RP. Many of the works that were destroyed had not yet been assessed by the students’ professors. Others were to be sold.

Considering the consistently illustrious careers of the academy’s alumni—among them some of Germany’s most expensive, such as Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Günther Uecker, and Thomas Schütte, as well as recent star David Ostrowski—the long-term economic impact of the destruction could be in the millions. (For the perpetrator’s sake, we hope none of current-professor Peter Doig’s works happened to fall into the fray.)

The Kunstakademie Düsseldorf’s director, Rita McBride, was similarly floored by the incident. “It’s just terrible for the students,” she told the paper. “The works are irreplaceable.” However, in a letter to the academy’s student body the administration’s contrition was more measured. It read, “Relevant members of the janitorial staff have been spoken to about their flawed approach,” in this matter.

[ click to continue reading at artnet.com ]

from The Financial Times

Felix Dennis, the improbable magazine entrepreneur

By Matthew Engel

Felix Dennis, center, with James Anderson, left, and Richard Neville, editors of Oz, after being found guilty of corrupting public morals in 1971. (United Press International)

Felix Dennis, whose death aged 67 was announced on Monday, was one of Britain’s most successful media entrepreneurs and by a long distance the most improbable. Reaction varied from amazement that he had lived as long as he did, to shock that such a seemingly unstoppable force had allowed a mere disease to get the better of him.

John Brown, a friend and business associate, compared him to Richard Branson in his willingness to court failure and, if it happened, shrug it off. “Felix had irrepressible energy, loads of ideas and faith in his own abilities. And he just charged ahead.”

He charged ahead out of the office too. Dennis had revelled in the Sixties lifestyle: “Free sex with no downside,” he would recall. “Women were walking down the street in miniskirts, in what looked like their underwear. It was almost too much for anyone to stand.” All his life there were a lot of cigarettes and whisky and wild, wild women – and drugs, including a spell as a crack addict. Some, however, thought that Dennis was inclined to overstate the quantity of drugs and sex, just a bit. He once claimed, in a newspaper interview, to have pushed a man over a cliff. And no one seemed to believe that at all.

He did find the time for a remarkably varied set of achievements. Dennis was a popular performance poet (particularly when he offered free wine from his cellar as well). He established the Heart of England Forest near his Warwickshire home, which now has more than 1m saplings. And he had a large, themed collection of bronze sculptures.

[ click to read full article at FT.com ]

from The Guardian

US student is rescued from giant vagina sculpture in Germany

More than 20 firefighters free exchange student from the artwork Chacán-Pi (Making Love) by Fernando de la Jara in Tübingen

by Philip Oltermann in Berlin

The student waits to be rescued. Photograph: Erick Guzman/Imgur

On Friday afternoon, a young American in Tübingen had to be rescued by 22 firefighters after getting trapped inside a giantsculpture of a vagina. The Chacán-Pi (Making Love) artwork by the Peruvian artist Fernando de la Jara has been outside Tübingen University’s institute for microbiology and virology since 2001 and had previously mainly attracted juvenile sniggers rather than adventurous explorers.

According to De la Jara, the 32-ton sculpture made out of red Veronese marble is meant to signify “the gateway to the world”.

Police confirmed that the firefighters turned midwives delivered the student “by hand and without the application of tools”.

[ click to read full article at The Guardian ]

from Interview

KENNETH ANGER

To describe Kenneth Anger as a “cult filmmaker” seems requisite but incomplete. The 87-year-old native Angeleno is indeed the writer and director of the surrealist shortsInauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954-66), Scorpio Rising (1963), and Lucifer Rising (1970-81)—some of the wildest and most profoundly influential experimental films of the last century. But his salacious narrative history of the industry, Hollywood Babylon, originally published in 1960, is also kitsch-famous, a kind of gossip gospel in the land of holy celebrity. His film and video works are in the permanent collections of various museums of modern art. And he is also the most famous living practitioner of Thelema—the ritual-based doctrine dictated to Aleister Crowley by the spiritual messenger Aiwass.

Over the course of his multivalent career, Anger has worked with and befriended such artists as Marianne Faithfull (a collaborator on Lucifer Rising), the surrealist Jean Cocteau, guitar god Jimmy Page, sexologist Alfred Kinsey, and Tennessee Williams, as well as fellow Thelemite Marjorie Cameron—star of Pleasure Dome and onetime wife of Jet Propulsion Laboratory founder Jack Parsons. Anger is the godfather of homoerotic cinema, having made his pioneeringFireworks in 1947. He has been famously obscene (and charged as such for Fireworks in California), happily hallucinogenic (his Invocation of My Demon Brother from 1969 was famously evocative of an acid trip), and quite consciously provocative (see all). Inside the industry, he’s never found a place to rest—he has Lucifer tatted on his chest. And he’s seen UFOs—three times.

