#1 (Grand Prize) Takayuki Fukada, Japan / Courtesy IAPLC & Aquabase

The art of aquascaping is still a fledgling endeavor, first started in the 90s by Japanese wildlife photographer Takashi Amano. The annual IAPLC competition has grown dramatically since, with the 2015 contest seeing 2,545 entries from 69 countries. Japan, China, Brazil, and France dominate the top finalist spots (only 13 entries were from the United States). Finalists were announced in September.

#2 范博文, China / Courtesy IAPLC & AquaA3

#4 Paulo Pacheco, Brazil / Courtesy IAPLC & Aquabase

#8 タナカカツキ, Japan / Courtesy IAPLC & Aquabase

#16 张大东, China / Courtesy IAPLC & Aquabase

Awesome Aquariums: Winners of the 2015 International Aquatic Plants Layout Contest | Colossal

From the World’s Advanced Saving Project (WASP) comes the largest Delta-style 3D printer in the world, capable of printing homes out of mud.

Delta-style robots are those with three parallel arms, connected at the joint at the base.  In this printer, the joint is the printing mechanism.

This printer, called the BigDelta, is 40 feet tall and prints homes at nearly zero cost.  Inventor, Massimo Moretti, created WASP with the goal to “create a means for affordable fabrication of homes, and provide these means to the locals in poverty stricken areas.”  He saw the need for housing and noted the quality and almost endless supply of dirt/clay/fiber homes.  The machine is capable of producing highly insulated homes that cost next to no environmental footprint.

The world’s largest Delta 3D printer can print nearly zero-cost housing out of mud | Minds

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.

“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

This delightful Lovelace & Babbage Analytical Engine is gathering support on LEGO Ideas (formerly CUUSOO) where the community can up-vote fan-made play sets into consideration for production.

Featuring Lada Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, this set pays beautiful, Victorian tribute to their collaboration on the mechanical general-purpose computer of his design, including her pioneering work in creating the algorithm that would be used to program it.

What’s more, the lovely, monochromatic Analytical Engine model can be used to house a Raspberry Pi Linux computer.

Source: Help convince LEGO to produce “Lovelace and Babbage” play set / Raspberry Pi case / Boing Boing

Lee Griggs, whose macroscopic 3D topographies we covered earlier this week, released a set of abstract portraits rendered with Arnold for Maya this morning. The series includes a variety of a psychedelic (and, admittedly, a bit terrifying) faces that look like the digital lovechild of H.R. Giger and Alex Grey.

The lack of descriptions on the Spanish artist’s Behance page only adds to the creatures’ peculiarity. To be clear: we think the artworks are gorgeous, but these characters could appear in a horror movie set in some surreal, parallel universe withoutquestion. We hope to see the day where Ridley Scott or Wes Craven take note of Grigg’s skill—Halloween might never be the same again.

Source: These Digital Mutant Portraits Are Tripping Us Out | The Creators Project

For more than a decade, we’ve lived with personal technologies — video games and social-media platforms — that have helped us create alternate or auxiliary personae. We’ve also spent a dozen years in the daily grip of makeover shows, in which a team of experts transforms your personal style, your home, your body, your spouse. There are TV competitions for the best fashion design, body painting, drag queen. Some forms of cosmetic alteration have become perfectly normal, and there are shows for that, too. Our reinventions feel gleeful and liberating — and tied to an essentially American optimism. After centuries of women living alongside men, and of the races living adjacent to one another, even if only notionally, our rigidly enforced gender and racial lines are finally breaking down. There’s a sense of fluidity and permissiveness and a smashing of binaries. We’re all becoming one another. Well, we are. And we’re not.

NYT: The Year We Obsessed Over Identity

[I totally fell for this too. -egg]

I’ve heard — and repeated — the theory that addiction rates among indigenous people in the Americas was caused by genetics — specifically, that “new world” populations hadn’t gone through the European plague years’ genetic bottleneck that killed everyone who couldn’t survive on alcoholic beverages (these having been boiled during their production and thus less likely to carry infectious diseases).

