This week conceptual artist Florentijin Hofman brought his gargantuan Rubber Duck artwork to Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong. The huge inflatable duck measures nearly 46 feet tall and 55 feet long and is shown above being pulled by a tug boat only a fraction of its size. Hofman is well known for his grandiose and whimsical sculptures that seem born with the primary goal of inducing as many smiles possible. Via the artist’s website:

The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn’t discriminate people and doesn’t have a political connotation. The friendly, floating Rubber Duck has healing properties: it can relieve mondial tensions as well as define them. The rubber duck is soft, friendly and suitable for all ages!

via The World’s Largest Rubber Duck Arrives in Hong Kong | Colossal.

[Oh hell yeah. Don’t miss the video. -egg]

The artist considers it important to escape from human bondage in order to achieve harmony between men and machines. He thinks this harmony can be achieved through the process of religious practices and spiritual enlightenment. In Buddhism, the Bodhisattva of Compassion helps people attain enlightenment, Arhat is a spiritual practitioner of asceticism, and Buddha is a being who reaches the highest level of enlightenment. Through them, the artist intends to follow the path of enlightenment, breaking away from anxiety, agony, and pain. The artist has no intention to emphasize religious connotations through these Buddhist icons but to reflect his own or our own existence between utopia and dystopia.”

via Mechanical Buddhas Bring Motion into Harmony.

Iron Shoes || Hauschka – YouTube.

There is, of course, a working definition of disease, one that most of us share: a disease is a kind of suffering caused by something gone wrong in the body. Cancer, diabetes, tuberculosis—we label these diseases not simply because they inflict pain upon us, or impair the quality of our lives, but because doctors can specify their biochemistry—the neoplasms, the lack of insulin, the bacilli that can that can confirm the presence of the disease, that can be spotted and measured and, sometimes, eradicated.

A disease may be what the medical profession recognizes as such, but doctors are reluctant admit into their realm problems without some biochemical signature. Borderline cases—chronic fatigue syndrome, major depression, restless-legs syndrome—are vexing precisely because they lack those indicators. Doctors often leave conditions like these outside the pantheon of diseases, at least until they can demonstrate their biochemical cred. Which is why you shouldn’t be surprised to read sometime in the near future about a doctor who has inserted binge eaters into M.R.I. machines and proved that the disorder is a real disease.

The lack of this kind of proof that alcoholism is a disease is what led Jellinek to wrestle with the concept. It is also why the A.P.A. has to begin its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with a loose and baggy four-paragraph definition of mental disorder that is no more satisfying than Jellinek’s was. Without biochemistry on their side, the authors of the manual have struggled to prove that the conditions they treat belong in the realm of physicians, and their efforts have done little to reduce suspicions that the profession is too eager to turn all our troubles into their disorders.

But psychiatrists are beginning to rethink this strategy. They are going on the offensive, claiming that psychiatry’s diagnostic uncertainty (and lack of biochemical findings) is pervasive in all of medicine. They point to the many physical illnesses—Alzheimer’s disease, peripheral neuropathy, even poison ivy rashes—diagnosed without resort to biological lab tests, and to the numerous diagnostic thresholds—such as glucose levels in diabetes and blood pressure in hypertension—that have been reworked over the years. So, they argue, it isn’t just psychiatry that fails to measure up to modern medicine. It’s also much of modern medicine.

via Do disease definitions come from science or say-so? : The New Yorker.

Two weeks ago, one student brought up the word slash as an example of new slang, and it quickly became clear to me that many students are using slash in ways unfamiliar to me. In the classes since then, I have come to the students with follow-up questions about the new use of slash. Finally, a student asked, “Why are you so interested in this?” I answered, “Slang creates a lot of new nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. It isn’t that often that slang creates a new conjunction.”

Let me explain. Lots of us use the slash (/) in writing to capture two or more descriptions of the same thing, with a meaning something like “or,” “and,” or “and/or”—e.g., “my sister/best friend” or “request/require.” The slash typically separates two things that are the same part of speech or parallel grammatically; and we can say that slash out loud if needed: “my sister slash best friend.”

Now I wouldn’t write that phrase down that way, with the slash spelled out, but students tell me they now often do.

via Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore – Lingua Franca – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

After human GeoCities site and Rackspace employee wrote this frothing “review” of Glass, he apparently didn’t think we believed him. “I will never live a day of my life from now on without it,” Scoble said of his beloved face computer, praising it as if his very life depended on it. “I’m never taking them off.” True to his word, there he is, red as a beet, mouth open in ecstasy. These seem the actions of someone in the midst of a crazed religious awakening, not a gadget test.

via Oh God Robert Scoble Is Wearing His Google Glasses in The Shower.

brofiling • white privilege radically changes the appearance….

About 200 years ago in the German city of Koenigsberg, a tree began to grow inside a brick fence. Because the owners never tended to the property, the tree was allowed to take over.

309898_518345471554858_1762377986_n.jpg (700×933).

Carolyn Porco, Cassini Imaging Team Leader and CICLOPS director, writes:

One of the most gorgeous sights we have been privileged to see at Saturn, as the arrival of spring to the northern hemisphere has peeled away the darkness of winter, has been the enormous swirling vortex capping its north pole and ringed by Saturn’s famed hexagonal jet stream.

Today, the Cassini Imaging Team is proud to present to you a set of special views of this phenomenal structure, including a carefully prepared movie showing its circumpolar winds that clock at 330 miles per hour, and false color images that are at once spectacular and informative.

Here are the images, in glorious hi-rez [ciclops.org].

via The Red Rose of Saturn – Boing Boing.

These narratives appeal to our collective sense of nostalgia: pink-cheeked farmwomen kneading homemade bread, mothers and daughters shelling sun-warmed peas on country porches, and multigenerational families gathered happily around the dinner table to tuck into Grandma’s hand-plucked roasted chicken. As the oft-quoted Michael Pollan saying goes, “Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” (in my case, that would mean a steady diet of pierogies and cabbage).

Unfortunately, this cozy vision obscures the often-grimy truths about what cooking was really like for our foremothers and -fathers in the preindustrial, preconvenience era.

Contrary to the myth of the happy, apple-cheeked great-great-grandmother, cooking has rarely been seen as a source of fulfillment, historically speaking. In Colonial America, kitchen work was viewed as a lowly chore, often farmed out to servants (who, needless to say, did not spend a lot of time exulting in the visceral pleasures of pea shucking). In the 1800s, middle-class women supervised immigrant kitchen maids (or slaves), while pioneer women and rural housewives sweated over wood fires and heavy iron pots.

via Is Michael Pollan a sexist pig? – Salon.com.