Painter and filmmaker—and something of a hell-raiser himself—Harmony Korine has long appreciated the work and legend of Anger, but the two have never really had the chance to speak. We thought they should, so in April, Korine called Anger from his home in Nashville to discover that his hero is still working outside of the mainstream, still a scabrous critic of Hollywood, and still speculating about that Malaysia Airlines flight.

[ click to continue reading at Interview ]

from Cinetropolis via Reddit

[ click to check out Cinetropolis ]

from TIME

Study: Food Trucks May Be Safer Than Restaurants

by Aleksandra Gjorgievska

Food trucks gather at Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto on April 2, 2014.Andrew Francis —Toronto Star/Getty Images

Food trucks in 7 cities performed better than or the same as restaurants on food safety inspection reports

Grabbing your lunch from a food truck may be a safer option than sitting down at a restaurant, according to a new study.

After examining over 260,000 food inspection reports, researchers from a public law interest firm in Virginia foundthat in each of the seven examined cities—Boston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Louisville, Miami, Seattle and Washington, D.C.—food trucks performed better than or as well as restaurants.

In every city except Seattle, food trucks averaged fewer sanitation violations than restaurants. In Seattle, the number of violations for food trucks was also lower but was not statistically significant, which means that food trucks and restaurants performed approximately the same. The study, called “Street Eats, Safe Eats,” looked at cities where food trucks and restaurants are obliged to follow the same health guidelines.

[ click to continue reading at TIME ]

from SPLOID

The designer of the F-16 explains why the F-35 is such a crappy plane

by Casey Chan

According to the Pierre Sprey, co-designer of the F-16, the F35 is a turkey. Inherently, a terrible airplane. An airplane built for a dumb idea. A kludge that will fail time and time again. Just impossibly hopeless. And judging from the bajillion times the F-35 fleet has been grounded, well, he’s probably not wrong. It’s a trillion dollar failure. Watch Sprey eviscerate the F-35 in the video above.

[ click to read at gizmodo ]

from The Telegraph

Mt Etna eruption disrupts tourist flights to Sicily

Eruption of Mt Etna, Europe’s most active volcano, results in delays and disruptions for tourists trying to reach Sicily

By Nick Squires, Rome

Flights into and out of the Italian city of Catania have been disrupted by the eruption of Mt Etna, Europe’s most active volcano.

Catania airport remained open but two air space corridors were temporarily closed on Monday, resulting in delays and disruptions for tourists trying to reach Sicily.

The volcano, which looms over Catania, put on an impressive pyrotechnics display, belching molten lava and sending plumes of ash into the sky.

Most of the activity came from a crater on the south-east side of the mountain.

This latest eruption began on Sunday and was the first major activity this year.

Dominating the landscape in eastern Sicily between Catania and the popular tourist town of Taormina, Etna is one of the most active volcanoes in the world.

The fertile volcanic soils on its flanks support extensive agriculture, including vineyards and orchards.

[ click to continue reading at The Telegraph ]

pledge at Kickstarter

BANDITO is the coming-of-age epic tale of a young boy, who sneaks out to join his older brother on a life-changing semi-truck robbery.

[ click to pledge now ]

from The Telegraph UK

Poachers kill one of the world’s largest elephants in Kenya

Poachers hack the face and tusks off Satao, one of Kenya’s most famous elephants, as conservationists warn elephant poaching “is at least 10 times the official figures”

Satao’s enormous tusks classed him among the largest elephants left alive in the world Photo: RICHARD MOLLER/TSAVO TRUST

By Zoe Flood, Nairobi

One of Africa’s last ‘great tuskers’, elephants with ivory weighing over 100lbs, has been poisoned to death by poachers in Kenya after years of adapting his behaviour to hide himself from humans.

The bull, named Satao and likely born in the late 1960s, succumbed to wounds from poison darts in a remote corner of Tsavo National Park where he had migrated to find fresh water after recent storms.

His carcass yesterday lay with its face and great tusks hacked off, four legs splayed where he fell with his last breath, left only for the vultures and the scavengers.

Conservationists told how he moved from bush to bush always keeping his ivory hidden amongst the foliage.

