Tangled Mind

I'm sure those of my readers with actual Employment will not be at all interested in the Ptak Science Books blog (syndicated on LJ as ptak_science). Others, especially those curious individuals who are unable to resist the urge to click an intriguing link, will be drawn into a fully-illustrated seething maelstrom of SHEER FASCINATION.

I know I was.

I think I happened upon the site about four hours ago. In those four hours I have read about WWII infographics; Beethoven's last and weirdest composition; the use of blank space in early woodcuts; manuals for how to be a well-behaved Girl; salvage rates for bullets in Europe, 1944; how rare it is to see a non-symbolic view beyond a window in Renaissance art; plaques designed to convey information to whoever's reading them 10,000 years from now; future hair trends as shown on classic pulp SF covers ...

The illustrations (mostly scanned, many of them available via the blog's shop) are truly inspirational. So are the commentaries.

Here's Mr Ptak's overview of W. Clarissa Christeen’s The Universal Color Keyboard for Body Building

...what Ms. Christeen absolutely does have going for her is her artwork, which is, in its own special way, quite sensational...Her philosophy is at the very least odd, though it may spring from a synestheisa. Or not.

Go! read!

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Arts & Culture | Pictures that paint a thousand words

Interesting piece on use of text in art. The accompanying slideshow has some examples I want to rush off and see!

Oh, and some distressing punctuation (Fiona Banner's 'literary car chase' is a punctuation carcrash). Get me out of here, I'm a proofreader ...

Aha, now I know why Long Meg and her daughters seemed so familiar ...

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(images click through to Anne Sudworth's site)

Beach Rainbow Today I went to Snettisham and took photos of things that were colourful. Then I cropped and resized photos down to 600x600.

The results look good: they are also depressing evidence of the plethora of coloured plastic rubbish on British beaches. Out of 15 pictures, only 3 show naturally-occurring objects. (However, keep in mind that natural objects don't tend to be as colourful as man-made artifacts, and on a dull day shells and stones don't stand out on a beach.) photo set here at Flickr. I may also upload some of the original photos.

Masterpieces of the Prado Museum via Google Maps -- launching new Google Earth feature. For the next week or so, various masterpieces can be viewed, navigated and zoomed using Google Maps. Images are up to 14GB and the detail is remarkable. Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights in more hallucinatory vividness than ever before! Sample under the cut. edited to add max zoom ...

( Bosch's Kitty )