Bioartist training fungi to devour her when she dies: “

Bioartist Jae Rhim Lee is systematically training fungi to feast on her “body tissue and excretions–skin, hair, nails, blood, bone, fat, tears, urine, feces, and sweat.” When she dies, she wants the mushrooms to devour her and remediate the industrial toxins in the soil where she’s buried. She wears a fungus suit covered in her lee-phaghic buddies so that they can be close to her. It’s all about death; Lee calls it “decompiculture.”

The first prototype of the Infinity Burial Suit is a body suit embroidered with thread infused with mushroom spores. The embroidery pattern resembles the dendritic growth of mushroom mycelium. The Suit is accompanied by an Alternative Embalming Fluid, a liquid spore slurry, and Decompiculture Makeup, a two-part makeup consisting of a mixture of dry mineral makeup and dried mushroom spores and a separate liquid culture medium. Combining the two parts and applying them to the body activates the mushroom spores to develop and grow.

Infinity Mushroom

(via Kottke)

Books-rupturing-the-walls installation: “

Warey Myers designed this installation for the new offices of Portland’s VIA Advertising Agency, which are in the Baxter Building, home to the Portland Public Library from 1888-1960: “Books breaking through the (faux) wall downstairs, referencing the “basement stacks” every library has. In this case it’s as if those stacks had been sealed up during some remodel, and are anthropomorphically breaking through, referencing the old library, history, roots, poltergeists…”

^^^ Wary Meyers The Basement Stacks ^^^

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How “Try a Little Tenderness” went from forgettable love-song to soulful classic: “

On The Awl, an engrossing musical history of “Try a Little Tenderness,” which started life in 1932 as a schmaltzy, vacuous love-song recorded by Ray Noble and his Orchestra. Gradually, over the decades, new singers reinterpreted it, gradually giving it soul in dribs and drabs, leading up to the classic Otis Redding recording (and the regrettable Jay-Z reinterpretation).

As nice a story as it’d make, Otis Redding didn’t transform “Try A Little Tenderness” from campy relic to anthem in a single stroke. The process was more gradual, maybe more compromised. Bing Crosby took a go at “Tenderness” in 1933, and in the process injected some humanity into it. No less paternalistic, his interpretation stressed the duties of manhood, the weakness of women, and how love was about being strong by pretending to be vulnerable. Maybe that’s a little too much psychodrama to pull from a performance that, for all Crosby’s sly phrasing and attempts at straight talk, is still relatively light fare. But it was enough for “Tenderness” to catch on as a minor standard, an especially useful one to have in the songbook for black entertainers looking to cross over in the ’50s and early ’60s and perform at “classy joints.” Selling records to white kids was one thing; eons before anyone thought to let youth guide the industry, appealing to white adults was the real meal ticket.

How ‘Try A Little Tenderness’ Got Its Soul (And Lost It)

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On the Street….Saddle Shoes and Seersucker, Florence: “

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Bee-wearing competition: “

Beekeeper Lv Kongjiang, 20, stands with bees covering his body on a weighing scale during a bee-wearing competition held last week in China. Competing against fellow beekeeper Wang Dalin in Shaoyang, Hunan province, the two wore only shorts and bees; Wang won the competition after attracting 57 lbs of bees on his body in 60 minutes, while Lv had 50 lbs, local media reported. Photo Reuters/China Daily

Previously: The Beekeeper’s Lament: Must-read book on bee life, and death

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Who holds the copyright to a picture taken by a monkey?: “Caters News Agency claims to have bought exclusive rights to the iconic self-portrait taken by a macaque that snatched a photographer’s camera while the latter was shooting on Sulawesi. Caters has sent copyright threats to some sites that reproduced the image, prompting Techdirt (one of the nastygram recipients) to delve deeply into the question of the copyrightability of works created by non-humans.

Under US law (we’ll deal with elsewhere soon), you have to have made the creative contributions (the copyrightable aspects) to the image to have it qualify for any copyright protection (and then, it’s only the creative aspects that get the copyright). Thus, you could argue that if the photographer had set up the camera, framed the shot, and simply let the monkey click the shutter, perhaps there is some copyright there (though, even then it would likely be limited to some of the framing, and not much else). But David Slater has already admitted that the monkeys found a camera he had left out by accident and that he did not have anything to do with setting up the shot. He’s stated that the monkeys were playing with the shiny objects and when one pushed the shutter, the noise interested them and they kept it up. It would be difficult to argue he made any sort of creative contribution here to warrant copyright.

Can the monkeys get the copyright? No. As Justin Levine kindly pointed out, according to the rules published by the US Copyright Office:

503.03 Works not capable of supporting a copyright claim.

Claims to copyright in the following works cannot be registered in the Copyright Office:

503.03(a) Works-not originated by a human author.