“I’m convinced he did that to hide his tusks from humans, he had an awareness that they were a danger to him,” said Mark Deeble, a British documentary filmmaker who has spent long periods of time filming Satao.

The elephant’s killing is the latest in a massive surge of poaching of the mammals for their ivory across Africa.

Richard Moller, of The Tsavo Trust, who had been monitoring Satao for several months confirmed that the elephant found dead on May 30 was indeed Satao, whom he called “an icon”.

“There is no doubt that Satao is dead, killed by an ivory poacher’s poisoned arrow to feed the seemingly insatiable demand for ivory in far off countries,” Mr Moller said.

“A great life lost so that someone far away can have a trinket on their mantelpiece.”

[ click to continue reading at The Telegraph ]

from NY Times

Poetry: Who Needs It?

By WILLIAM LOGAN

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — WE live in the age of grace and the age of futility, the age of speed and the age of dullness. The way we live now is not poetic. We live prose, we breathe prose, and we drink, alas, prose. There is prose that does us no great harm, and that may even, in small doses, prove medicinal, the way snake oil cured everything by curing nothing. But to live continually in the natter of ill-written and ill-spoken prose is to become deaf to what language can do.

The dirty secret of poetry is that it is loved by some, loathed by many, and bought by almost no one. (Is this the silent majority? Well, once the “silent majority” meant the dead.) We now have a poetry month, and a poet laureate — the latest, Charles Wright, announced just last week — and poetry plastered in buses and subway cars like advertising placards. If the subway line won’t run it, the poet can always tweet it, so long as it’s only 20 words or so. We have all these ways of throwing poetry at the crowd, but the crowd is not composed of people who particularly want to read poetry — or who, having read a little poetry, are likely to buy the latest edition of “Paradise Lost.”

This is not a disaster. Most people are also unlikely to attend the ballet, or an evening with a chamber-music quartet, or the latest exhibition of Georges de La Tour. Poetry has long been a major art with a minor audience. Poets have always found it hard to make a living — at poetry, that is. The exceptions who discovered that a few sonnets could be turned into a bankroll might have made just as much money betting on the South Sea Bubble.

There are still those odd sorts, no doubt disturbed, and unsocial, and torturers of cats, who love poetry nevertheless. They come in ones or twos to the difficult monologues of Browning, or the shadowy quatrains of Emily Dickinson, or the awful but cheerful poems of Elizabeth Bishop, finding something there not in the novel or the pop song.

This is not a disaster. Most people are also unlikely to attend the ballet, or an evening with a chamber-music quartet, or the latest exhibition of Georges de La Tour. Poetry has long been a major art with a minor audience. Poets have always found it hard to make a living — at poetry, that is. The exceptions who discovered that a few sonnets could be turned into a bankroll might have made just as much money betting on the South Sea Bubble.

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from PASTE Magazine

Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon

By Brent Simon

A documentary about its titular talent manager, Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, directed by writer-actor Mike Myers, has the potential to be a slice of yawning, self-congratulatory star-fuckery of the highest order. After all, in addition to its famous director, it has plenty of recognizable celebrities who all line up to sing the praises of its subject. And yet, thanks to whip-smart pacing, this warm-hearted and unfussy nonfiction valentine emerges as an engaging portrait of a life less ordinary—a man who embraced and promulgated selflessness, even while, in his early days, indulging in druggy partying and frequently sporting a T-shirt that read, “No head, no backstage pass.”

Gordon looks like your average Florida retiree but sounds rather like the late Sydney Pollack, erudite and measured, except when his laugh—halfway between a chuckle and a goose’s honk—comes bursting forth. What helps further differentiate him is the fact that wild yarns trail him like a speedboat’s wake. A self-described social liberal who graduated from the University of Buffalo but quickly abandoned his dreams of becoming a probation officer, Gordon tells a story of occupational focusing so random and fanciful that it defies belief: a day after arriving in Los Angeles and taking a room at the Landmark Motor Hotel, he took some LSD, and later responded to the screams of a woman he thought was being sexually assaulted. She beat the crap out of him (turns out she was merely in the throes of ecstasy). The next day the duo apologized to one another, and since Gordon had a lot of marijuana, he shared it. The guy she was with suggested he become a manager. It turns out that woman and man were Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, respectively, and within a week Gordon was managing Alice Cooper and Pink Floyd.

