Buggin' out

In Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, a gnat hips Alice up on the insect life of Looking-Glass Land (not Wonderland). There's the Rocking-Horsefly, the Snap-Dragonfly, et al. The above insect made from old ammunition and watch parts seems to exist on the same fantastical plane as Carroll's bugs.

More on it and others like it here. The artist has come up with the most brilliant use for his technical skills.

Friday Random Ten stays dry

This morning (and only this morning, somewhat thankfully) it was raining hard. My boss dropped in for a visit, and was carrying an umbrella. Very strong primary yellow. It reminded me of Big Bird. The fact that I actually felt emboldened to say this speaks well of her.

1. Kendra Shank--You Say You Care
2. Frank Sinatra--What Is This Thing Called Love
3. Nina Simone--Sugar In My Bowl
4. Sly & the Family Stone--You Can Make It If You Try
5. The Who--Our Love Was
6. The Clash--Wrong 'Em Boyo
7. Yuka Honda--Small Circular Motion
8. Patsy Cline--South of the Border (Round Mexico Way)
9. L'Attirail--Suite en Solde
10. R.E.M.--Strange Currencies

It's a doggy dog world

I like this one. The animator seems to know her subjects well.

I Want To Play With Other Dogs from Laura Robinson on Vimeo.

Cash of civilizations

So if self-appointed consultants are feeding our law-enforcement personnel a lot of hyped up myths; and if these same law-enforcers are encouraged to single out and harass a specific minority group; and say, if this group finds they have every reason to fear and distrust said law enforcement: Put all these things together and only good things can result, right?

When I look at the life of Muhammad, I get a very nasty image,” said Kharoba, pausing to look around the auditorium. The audience was silent. “I am talking about a pedophile, a serial killer, a rapist,” Kharoba said. “And that is just to start off with.

“Anyone who says that Islam is a religion of peace,” he continued, “is either ignorant or flat out lying.”

Frustration seemed to be burning in the air, and a cop—looking grim, anguished—spoke up. “From a law enforcement standpoint, what can we do?” he asked. “What do we do to deal with these people?”

“The best way to handle these people is what I call legal harassment,” Kharoba answered. “Start to identify who is coming into your area.” Go to the DMV and see who has applied for a driving license. Look at the owners of convenience stores. Corner stores are one of the principal ways Hezbollah launders money in the United States, he said. (The claim is not true.) “You only need one precedent,” Kharoba said. “Health inspectors, alcohol trade officers, these guys can turn a convenience store upside down without a warrant.”

What kills me is that we just had an election that was dominated by alleged "fiscal conservatives", and the whole economy is supposed to go on a crash diet. These counterterrorism guys actually are dining out on our dime, and they're untouchable.

Only the King, man

I was playing cards with a couple of chums in a coffee shop tonight. On the stereo they were playing an Elvis compilation. At some point this song came on.

And when you hear the lyrics, wow. Dating two sisters is a remarkably bad idea. It's not at the same time, but still. And playing them against each other isn't good for anyone.

Overall I'd have to count this as one of his more fucked up and evil songs. Also one of the most rock n' roll things he ever did. The two coincide sometimes.

Short week Friday Random Ten

Huh. There's only one post between this and the last FRT. I think the situation has been something like, "I have an idea, but it takes some work. And I have to sleep, which doesn't really take work. Bye." We'll see if we can't change that around next week.

1. Frank Sinatra--In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning
2. Patsy Cline--Anytime
3. The XX--VCR
4. Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings--Window Shopping
5. Nellie McKay--Adios
6. Esquivel--Yours
7. Elvis Costello with Burt Bacharach--God Give Me Strength
8. The 5,6,7,8's--Green Onions
9. The Fiery Furnaces--Vs. Birds
10. The New Pornographers--If You Can't See My Mirrors

See here, see there

This is an interesting anthro-neurological tidbit.

Are human eyes also efficiently coded? They don't seem to be. The sky and sea make up much of our natural scenes, yet only 6% of our cone cells detect blue, and they are mostly located around the edge of our retina. Of the remaining cones, the ratio of red to green cones varies wildly between individuals.

To find out why this is, Tkačik, along with neurobiologist Vijay Balasubramanian of Penn and colleagues, created a database of more than 5000 high-resolution photographs taken at various locations in Botswana, a place near where humans likely evolved and other primates still live. The same scenes were shot at different times of day, with different exposure lengths, apertures, and distances from the camera. Using an algorithm they developed from previous studies of how human cones detect light, the researchers calculated how many photons of different wavelengths the camera had captured and what cone arrangement would pick up the largest number of them.

The actual pattern of cones in the human retina matches the algorithm's predictions, the researchers reveal in a paper uploaded to the arXiv database this month and another published in PLoS Computational Biology. Red and green cones would pick up more photons from the images than could blue cones. That explains why the eye makes so few blue cones and places them around the periphery of the retina rather than at the center, where light focuses, Balasubramanian says. Red and green cones, however, pick up about the same amount of information, so there's no evolutionary benefit in keeping their ratio tightly regulated.

Now it seems to me that some caveats are in order. The images captured here are from contemporary Botswana. While we're a young species in geological terms, there still could be some significant changes from the African landscape that our protohuman ancestors saw.

Still, the idea that Africa shaped the evolution of our eyes is a valid hypothesis, and interesting. It's also a good reminder that our vision is selective.