But there’s no evidence to support that theory — it’s just a story without any falsifiable hypotheses. Our received scientific wisdom is full of well-known “facts” that are just fairy-tales made up to explain social problems through a biological lens (see, for example, virtually the entire field of Darwinian psychology). These science-tales serve a social purpose: they situate social problems as being innate and outside of the realm of human fault. Particularly, they excuse away any social inequality as being the (seemingly inevitable) result of our biology, and not the result of some people grabbing more than their fair share, at everyone else’s expense.

Source: Genocide, not genes: indigenous peoples’ genetic alcoholism is a racist myth / Boing Boing

In Feldman’s version of things, the castrato had no interest in being figuratively or really female, but rather was ‘decidedly male’. In a rather wonderful sentence, she questions the very idea of maleness. ‘Maleness was a zone of ambiguity only if we presuppose it as a category of sexual identity in the first place.’ Instead, she sees maleness in Italy in the period when the castrati flourished as a political category that involved having personal access to power and wealth, and to easy autonomy. Castrati, as she points out, managed their estates, decided on heirs and bequests; they also had an international network of friends, patrons and associates. They went where they liked, they did what they liked, some of them even married women. That might be a useful definition, indeed, for a man, and not only in the 18th century.

In fact, some of the best-known roles for castrati were the alpha males Alexander the Great, Richard I, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar. Boys were castrated to make them better and stronger singers, not to make them girls. On the other hand, while living in the house of a Russian prince the castrato Balatri ‘gained unheard of access to the sexually segregated, staunchly Orthodox female quarters of the household, where he spent many an hour by the embroidery frames, and he was even dressed up in drag by the princess and her girls for fun’.

In Portrait of a Castrato, Roger Freitas writes that ‘contemporaries frequently regarded castrati as analogues to boys … The castrato does seem frequently to have taken the boy’s role in sodomitical sex.’ Thus castrati could shift and transform themselves. Everybody, it seemed, wanted them, but for different things. Girls wanted to dress them up; men wanted to fuck them. When composers needed them to sound like angels rather than play the parts of big strong men, they merely wrote different music, making castrati sound sweet, maybe even divine. They sang over the bodies of dead children as much as they sang the big warrior roles. ‘As angel guardians of the dead,’ Feldman writes, ‘young castrati were assimilated to other androgynous beings of long ancestry, giving them special mimetic flexibility as intercessories with the divine.’

Colm Tóibín reviews ‘The Castrato’ by Martha Feldman and ‘Portrait of a Castrato’ by Roger Freitas · LRB 8 October 2015

 

The lower reaches of the southern slopes of Khasi and Jaintia hills, in Northeastern India, are humid, warm and streaked by many swift flowing rivers and mountain streams. On the slopes of this hill, among the dense undergrowth, a species of Indian Rubber tree – (Ficus Elastica) –  thrives and flourishes. These trees shoot out many secondary roots from their trunks. The trees, supported by these secondary roots, can comfortably perch itself on huge boulders along side the riverbanks or in the middle of rivers and send its roots down to the riverbed.

The ancient War-Khasi people, a tribe in Meghalaya, had noticed these qualities of this tree and had adapted it to serve their need for building bridges across rivers and streams. In order to direct the roots in the desired direction, the Khasis sliced betel nut tree trunks half in the middle for their entire length, hollowed them out and passed the thin and long tender roots through them. The roots start growing towards other end of the stream and when they are reached they are allowed to take root in the soil. Given enough time, a sturdy, living bridge is produced.

Some of these root bridges can carry fifty or more people at a time and can be over 100 feet long. These bridges take 10 to 15 years to become fully functional, and they keep growing in strength by the day. Some of these bridges are well over 500 years old.

Source: The Living Root Bridges of Cherrapunjee, India | Amusing Planet