Though the latter relationship would only last nine days (Gordon freely admits he had no idea what he was doing), his relationship with shock-rocker Cooper would endure decades. Gordon was less interested in the music than the manipulation of the moment, ginning up controversy wherever they went—trying to get Cooper arrested for wearing see-through clothes, and insisting on wrapping the vinyl records of Cooper’s 1972 album School’s Out in panties. He saw the value in marketed rebellion, but Gordon also had a conscience. Later, working with Teddy Pendergrass and other African-American artists, he sought to break free from the constraints of the so-called “chitlin’ circuit,” in which artists were frequently stiffed performance fees.

[ click to continue reading at PASTE ]

from BREITBART NEWS

THAD COCHRAN: I GREW UP DOING ‘ALL KINDS OF INDECENT THINGS WITH ANIMALS’

by MATTHEW BOYLE

Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) provided his latest head-scratching comment in public, this time joking he engaged in illicit activities with animals as a child.

“[We’d] get back [to the Pine Belt-Hattiesburg area of Mississippi] as often as we could because it was fun—it was an adventure to be out there in the country and see what goes on,” Cochran said of his childhood and how parts of his family lived in the central part of the state. “Picking up pecans, from that to all kind of indecent things with animals.”

The audience laughed at that point, video published by the Jackson Clarion-Ledger shows. Cochran’s facial expressions did not change, nor did his stance or demeanor. “I know some of you know what that is,” he continued. “The whole point of the story is not just coming here to visit cousins and get to know aunts and uncles better, you absorb the culture and you know what’s important to people here. I feel very comfortable here and have an identity with this area of the state that’s different than any other.”

[ click to continue reading at Breitbart.com ]

from The Wall Street Journal

The Shawshank Residuals

How one of Hollywood’s great second acts keeps making money

By RUSSELL ADAMS

Bob Gunton is a character actor with 125 credits to his name, including several seasons of “24” and “Desperate Housewives” and a host of movie roles in films such as the Oscar-winning “Argo.” Vaguely familiar faces like his are common in the Los Angeles area where he lives, and nobody pays much attention. Many of his roles have been forgotten.

But every day, the 68-year-old actor says, he hears the whispers—from cabdrivers, waiters, the new bag boy at his neighborhood supermarket: “That’s the warden in ‘Shawshank.’ ”

He also still gets residual payments—not huge, but steady, close to six figures by the film’s 10th anniversary in 2004. Since then, he has continued to get “a very substantial income” long past the age when residuals usually dry up.

“I suspect my daughter, years from now, will still be getting checks,” he said.

[ click to continue reading at WSJ.com ]

from The LA Times

Bob Welch, Pitching Ace and Prototype for Today’s Power Arms, Dies at 57

Bob Welch, a flame-throwing right-hander for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Oakland A’s who overcame alcoholism to win 211 games, including 27 in 1990, a single-season total no other pitcher has reached in the past 40 years, died on Monday in Seal Beach, Calif. He was 57.

Welch played 17 seasons in the big leagues, from 1978 to 1994, was named to two All-Star teams, one in each league, and won the American League Cy Young Award in 1990. He was among the hardest throwers of his era, a rangy and athletic prototype of the so-called power arms who now flood the rotations and bullpens of major league teams, challenging opposing lineups with their 95-mile-per-hour fastballs.

His blistering fastball, and his poise, received an early showcase at the end of his rookie season with the Dodgers, when he was called in from the bullpen to protect a one-run lead with one out in the ninth inning of Game 2 of the 1978 World Series against the Yankees.

Two men were on base, and after getting Thurman Munson to fly out he faced Reggie Jackson, the Hall of Fame slugger who the year before had clinched the Series for the Yankees, also against the Dodgers, with three homers in Game 6.

In an at-bat that lasted more than five minutes and became one of baseball’s most famous showdowns, Welch, who was just 21, threw nine pitches, all fastballs, and with a 3-2 count blazed one on — or maybe just off — the inside corner. Jackson swung violently and missed, ending the game.

[ click to read full article at LATimes.com ]

from artnet

Artist Enacts Origin of the World at Musée d’Orsay—And, Yes, That Means What You Think

Benjamin Sutton

On May 29 the Luxembourgian performance artist Deborah de Robertis visited Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, sat down in front of Gustave Courbet’s infamous 1866 painting L’Origine du monde (Origin of the World), and recreated the iconic image in the flesh. In a video of the piece, titled Mirror of Origin, the artist can be seen dressed in a gold sequin dress, exposing her vagina while the museum’s security guards crowding around her and usher cheering visitors out of the gallery. The artist was eventually taken away by police. The museum and two of its guards have filed sexual exhibitionism complaints against the artist.

