social science palooza

social science experiment summaries

fascinating...

mind-blowing revelation

via ubersuper.

my dream car...

watch this awesome vid about pakistan's truck art.

really neat!

also, i really do want a vintage beetle... the paintings would be a bonus. ;)

you should watch this

for all you science geeks and even for you regular joe shmoes, it's pretty freaking interesting.

water droplet at 2000 frames per second

life rulez

artsy news: the superbowl bet

so, since the colts lost, the indianapolis museum of art will be loaning joseph turner's "the fifth plague of egypt" to the new orleans museum of art. had we won, NOMA would have loaned claude lorrain's "ideal view of tivoli". apparently there is going to be quite a big space on the wall at the IMA, as the turner was prominently placed...  full story below

 

Sports and art don’t usually mix. But this year, on Super Bowl Sunday, they will.

Two directors from Super Bowl contender city art museums–the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art–are getting in on the Big Game by wagering major art loans on the outcome of the Saints-Colts matchup.

The bet, just finalized this afternoon, is this: If the Colts win, IMA will get a three-month loan of NoMA’s 1644 painting “Ideal View of Tivoli” by Claude Lorrain, a French artist considered the father of landscape painting. If the Saints win, NoMA will get to borrow IMA’s Joseph Turner oil painting “The Fifth Plague of Egypt,” for three months. Both works are now hung prominently in their respective museums.

“There’s going to be a big hole in the wall if it has to go south,” says IMA director Maxwell Anderson of the Turner painting.

Initially, Anderson kicked off betting by offering a painting by Ingrid Calame. But John Bullard, NoMA’s director, countered by calling it “insignificant.” He placed the museum’s $4 million Renoir “Seamstress at a Window” on the table, to which Anderson tweeted: “We’ll see that sentimental blancmange by that ‘China Painter’ and raise you a proper trophy.” (The “trophy” is a jeweled cup by Jean-Valentin Morel made of gold, emerald, rubies and sapphire that won the Gran Medal at the 1855 Paris World’s Fair.) Bullard rejected it, and in an interview called the piece “a gaudy tchotchke.”

At one point, Anderson asked for NoMA’s portrait of Marie Antoinette by Élisabeth-Louise Vigee Lebrun, which, via the museum’s Twitter account, Bullard said was “too fragile to travel, much like Favre,” a dig at the Vikings quarterback whom the Saints beat in overtime on Sunday.

The idea for the wager was spurred by arts blogger Tyler Green, who earlier this week tweeted and wrote on his Modern Art Notes blog that the two should make a bet on the Super Bowl. Anderson took the bait right away. “I thought it was a great way to get people who follow sports but don’t necessarily consider arts at the top of their agenda to pay attention,” he tells Speakeasy.

Naturally, both museums are convinced that they won’t need to bust out the packing materials and spackle come Super Bowl Sunday. Anderson says he’s already spoken with his curator of early European Art and determined where the Claude Lorrain painting will hang. “We’re in full battle cry, preparing for the glorious arrival,” he says.

Bullard says New Orleans is looking forward to the potential loan. “We’re the magic team this year,” says Bullard of the Saints. “I’m absolutely confident.”

from: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/01/27/art-musuems-make-a-super-bowl-bet/tab/article/

original bet post: http://www.artsjournal.com/man/2010/01/super_bowl_loan_challenge.html

ACCENTS ARE NOT OPTIONAL IN FRENCH

this post illustrates the fact that i am a NERD. this forum header from wordreference.com cracks me up!

i know, ridiculous.

but, since my blog is titled in french, it kinda goes... hahahaha I EMBRACE MY NERDINESS!!! :D

artsy news: exhume leo?

Creative art historians have made a cottage industry out of trying to prove various theories about the Mona Lisa (she was the mistress of Giuliano di Medici!), her elusive smile (an optical illusion!), and even her health (she's pregnant!), but never has anyone gone to the macabre lengths proposed by a team of Italian scientists and art historians.

