Digitally Assembled Paintings by Russ Mills:






Artist Russ Mills creates these astonishing images using a wide variety of traditional methods including painting and drawing with ink and pencil, but also utilizing scanned textures including splotches of paint (or “painting disasters” as he calls them) as well as photography. The resulting paintings are sparse in color but seem to contain explosive amounts of energy as displayed in the rough brushes of paint and the almost perfectly manic pencil strokes. Of his work Mills says:

My work dwells in a netherworld between urban fine art and contemporary graphics, a collision of real and digital media it is primarily illustration based with a firm foundation in drawing, I focus mainly on the human form particularly the face, interweaving elements from the animal kingdom often reflecting the absurdity of human nature.

You can see many more paintings on Behance and limited edition prints are available in his shop.

If politics in Game of Thrones featured attack ads:

Mike Mechanic from Mother Jones sez, “So, basically, the folks in our DC office were sitting around shooting the shit, and someone asked: What would it be like if they had Super-PACs in Westeros? Well, it turns out somebody knew somebody who knew someone, which allowed us to professionally produce these ‘Game of Thrones Super-PAC Attack Ads.'”

Game of Thrones Attack Ads

Switzerland is one gigantic booby-trap:

Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG has been exploring the bizarre world of Swiss self-destructing infrastructure, documented in La Place de la Concorde Suisse, John McPhee’s “rich, journalistic study of the Swiss Army’s role in Swiss society.” It turns out that the Swiss Army specifies that bridges, hillsides, and tunnels need to be designed so that they can be remotely destroyed in the event of societal collapse, pan-European war, or invasion. Meanwhile, underground parking garages (and some tunnels) are designed to be sealed off as airtight nuclear bunkers.

To interrupt the utility of bridges, tunnels, highways, railroads, Switzerland has established three thousand points of demolition. That is the number officially printed. It has been suggested to me that to approximate a true figure a reader ought to multiply by two. Where a highway bridge crosses a railroad, a segment of the bridge is programmed to drop on the railroad. Primacord fuses are built into the bridge. Hidden artillery is in place on either side, set to prevent the enemy from clearing or repairing the damage…

There are also hollow mountains! Booby-trapped cliff-faces!

Near the German border of Switzerland, every railroad and highway tunnel has been prepared to pinch shut explosively. Nearby mountains have been made so porous that whole divisions can fit inside them. There are weapons and soldiers under barns. There are cannons inside pretty houses. Where Swiss highways happen to run on narrow ground between the edges of lakes and to the bottoms of cliffs, man-made rockslides are ready to slide…

The impending self-demolition of the country is “routinely practiced,” McPhee writes. “Often, in such assignments, the civilian engineer who created the bridge will, in his capacity as a military officer, be given the task of planning its destruction.”

Various forms of lithic disguise

(Thanks, @MagicPeaceLove!)

[So. Hot. -egg]
Automated rubegoldbergian postcard-writing machine in a suitcase:
Melvin the Mini Machine from HEYHEYHEY on Vimeo.
Melvin the Machine’s latest iteration is a rubegoldbergian automatic post-card-writing machine that is intended to travel the world, penning brief postcards and firing them out:

Conveniently built in two old suitcases, Melvin the Mini Machine is a Rube Goldberg machine specifically designed to travel the world. Each time Melvin fully completes a run, he ‘signs’ a postcard and sticks a stamp to it – making it ready to be sent…

As soon as Melvin is set up for a run, he starts gathering geographical data, which he uses to determine where he is in the world. He will then publish that info on this site and through his Twitter account and Facebook page.

MELVIN THE TRAVELING MINI MACHINE

(via Wil Wheaton)

A Softer World:

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[Wow. Could virtual worlds finally push economics into being a true science? Seems plausible to me. -egg]
Valve’s new economist-in-residence will publish notes on the political economy of games:
Yanis Varoufakis, “an academic economist,” recounts the story of how his widely read writings on the Euro crisis led to a job offer from Valve software, who were contemplating the creation of a shared virtual currency between two worlds. Valve founder Gabe Newell was contemplating balance of payments when he realized “this is Germany and Greece,” and he wrote to Varoufakis to ask for his consulting help.

Varoufakis is now Valve’s economist-in-residence, and he has set out “to forge narratives and empirical knowledge that (a) transcend the border separating the ‘real’ from the digital economies, and (b) bring together lessons from the political economy of our gamers’ economies and from studying Valve’s very special (and fascinating) internal management structure.”

He will blog his findings on the brand new Valve Economics blog. The inaugural post tells the tale of his recruitment, and tantalizes with the prospect of more to come.

For the first time since I switched from mathematical statistics to economics (around 1982), I saw an opportunity for scientific research on some really existing (albeit digital) economy. For let’s face it: Econometrics is a travesty! While its heavy reliance on statistics often confuses us into believing that it is a form of applied statistics, in reality it resembles computerised astrology: a form of hocus pocus that seeks to improve its image by incorporating proper science’s methods, displays and processes. Is this not too harsh a judgment on econometrics?

Not in the slightest. Econometrics purports to test economic theories by statistical means. And yet what it ends up testing is whether some ‘reduced form’, an equation (or system of equations), that is consistent with one’s theory, is also consistent with the data. The problem of course is that the ‘reduced form’ under test can be shown to be consistent with an infinity of competing theories. Thus, econometrics can only pretend to discriminate between mutually contradictory theories. All it does is to discover empirical regularities lacking any causal meaning. To put it bluntly, it is impossible to avoid absurd conclusions such as “Christmas is explained by a prior increase in the demand for toys”. And when we do (avoid them), it is only by accident (or because of a good hunch), as opposed to scientific rigour.

IT ALL BEGAN WITH A STRANGE EMAIL

(via MeFi)