“If you ignore the context, you could construe this performance as an act of exhibitionism, but what I did was not an impulsive act,” De Robertis told Luxemburger Wort. “There is a gap in art history, the absent point of view of the object of the gaze. In his realist painting, the painter shows the open legs, but the vagina remains closed. He does not reveal the hole, that is to say, the eye. I am not showing my vagina, but I am revealing what we do not see in the painting, the eye of the vagina, the black hole, this concealed eye, this chasm, which, beyond the flesh, refers to infinity, to the origin of the origin.”

[ click to continue gaping at artnet.com ]

from The NY Daily News

John Waters details his cross-country hitchhiking adventure in his new book ‘Carsick’

Cult director began his journey in May 2012 at end of his street to catch a ride to Interstate 70. That began a nine-day, 21-ride odyssey from Baltimore to San Francisco

by MARIANNE GARVEY, BRIAN NIEMIETZ AND OLI COLEMAN WITH MOLLY FRIEDMAN

Famed cult director John Waters was 66 when he decided it would be a great idea to hitchhike across the country and write a book about his experience.

“I make a living thinking up weird things to do,” says Waters, now 68, who directed such camp classics as the original “Hairspray” and “Pink Flamingos.” “That’s what I do every morning.”

His nine-day, 21-ride odyssey from Baltimore to San Francisco (he has homes in both cities) is detailed in a road-trippy new book, “Carsick.”

Not mentioned in the memoir is that Waters made it back to New York in time to accept a Council of Fashion Designers of America award on behalf of absentee Johnny Depp in 2012.

Waters, who had directed Depp in “Cry-Baby,” was such a hit that the CFDA asked him to host the whole glittering shebang Monday at Lincoln Center. It seems the director — famous for his pencil mustache — always had a passion for fashion.

[ click to continue reading at NYDailyNews.com ]

from The Financial Times

Dawn of a robot revolution as army of machines escape the factory

By Chris Bryant in Frankfurt

Cleaning the Sydney Harbour Bridge used to be a dangerous, dirty and laborious job. As soon as a team of workers, operating a sandblaster, reached one end of the iconic structure they had to start again to keep 485,000 square metres of steel pristine.

Now two robots called Rosie and Sandy, built by SABRE Autonomous Solutions, blast away paint and corrosion all day long without a break. They determine which area needs most attention via a laser scan and move about on rails.

“A sand blaster can slice through flesh. Automating jobs like that is a good thing, it helps improve the quality of human work,” says Roko Tschakarow, head of the Mobile Gripper Systems Division at Schunk, which supplies the lightweight robot arm for the Sydney robots.’

However, first various ethical, legal and societal issues will need to be addressed.

“If a heavy robot falls on your grandma, without a clear legal framework, what’s going to happen?,” asks Mr Champion at Robolution.

[ click to read full article at FT.com ]

from Yahoo! News

Hidden Beached Whale Revealed in 17th-Century Dutch Painting

By by Megan Gannon, News Editor

View of Scheveningen Sands, before and after conservators uncovered a beached whale in the painting. (Fitzwilliam …

When art conservators in the United Kingdom were cleaning a 17th-century Dutch seascape, they found a surprise: an image of a beached whale that had been hidden for at least 150 years.

Until recently, the painting — “View of Scheveningen Sands,” created by Hendrick van Anthonissen around 1641 — simply showed groups of people gathered on a beach in The Hague in the Netherlands.

“It seemed a very unassuming painting depicting a very calm beach scene set in winter,” Shan Kuang, a conservation student at the University of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, said in a new video explaining the strange find. “There were clusters of people gathered. I was unclear why they were there, but it didn’t seem too out of normal.” [Image Gallery: Technology Reveals Hidden Art Treasures]

Kuang was tasked with removing a coat of varnish, which is typically found on oil paintings, but unfortunately yellows over time. When she began cleaning, a figure emerged on the horizon of the ocean next to a shape that looked like a sail. This was “extremely peculiar and unexpected,” Kuang said. But further cleaning with a scalpel and solvent revealed the floating figure was actually standing on top of a whale, and what at first appeared to be a sail was actually the whale’s fin.

At the time the painting was created, there was a surge of public interest in whales, researchers at the museum said, noting that historical records document a number of whale strandings on the coastline of the Netherlands in the beginning of the 17th century.

