[It’s particularly interesting to me that when a man said he was in love with them, their mother said, “Well, you can’t love them both.” That’s completely contrary to their own perception of their identity — for them, marrying separate men would be bigamy. -egg]

Identical twins Bridgette and Paula Powers think of themselves as a single person.

Frank Robson profiled them for the Sydney Morning Herald:

Before we meet, I phone identical twins Paula and Bridgette Powers at the Twinnies Pelican and Seabird Rescue refuge on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The woman who answers doesn’t offer a name, so I ask if I’m speaking to Paula or Bridgette. “Yes,” says the woman, waiting for me to continue.

It’s only when we get together that the aptness of that response sinks in. Because although the twins – or “twinnies” as they prefer – are clearly two people, they give the eerie impression of being completely interchangeable.

Source: Identical twins say the same thing at the same time / Boing Boing

Thai artist Uttaporn Nimmalaikaew paints portraits on layers of fine netting or tulle, deftly producing an analog 3D effect with subjects who appear to be sitting in chairs or lying down on beds. When circling the paintings they morph and shift, changing form depending on the viewer’s distance and location to the piece. These subjects are often his family, a way for the artist to pause his loved ones’ aging process and preserve them in time.

Nimmalaikaew first discovered the technique while a student at Silpakorn University in Bangkok after a stray speck of paint landed on a mosquito net in his studio. Witnessing the dimensionality the surface afforded the paint, he began to explore new ways in which to paint on the utilitarian material.

For each piece Nimmalaikaew begins with a digital drawing which he then prints life-size to determine the subject’s form and texture. He then begins to paint the layers with oil paint in a style that he calls “tulle-painting style.” In an 2014 interview he explained, “Over time, I have learnt that the tulle demands a different way of creating realistic light and shadow for the material. The top layer gives details for the optical illusion. Then I connect each layer with clear copolymer line to make it all fit together and create depth in the image.”

Source: Ghostly Portraits Painted Onto Layers of Netting by Uttaporn Nimmalaikaew

Inspired by animalistic forms both living and extinct, artist Mylinh Nguyen welds alien creatures from brass, bronze, and silver. Using a variety of machining techniques each creature takes form over several weeks, originating first as haphazard sketches in a notebook before evolving into perman

Source: Otherworldly Metal Organisms Welded by Mylinh Nguyen

It was the next month that it happened. On August 19, just days before his twentieth birthday, Lilley tried to log in to So-Relatable but couldn’t. Greenfield checked the site, which redirected to an error page: “There’s nothing here. Whatever you were looking for doesn’t currently exist at this address.” They’d been terminated, their blogs revoked by Tumblr for violating its terms of service.

Tumblr had just dissolved the sites of some of its most popular teenage users, an estimated 30 million follows gone. Including Pizza. Blogs that had brought relief from unremitting high school agony and then miraculously made their teen creators more money than they could have ever imagined, were erased from the internet, except for fragments reblogged on other sites. The day before, if they’d had a funny thought, they could share it with half a million people. And now, nothing.

Source: The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens | New Republic

Remember the Tamagotchi? Those little monsters were great. A new iOS app called Tep created a Tamagotchi-like app for your phone to help you stay motivated when it comes to working out. Move around if you want to feed your giraffe.

In many ways, Tep works like other popular fitness tracking apps, such as RunKeeper and Runtastic. First, you select your activity, then you hit start and track the distance, duration and pace of your activity. You can also get real-time audio feedback. Tep is available on iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

Once you’re done, you receive coins that you can spend to make your cute virtual pet happy. You can buy food and upgrade the environment of your pet. It sounds gimmicky, but this tiny giraffe is so adorable.

Source: Tep Is An Adorable Fitness Tracking App That Works Like A Tamagotchi | TechCrunch

[The latest strategy evolved by our alien overlords. -egg]

The majority of China’s new super-rich are prepped to leave the country, but getting their cash out is a serious problem. Much of the volatility in Bitcoin can be ascribed to Chinese elites using the cryptocurrency to smuggle cash out of the PRC. With the Chinese Yuan tanking, the race is on to convert Chinese wealth to other currencies and get out while the getting is good.

But there’s a better way: for a small sum, you can just set up an offshore shell company, direct it to sue a Chinese company you own, throw the lawsuit, and then, oh well, I guess there’s nothing for it but to send a bunch of cash to your shell company, exempted from export controls, in the form of court-ordered damages.

Chinese millionaire sues himself through an offshore shell company to beat currency export controls / Boing Boing

[SO AMAZING. -egg]

Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light, releasing great shudders of gravitational energy. Space and time became distorted, like water at a rolling boil. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. As it smoothed itself out, assuming the shape of a slightly flattened sphere, a few last quivers of energy escaped. Then space and time became silent again.

The waves rippled outward in every direction, weakening as they went. On Earth, dinosaurs arose, evolved, and went extinct. The waves kept going. About fifty thousand years ago, they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo sapiens were beginning to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet’s dominant species of ape. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the species, predicted the waves’ existence, inspiring decades of speculation and fruitless searching. Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth. Marco Drago, a thirty-two-year-old Italian postdoctoral student and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, was the first person to notice them. He was sitting in front of his computer at the Albert Einstein Institute, in Hannover, Germany, viewing the LIGO data remotely. The waves appeared on his screen as a compressed squiggle, but the most exquisite ears in the universe, attuned to vibrations of less than a trillionth of an inch, would have heard what astronomers call a chirp—a faint whooping from low to high. This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation of gravitational waves.

Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them – The New Yorker

Jon Noorlander’s latest sculpture series only exists in two dimensions.

Source: Gorgeous Sculptures Float in Digital Space | The Creators Project