In an effort to investigate an outside-the-box hypothesis that the famous portrait is actually a disguised self-portrait of da Vinci, the group has requested permission to open the Renaissance master's tomb and use his skull to "rebuild Leonardo's face and compare it with the Mona Lisa," anthropologist Giorgio Gruppioni told the Times of London.

Da Vinci's remains reside at Amboise Castle in France's Loire valley, where they were taken after the church where he was originally laid to rest was destroyed during the French Revolution. Thus far the scholars say the French government has agreed to allow the exhumation in principle, and that formal approval could be granted by this summer -- a prospect that has disquieted other Leonardo scholars who wonder if exploring the unusual theory is worth disturbing the artist's resting place.

However, supporters of the investigation point to similarities between the Mona Lisa's facial structure and that of the artist's own face as evidenced in a circa 1515 self-portrait, also citing da Vinci's homosexuality and interest in riddles as support for the conjecture. The undertaking would have tickled Marcel Duchamp. The keen wit behind L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), a reproduction of the Mona Lisa embellished with a mustache, the late Modernist icon had a cross-dressing artistic alter ego himself, Rrose Sélavy.

about L.H.O.O.Q. cuz it's interesting...

L.H.O.O.Q. is a work of art by Marcel Duchamp first conceived in 1919. The work is one of what Duchamp referred to as readymades, or more specifically an assisted ready-made. Pioneered by him, the readymade involves taking mundane, often utilitarian objects not generally considered to be art and transforming them, by adding to them, changing them, or (as in the case of his most famous work Fountain) simply renaming them and placing them in a gallery setting. In L.H.O.O.Q.the objet trouvé (found object) is a cheap postcard reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa onto which Duchamp drew a moustache and beard in pencil and appended the title.

The name of the piece, L.H.O.O.Q., is a pun, since the letters when pronounced in French form the sentence, Elle a chaud au cul. "Elle a chaud au cul" literally translates into "She is hot in the ass". In a late interview (Schwarz 203), Duchamp gave a loose translation of "L.H.O.O.Q." as "there is fire down below" (in fact the term avoir chaud au cul is slang used in the sense of "to be horny").

article from artinfo.com

L.H.O.O.Q. info from wikipedia.com

everyone: MAKE OUT!

ten surprising facts about kissing...

1. According to anthropologists, 90 percent of people kiss. But that doesn’t mean that kissing is the same for everyone. Kissing customs vary across the world. 

For instance, certain African tribes literally kiss the ground of their leaders, while in many parts of Europe, it is not unusual for men to kiss each other. Kissing people on both cheeks as a form of greeting is another popular custom in many parts of the world, and both Eskimos and Egyptians "kiss" by rubbing noses, hence an "Eskimo kiss."

2. PDA was strictly forbidden in old-school Italy. In 16th century Naples, the punishment for kissing was the death penalty. We bet there were a lot of unhappy women. And a lot of hangings.

3. Be careful where you kiss. Though the punishment's not quite as harsh as our Italian predecessors, kissing is still illegal in some parts of the United States.

Those in Cedar Rapids, Iowa are not allowed to kiss strangers and women in Hartford, Conn. are not legally allowed to lock lips with their husbands on Sundays. And mustached Indiana men can forget about ever becoming "players." According to Indiana law, it is illegal for men who have a mustache to "habitually kiss human beings." <<< hahaha! oh indiana, you and your silly laws...

4. Let's talk science. Kissing generally uses one muscle, called the orbicularis oris, that is responsible for puckering your lips when you kiss. The science of kissing itself is called philematology.

5. Making out can be healthy for you. Kissing for one minute burns 26 calories. So enjoy that chocolate cake, and make up for it later with an extended make-out sesh with your partner.

6. It is considered good luck to kiss the Blarney Stone, but you may die trying. Kissing the Blarney Stone located in Cork, Ireland, is no easy feat. One poor pilgrim even fell to his death trying to accomplish the task.