[ click to continue reading at Yahoo! ]

from The Atlantic

Science Confirms: Yup, This Book Really Is Bound in Human Skin

ALEXIS C. MADRIGAL

Surely, you’ve seen our recent work on anthropodermic bibliopegy, the early modern practice of binding books in human skin?

No? Well, a quick refresher: some books, since the 16th century but before our own time, were bound in human skin. Why? “The confessions of criminals were occasionally bound in the skin of the convicted,” Harvard librarian Heather Cole explained, “or an individual might request to be memorialized for family or lovers in the form of a book.”

Qué romantico!

Anyway, we know it happened because people refer to it happening in the literature of the time, and also because some books bore inscriptions that literally said that they were bound in skin.

But such tomes are suspect. You can’t just trust anyone who says they’ve bound a book in human skin. For example, one had this inscription, but turned out to be stupid sheepskin:

The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King Mbesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it.

[ click to continue reading at The Atlantic ]

from The LA Times

Marilyn Beck, longtime syndicated Hollywood columnist, dies at 85

(Ron Galella, WireImage)

STEVE CHAWKINS

Marilyn Beck, a syndicated Hollywood columnist who for decades dished out delectable dollops on celebrities hooking up, splitting up and cracking up, has died at her Oceanside home. She was 85.

At its peak, Beck’s column was featured in some 500 newspapers with a total circulation of 38 million. She also was a familiar presence on television’s syndicated “PM Magazine” and E! Entertainment’s “The Gossip Show.”

As an interviewer, Beck was genial but brash. In a TV appearance, she asked her longtime friend Barbara Walters, then in her 50s, whether she’d had cosmetic surgery. (The answer was no.) She also tried to pin down Bob Hope on the size of his fortune and discovered it was more than $100 million but less than $500 million. (Time magazine got the half-billion-dollar estimate from “some kid backstage,” Hope fumed.)

[ click to continue reading at LATimes.com ]

from International Business Times

Korea’s Dinosaur Robot Outruns Usain Bolt

By Mary-Ann Russon

Scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have built a fast-running biped robot that can reach a top speed of 46 km/hour (28.6mph) on a treadmill.

Inspired by the velociraptor – the predatory dinosaur which lived 75 million years ago, and was made infamous by Jurassic Park – the scientists decided to build a sprinting robot with two legs and a mechanism that works as a tail.

While Raptor is not as fast as Boston Dynamics’ Cheetah, the world’s reigning fastest legged robot, which has a top speed of 47 km/hr, the new Korean robot can beat Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt, the fastest human ever whose top speed is estimated to be 43.92 km/hr.

The two robots are also very different in the way they have been built.

Cheetah is a four-legged quadroped robot powered by hydraulic actuators and is heavy, but the Raptor only has two legs, which are made from lightweight composite material, and it weighs just 3kg.

The Raptor also has a ‘tail’ – a spinning rod – that keeps its body stable as it navigates around and over obstacles, according to Jongwon Park, a PhD student at KAIST’s Mechatronics, Systems, and Control Laboratory.

[ click to continue reading at IBT ]

from DEADLINE Hollywood

Fox 2000, Temple Hill To Bring EDM Mogul Pasquale Rotella’s Life To Screen, Buying James Frey-Penned Memoir

By MIKE FLEMING JR

EXCLUSIVE: Based on a book proposal, Fox 2000 has made a preemptive acquisition of Insomniac: The Life And Times of Pasquale Rotella, a memoir that the Electronic Dance Music mogul is writing with A Million Little Pieces author James Frey. The book, which St. Martin’s Press will publish next summer, tells of Rotella’s rags to riches ride as the architect of Insomniac, a company behind the biggest EDM events in the country. Rotella became a promoter at the beginning of the rave scene in the early 1990s, starting with 50 people in warehouses in Venice Beach, to staging events like the Electric Daisy Carnival Flagship Festival, which draws 400,000 to Vegas each June. He reportedly sold half his company to Live Nation for $50 million.

Temple Hill‘s Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen will produce with Haven Entertainment’s Rachel Miller, and Fox 2000′s Elizabeth Gabler and Erin Siminoff will oversee it with Temple Hill’s Isaac Klausner. The studio views it as a way into the immensely popular EDM world, with an edgy 8 Mile/Social Network-type look look at a provocative character scratching for his share of the American dream. Mollie Glick at Foundry and Lev Ginsburg at Ginsburg Daniels brokered the deal. Frey’s repped by WME.

[ click to continue reading at DEADLINE.com ]