Dog dressed as two dogs holding a present:

Dan Wrexham throws down the gauntlet: “If you’ve seen a better picture than this picture of a dog dressed as two dogs carrying a present, I don’t believe you.” I can’t think of anything better.
Dog dressed as two dogs holding a present on Twitter via @willak via @Mike_FTW

December 01, 2012:

Geeks! Sorry, but we are almost sold out of the new Texas shirt. We just placed an order and should have more before the Christmas deadline.

Meantime, I’m assured we have lots of dinovengeance left.

Danish entrepreneur helps people with autism get jobs that require focus, attention to detail:
Gareth Cook tells the story of Thorkil Sonne, founder of a Danish social enterprise called Specialisterne (“the specialists”), which helps place people with autism in jobs that demand a degree of focus and detail-orientation that’s impossible to find among the neurotypical. Specialisterne began because Sonne’s son, Lars, has autism, and Sonne saw that he was eminently suited to many tasks, and that performing them made him happy and did useful work, too. Now Specialisterne is a web of social enterprises that does everything from training to placement, and Sonne is pondering a move to the USA.

To his father, Lars seemed less defined by deficits than by his unusual skills. And those skills, like intense focus and careful execution, were exactly the ones that Sonne, who was the technical director at a spinoff of TDC, Denmark’s largest telecommunications company, often looked for in his own employees. Sonne did not consider himself an entrepreneurial type, but watching Lars — and hearing similar stories from parents he met volunteering with an autism organization — he slowly conceived a business plan: many companies struggle to find workers who can perform specific, often tedious tasks, like data entry or software testing; some autistic people would be exceptionally good at those tasks. So in 2003, Sonne quit his job, mortgaged the family’s home, took a two-day accounting course and started a company called Specialisterne, Danish for “the specialists,” on the theory that, given the right environment, an autistic adult could not just hold down a job but also be the best person for it.

The Autism Advantage [NYT]

(via Kottke)

How monoculture farming changes biodiversity:

This image, taken by artist David Liittschwager shows the plants and animals collected in a square meter of South African public park over the course of 24 hours.

This image, from National Public Radio, illustrates the plants and animals found over the course of two nights and three days in an Iowa cornfield.

Robert Krulwich has a fascinating piece about the ways food systems affect ecological systems. How efficient is too efficient?

Via On Earth

[Warren Ellis says:]
The Parlour Trick, With Meredith Yayanos: A Spooky Joy:
Meredith Yayanos is one of my oldest friends.  You may know her from arts journalism, from performing as a musician with Amanda Palmer or Jim Sclavunos’ The Vanity Set, or from co-founding COILHOUSE magazine.  Now, with multi-instrumentalist Dan Cantrell, she has formed The Parlour Trick in order to release the album A BLESSED UNREST.  And you can pre-order it, with various levels of additionally beauty, via Kickstarter.  It actually got funded within hours of going live.  But, please, click through.  If you like even some of the music you’ve heard here over the years, then I suspect you’ll enjoy this.  It’s an amazing record.

[So cool. I’d really, really love to spend a month or so playing with one of these. -egg]

Interactive laser-cutter:

Constructable is an experimental laser-cutter from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam. It uses a light-pen to direct the cutting beam, so that you can draw the cuts freehand, in realtime, rather than designing a pattern that is fed to the cutter. Basically, it transforms the cutter into a hand tool, rather than a programmable plotter.

Personal fabrication tools, such as laser cutters and 3D printers allow users to create precise objects quickly. However, working through a CAD system removes users from the workpiece. Recent interactive fabrication tools reintroduce this directness, but at the expense of precision.

Constructable is an interactive drafting table that produces precise physical output in every step. Users interact by drafting directly on the workpiece using a hand-held laser pointer. The system tracks the pointer, beautifies its path, and implements its effect by cutting the workpiece using a fast high-powered laser cutter.

Hasso-Plattner-Institut: constructable

(via Kottke)

Geometric Sandcastles by Calvin Seibert:








Sand castle artist Calvin Seibert manages to construct nearly impossible shapes from one of the world’s most delicate mediums. While Colossal has seen its fair share of art made with sand I’ve never seen anything so perfectly angular and geometric. See much more of his work over on Flickr. (via fasels suppe)

Nudes in blurred motion:
Shinichi Maruyama, whose magical “Water Sculpture Movie” I posted about last year, created a stunning photo series of human bodies in motion. (via PetaPixel)