Yanko Tsvetkov, a Bulgarian designer and illustrator living in London, has produced seven maps in which countries and regions are labelled according to the stereotypes of their inhabitants held by the people of other.
Excellent stuff.
nationalities.http://alphadesigner.com/project-mapping-stereotypes.html
Europe from the US
Image via Wikipedia
A forgery of a forgery is no original but can still have considerable value……
From Der Spiegel:
A Dresden court has sentenced a woman for forging copies of masterpieces made by Konrad Kujau, famous as the author of the “Hitler Diaries.” Copies of his copies allegedly earned the convict 300,000 euros.
The story sounds like it could be made up, an elaborate hoax meant to fool Germany’s media and public alike. A woman claiming to be the great niece of Konrad Kujau, author of the mother of all forgeries, the “Hitler Diaries,” has been convicted of selling forged versions of paintings made by Kujau in his later years, themselves copies of famous masterpieces.
The falsifications in question were, absurdly, fakes of Konrad Kujau’s own copies of masterpieces from artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Franz Marc and Claude Monet. A talented artist, Kujau, who died in 2000, turned to producing fakes in the late 1980s following his four-year stint in prison for fraud stemming from the “Hitler Diaries” case. Though clearly marked as fakes, Kujau’s newfound fame meant that people were willing to pay up to €3,500 for his work. He also sold many of his own pieces.
Petra Kujau worked for Konrad Kujau for a time in the 1990s. Prosecutors on Thursday, however, expressed doubt that she was in fact related to the famous forger.
Dresden prosecutors say that Petra Kujau and her accomplice purchased fakes produced in Asia before attaching Konrad Kujau’s signature to them and selling them on. She was convicted and sentenced on the basis of the 40 counts she ultimately confessed to.
Image via Wikipedia
The Guardian reports that Spike Walker was awarded the Royal Photographic Society‘s combined Royal Colleges medal for his ‘outstanding contribution to photography and its application in the service of medicine’. A retired schoolteacher, Spike produces photomicrographs in his garage, which he has converted into a laboratory
Dopamine is a key neurotransmitter released in our brains when we do something rewarding. The dopaminergic system is behind most good feelings we have, and it is also the chemical that is targeted by highly addictive drugs such as cocaine.
The Beautiful Brain: To create this beautiful micrograph of dopamine crystals, Spike Walker, who won Thursday evening’s Royal Photographic Society‘s Combined Royal Colleges Medal, shone polarized light at the minute chemical structures. The crystals reflect light at different wavelengths depending on their orientations within the overall chemical structure. According to Walker, using this technique highlights more detail in the crystal structure than regular observation through a microscope.
No wonder sunflowers are obsessed !!
Researchers at Big Bear Solar Observatory have tuned their adaptive optics array and achieved first light, capturing this image of a sunspot that is now the most detailed ever captured in visible light. The image was captured with Big Bear’s New Solar Telescope (NST), a brand new instrument (as the name implies) with a resolution of just 50 miles on the sun’s surface. http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/article_image_large/articles/011-03410-01high.jpg
The NST is the precursor to an even-larger telescope, the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST), which will be constructed over the next decade, allowing Big Bear researchers to build a new kind of adaptive optics system known as multi-conjugate adaptive optics, that should provide them with a clear, distortion-free means of observing the sun from Earth in unrivaled detail.
The history of shoe throwing is not very old, and the first such incident in recent history took place against President George W Bush on his visit to Iraq in 2008. Since then, several political leaders worldwide, including a Chinese premier, have become targets of fancy footwear by people who found it a happy outlet of their resentments. Throwing shoes as an extension of showing the sole of one’s foot or using shoes to insult are forms of protest primarily associated with the Arab world. Pointing ones feet at someone is a general mark of disrespect across most of Asia.
Graduate student arrested for throwing a shoe at Wen February 2, 2009
Shoe- throwing has quickly become an unambiguous, easily understood and visible expression of political contempt, dissent and outrage coupled to a helplessness against the “establishment”. It may well characterise a new behavioural pattern for those who consider themselves disenfranchised and down-trodden.
It is time to establish some standard guide-lines for shoe-throwing and shoe-throwers:
1. Do not wear the shoe to be thrown.
2.Carry the shoe to be thrown in a plastic “smell-proof” bag so as not to annoy your neighbors.
3. Choose a shoe that is not too heavy (no boots or metal studs) and one you will not miss.
4. Choose a light, brightly coloured shoe which shows up well on camera.
5. Arrange for an accomplice to film the event and upload the video quickly to You-tube.
6. Stand within your throwing distance but not too far from an exit. If possible stand at an exit.
7. Do not have your name on the shoe.
8. If using a well known brand, ensure that the brand name is clearly visible.
9. Keep photographs of the shoe taken before it was thrown for possible sale to the press later.
10. Have your “statement of contempt” or any other manifesto available and ready to issue on the web and as a press release.
11. Have one copy of your statement within the shoe to be thrown.
12. Activate your lawyer before the shoe is thrown and have him and a doctor available close to the nearest lock-up or police station.
A partial Lunar Eclipse will take place on June 26th. Observers in Canada, the US and East Asia will be able to see the eclipse when the moon is near the horizon when the Moon illusion is also apparent.
The moon illusion refers to the moon seeming larger when it is near the horizon than when it is high in the sky. Some people judge it to be as much as twice as large, but the average estimate is 50% to 75% larger. But this an optical illusion.
A picture “explaining” the illusion and a few of the wonderful moon images at mgstock9.co.cc/moon-illusion
Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, was born on May 1, 1852 in Navarre, Spain. His drawings of what he saw in his light microscope slides are the inspiration for Cajal’s Butterflies of the Soul (2010) by Javier DeFelipe, Oxford University Press. The book contains two-hundred and eighty-two exquisite images of the brain.
Exquisite Data: a Review of Cajal’s Butterflies of the Soul
The k2p blog 