To kiss the stone, you have to sit with your back facing the stone while someone holds your feet. Then you lean backwards, hold on to the handrails placed specifically there for this purpose, and lower yourself until you can reach the stone and kiss it. Sounds simple enough, right? <<< been there, done that, suckas... so cool. :)

7. The world record for longest kiss goes to Americans Rich Langley and Louisa Almedovar for a session lasted 30 hours and 59 minutes. No word on if they got food and bathroom breaks. 

8. On average, two-thirds of people tip their heads to the right when they pucker up. Some believe this tendency starts in the womb before you are even born. Or maybe you are just getting over the trauma that was your first kiss (you know, when you collided your nose into his and ended up kissing his ear instead of his mouth.). 

9. You may have signed XOXO on your high school crush's Valentine's Day card, but did you know what it meant? As many may know, the X in XOXO means kisses and the O has come to mean hugs. This comes from the Middle Ages, when people would often sign their names with an X, as much of the population was illiterate. Afterwards, they would kiss the document.

10. Kissing can increase your life expectancy. Sure, sucking face has been blamed for the rise of Mononucleosis, the spread of cold sores, and the general transmission of other unsavory diseases. But a study has shown that men live up to five years longer if they kiss their wife before going to work. So gentlemen, pucker up—for health's sake.

photo: gustav klimt "the kiss"

http://yourtango.com/200922434/10-unusual-kissing-facts?lid=more

vid: how to fold a shirt in two seconds!

pretty genius way to fold your clothes! of course it was a japanese lady who figured this out. they are folding mavens. their gift-wrapping is also fairly spectacular. :)

is proper grammar dying?

they're actually taking hyphens out of words, officially, because ppl don't know how to properly use them! don't you think we should be upping our grammatical standards instead of lowering them? or is this just something that only i find unsettling... (i realize i have a problem with capitalization, but that is only bc i am lazy. otherwise, i am a spelling and grammar fiend!)

Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on

By Simon Rabinovitch

LONDON (Reuters) - About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.

And if you've got a problem, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).

The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books.

"People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for," said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, the sixth edition of which was published this week.

Another factor in the hyphen's demise is designers' distaste for its ungainly horizontal bulk between words.

"Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography," he said. "The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

The team that compiled the Shorter OED, a two-volume tome despite its name, only committed the grammatical amputations after exhaustive research.

"The whole process of changing the spelling of words in the dictionary is all based on our analysis of evidence of language, it's not just what we think looks better," Stevenson said.

Researchers examined a corpus of more than 2 billion words, consisting of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, Web sites and blogs from 2000 onwards.

For the most part, the dictionary dropped hyphens from compound nouns, which were unified in a single word (e.g. pigeonhole) or split into two (e.g. test tube).

But hyphens have not lost their place altogether. The Shorter OED editor commended their first-rate service rendered to English in the form of compound adjectives, much like the one in the middle of this sentence.

"There are places where a hyphen is necessary," Stevenson said. "Because you can certainly start to get real ambiguity."

Twenty-odd people came to the party, he said. Or was it twenty odd people?

Some of the 16,000 hyphenation changes in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition: 

Formerly hyphenated words split in two:

fig leaf

hobby horse

ice cream

pin money

pot belly

test tube

water bed

Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:

bumblebee

chickpea

crybaby

leapfrog

logjam

lowlife

pigeonhole

touchline

waterborne

the history of weed. from nylon mag.

"marijuana has a long and storied history. the very first mention of cannabis was in 6000 BC china when ppl used the seeds as food, and it was introduced in northern europe as early as 500 BC. it has been used as an offering in royal tombs, as a medication, and, of course, for recreational purposes. and it wasn't ntil the early part of the 20th century that cannabis began to be banned--in 1935 a famous propaganda film, reefer madness, was even made to discourage american youth from touching the stuff. but cannabis remains a distinct part of our culture--it has, of late, even inspired a successful tv show [weeds]."

now, you can even buy perfumes in a cannabis scent!
it's interesting, no? whether or not you're a fan of the stuff...