In order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable. Thus, a linoleum floor covering featuring a multicolored pebble design which was produced by a mechanical process in unrepeatable, random patterns, is not registrable. Similarly, a work owing its form to the forces of nature and lacking human authorship is not registrable; thus, for example, a piece of driftwood even if polished and mounted is not registrable

Can We Subpoena The Monkey? Why The Monkey Self-Portraits Are Likely In The Public Domain

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Synesthesia and the origins of language: “

Do sounds have meaning?

Obviously, words do. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Instead, think about the sounds that make up words. When the word was coined, were the sounds chosen because those sounds already made people think of the concept being described?

That’s a difficult theory to prove, but there’s been some research that supports it. New Scientist has a really fascinating article up about the studies that suggest the sounds in our words aren’t totally random. Instead, we all might associate sounds with other senses to some degree. If that sounds a lot like synesthesia … well, that’s the point. The idea behind this theory is that, as with many neurological phenomena, synesthesia exists on a continuum. A true synesthete might hear the word ‘table’ and think of it as a color, or associate it with a smell. But most of us, if given the choice between two unfamiliar words, can tell which one means pointy at rate better than chance.

Suspecting that sound symbolism might also help adults to understand a foreign tongue, Lynne Nygaard at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, recently presented English speakers with pairs of antonyms (such as fast/slow) recorded in 10 different languages – including Albanian, Dutch, Gujarati, Mandarin and Yoruba. When given the corresponding pair of English words, and asked to match the foreign words to them, subjects performed better than they would by chance – suggesting the words’ sounds must give clues to their meaning.

What could these clues be? A subsequent analysis hinted at some answers. Words that indicate general movement tend to have more vowels, for instance, and they are more likely to have glottal consonants (the ‘h’ in ‘behind’, for example). Sounds might also reflect the speed of movement: slow movement tends to be represented by sonorant sounds such as ‘l’ or ‘w’, whereas explosive obstruents produced from a blocked airway, such as ‘ch’ or ‘f’, are suggestive of more rapid speeds. Nygaard presented her work at the Atlanta workshop.

Bringing all the evidence together, there seems to be a strong case for saying that sound symbolism does occur in human language. However, some big questions remain. How common are words that elicit cross-sensory connections in modern languages? ‘Maybe they represent just small pockets of vocabulary,’ says Morten Christiansen at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.

Finally, is sound symbolism universal, perhaps even innate? Tests showing that the patterns are recognised by young children, and by people across cultures, suggest that is a possibility, but more work needs to be done before it can be taken for granted.

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Tiny dinosaurs in minuscule bottles: “

Japanese artist Akinobu builds architectural models as his day job, and creates exquisite ‘Tiny Worlds In A Bottle’ for kicks. He sells them on eBay. Tiny World In A Bottle (via Smithsonian)

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Telex: an infrastructure-level response to state Internet censorship: “

J. Alex Halderman and his colleagues have unveiled Telex, a ‘state-level response to state-level censorship.’ It’s a network of censorship-busting major ISPs that provide infrastructure-level, hard-to-detect proxying that allows people in repressive regimes to get access to sites blocked by their national firewalls. The descriptive materials on the site are very easy to grasp and very exciting.

* Telex operates in the network infrastructure — at any ISP between the censor’s network and non-blocked portions of the Internet — rather than at network end points. This approach, which we call ‘end-to-middle’ proxying, can make the system robust against countermeasures (such as blocking) by the censor.

* Telex focuses on avoiding detection by the censor. That is, it allows a user to circumvent a censor without alerting the censor to the act of circumvention. It complements anonymizing services like Tor (which focus on hiding with whom the user is attempting to communicate instead of that that the user is attempting to have an anonymous conversation) rather than replacing them.

* Telex employs a form of deep-packet inspection — a technology sometimes used to censor communication — and repurposes it to circumvent censorship.

* Other systems require distributing secrets, such as encryption keys or IP addresses, to individual users. If the censor discovers these secrets, it can block the system. With Telex, there are no secrets that need to be communicated to users in advance, only the publicly available client software.

* Telex can provide a state-level response to state-level censorship. We envision that friendly countries would create incentives for ISPs to deploy Telex.

Telex.cc

Anticensorship in the Internet’s Infrastructure (announcement)

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Fish uses tool: “

A series of shots including the one above are thought to be the first photographic evidence from the wild of a fish using a tool. It shows a blasckspot tuskfish about to smash a cockle against a rock to expose its flesh for eating. Scott Gardner took the photos back in 2006 at a depth of 60 feet in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Scienctists have just now published their study on the images and related data, titled ‘Tool use in the tuskfish Choerodon schoenleinii?.’ ‘Carry-out Cockles‘

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