Mad Quickies 6.14

It’s the Friday Quickies! Pencils down! Surf’s up!

• Here are 10 Tips For Creating a Blockbuster Biomedical Game. Frankly, much of this applies to design in general—like, understanding your constraints, for example. A great post! {via Surly Amy}
• Lisa Park uses an EEG headset to create music with her mind. This is something quite amazing and beautiful! Watch “Eunoia” here.
• Zahra’s Paradise is the hero of an Iranian graphic novel by Amir and Khalil. She laso happens to be a virtual candidate for president. {via Daniela}
• File this under Etymological Cartography. These maps have their place names replaced with their original meanings. Here’s the fascinating source: Atlas of True Names. {via miserlyoldman}
• Dadaist Pegasus; an Indian Platypus; Smoking Joker Monkeys; Look at me, I’m wearing the Earth now…and other examples of weird matchbox art.
• Angelo Madrid draws for his blog Freedom to Offend, frequently illustrating George Hrab’s Religious Morons of the Week on the Geologic Podcast.
• High-wire artist Philippe Petit offers 60 ingenious knot designs in his new book Why Knot?
• Bill Nye explains how Superman probably shaves. That’s just one of 10 Sciencey Stats on the Man of Steel.
• Japan’s subway experiment uses beaming blue lights that might actually prevent suicides.
• Zoinks! Jesse Balmer‘s work is totally freaky deaky.
• Tumblr find: Phones Replaced with Sandwiches.

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From the American Museum of Natural History:

Background Paintings in the Dioramas

from the page

Painters such as James Perry Wilson referred to photographs and plein-air paintings to create the backgrounds for the Hall of North American Mammals’ dioramas. Wilson, an architect by training, perfected a grid system to compensate for distortions caused by the curved shape of diorama wall. A self-taught landscape painter who worked at the Museum from 1943 to 1957, Wilson painted backgrounds for 38 Museum dioramas, including 24 in the Hall of North American Mammals, which reopened October 2012.

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From the American Museum of Natural History:

The Art of Diorama Foregrounds

from the page
As a critical first step toward duplicating the natural habitats of the animals in the dioramas, foreground artists went into the field to collect specimens, take meticulous notes, and make paintings to catalog true colors. Back at the Museum, they used the information to re-create the scene with a mix of real flora and finely-crafted fabrications, from balsa wood cactuses to wax pumpkins.

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Featured images are the Japanese iron and the Dadaist Pegasus.

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