Happy Winter Solstice! Here, have some nice Quickies.
- Bloody, Bloody Boudoir Ladies: artist Jessica Harrison turns kitsch ceramics into horror. {via Anne S. and Daniela}
- Omigosh you guys…Otter artistes. {via A Kovacs}
- The science of comic strips.
- A programmable tattoo system. Ha ha. Not really. {via @vincenzof}
- Krystal Higgins created Game of Thrones-themed snowflakes and is sharing them as free printable JPEGs.
- And speaking of Game of Thrones, guess which character this newly discovered sea slug was named after.
- Han and Leia debate whether it’s worth venturing out from the Hoth base to save Luke in this version of Baby, It’s Cold Outside. Kirby Krackle and the Doubleclicks have made a fairly problematic tune likable. {via Anne S.}
- Jennifer Miller baked you a Grinch-Who-Stole-Christmas cake. The dangling Max slays me. [slays. get it? sorry!]
- The internet gave me this beautiful thing today: Jon Carling… everything is vibrating.
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Season’s Greetings and best wishes from The Glasgow School of Art for 2014.
Vintage computers sing a Christmas carol,
from the page
This year’s seasonal e-card comes from alumnus James Houston. James graduated from The Glasgow School of Art in 2008 with a first class degree in Visual Communication. He works in Glasgow as a moving image maker. 1030.co.uk
The ensemble: A collection of vintage Mac computers, a Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum + 1 and a SEGA Mega Drive perform a rendition of “Carol of the Bells” with lyrics re-written by Robert Florence & Philip Larkin in the Mackintosh Library at The Glasgow School of Art. Jacket by Ten30.co.uk (Alan Moore, GSA Textiles alumnus 2008).
James aimed to create a piece of Christmas music by appropriating past Christmas gifts. “I discovered that a few had the capability for speech synthesis so the obvious next step was to figure out how to assemble a choir.” he said. “This is a process which is based on the last piece of work I did as a student at GSA.”
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Jewel Box Sun
from the page
This video of the sun based on data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, shows the wide range of wavelengths — invisible to the naked eye — that the telescope can view. SDO converts the wavelengths into an image humans can see, and the light is colorized into a rainbow of colors.
As the colors sweep around the sun in the movie, viewers should note how different the same area of the sun appears. This happens because each wavelength of light represents solar material at specific temperatures. Different wavelengths convey information about different components of the sun’s surface and atmosphere, so scientists use them to paint a full picture of our constantly changing and varying star.
Yellow light of 5800 Angstroms, for example, generally emanates from material of about 10,000 degrees F (5700 degrees C), which represents the surface of the sun. Extreme ultraviolet light of 94 Angstroms, which is typically colorized in green in SDO images, comes from atoms that are about 11 million degrees F (6,300,000 degrees C) and is a good wavelength for looking at solar flares, which can reach such high temperatures. By examining pictures of the sun in a variety of wavelengths — as is done not only by SDO, but also by NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory and the European Space Agency/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory — scientists can track how particles and heat move through the sun’s atmosphere.
The 2.9 minute movie was created by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio or SVS at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and is available at the SVS website: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?11385
For more information about why scientists observe the sun in different wavelengths, visit:
http://1.usa.gov/1gvGGVn
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Featured image is Flying Lion by Jon Carling.
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