Felix Salmon muses on why art prices keep rising. On the way, he discusses why some art becomes super-popular:
"Fine art has become the billionaire’s-club equivalent of a Louis Vuitton bag, slathered in logos. It’s not connoisseurship which drives values, so much as recognizability. Which in turn helps to explain why the most prolific artists (Picasso, Warhol, Hirst) are also the most expensive: the more of their work there is, the more exposed to it people become, the more they’ll recognize it, and therefore the more desirable it is."
posted by benbenson
on Feb 8, 2012 -
23 comments
Counterparties is a nice little collection of curated and tagged economic news stories, 5-8 every day. It is edited in part by the admirable (and MetaFave) financial journalist
Felix Salmon.
posted by shothotbot
on Dec 22, 2011 -
12 comments
Four years after being spawned Fraser River Sockeye salmon return to the same creeks in which they were born to mate, spawn and die. Salmon have a strong preference for heavier returns every four years. Prior to 1913 this cycle peaked every second odd year (IE: 1905 - 1909 - 1913). However in 1913 (a year that had a record high 31 million fish harvested) construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway along side the Frasier river resulted in massive rock slides that
prevented most of the returning fish from making it to their ancestral streams. Clean up efforts in subsequent years and the construction of fish ladders at Hell's Gate saved the Salmon from extinction and switched peaked returns to every second even year (IE: 2010 - 2014 - 2018) but numbers of fish returning were way down.
Until now. This year's projected returns are the highest since 1913's record year and not far short of it. This is bound to make the organizers of
Salute to the Sockeye very happy.
[more inside]
posted by Mitheral
on Aug 25, 2010 -
37 comments
Functional MRI (fMRI) is a widely used technique of brain imaging in the cognitive sciences, allowing researchers to visualize what part of the brain is responding to certain stimuli, resulting in
striking images of
live brains. These days, fMRI is seeing more non-research use, such as forming the basis of controversial
new lie detectors. Craig Bennett, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB,
submitted a whole Atlantic salmon to fMRI analysis, and found that this fish could apparently detect, and respond to, the the emotional state of human beings (
poster). Remarkable science, especially considering the salmon was dead at the time.
[more inside]
posted by Rumple
on Sep 24, 2009 -
59 comments
Have you been salmoned? I just met a stranger from Denver via the process of salmoning, in which a chatbot initiates an unexpected two-way conversation between two (apparently random) nicks, giving them both aliases ending with "salmon," and leaving both parties confused.
[more inside]
posted by Mo Nickels
on Jun 14, 2008 -
26 comments
I’ve seen men in fur suits masturbating on stuffed animals. I’ve seen high heels stepping on snails. I’ve seen women farting on birthday cakes. I’ve seen guys wearing white socks in two inches of water in the bathtub. I’ve seen a tutorial on how to jack-off with a pair of Keds. And I’ve seen some weird stuff, too. Isn’t there a line of some kind, where it just stops being sexy to anyone? And the answer it seems, is no.... Because there is
sexually explicit salmon hentai. NSFW.
Via FG blog.
posted by KokuRyu
on Jun 10, 2008 -
87 comments
The SalmoFan: So long, and thanks for all the fish and animals, and plants... Amidst the
catastrophic decline of large ocean fish, Salmon farmers can choose the hue of their
"farmed" Salmon with the
SalmoFan. [Meanwhile, these same salmon are fed on a factory fishing catch process which effectively strips most large life forms from the ocean.] With
1/4 of all mammmals and
1/2 of all plant species facing extinction, Is the planet truly
at a crossroads? Are we
losing the extinction battle?
..
"Overfishing is a global problem. People are taking marine life faster than it can reproduce. The world's catch peaked at 86 million tons in 1989, up fourfold in 50 years.....But many governments, including the United States, Mexico, the European Union, Japan and China, kept on pouring subsidies into commercial fishing fleets to keep them afloat...The Gulf of California in Mexico is not dead, but it is exhausted from overfishing, which has caused every important species of fish there to decline....Crucial fisheries have collapsed worldwide."
Contrast that with
This: "[once upon a time there were] cod shoals
"so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them." There were six- and seven-foot-long codfish weighing as much as 200 pounds. There were great banks of oysters as large as shoes. At low tide, children were sent to the shore to collect 10-, 15-, even 20-pound lobsters with hand rakes for use as bait or pig feed. Eight- to 12-foot sturgeon choked New England rivers, and salmon packed streams from the Hudson River to Hudson's Bay. Herring, squid and capelin (a small open-water fish seven inches long) spawning runs were so gigantic they astonished observers for more than four centuries"
posted by troutfishing
on May 27, 2003 -
31 comments
The Most Delicious Food That's Also Very Good For You - - in fact, to my mind, the
best food in
the world, including all the tastiest unhealthy ones, is
sashimi. And
sushi comes second. But sometimes it's late at night or too early in the morning; you're broke; the
restaurants are closed; you're nowhere near Tokyo's
Tsukiji Fish
Market and all your sushi
etiquette,
memories and
knowledge; your
favourite sushi websites; your well-thumbed
sushi books and your
fishy wishlists...are of no darn use to you.
Then you remember it's late or early enough to hit your local fish market... And it's
then that this ideologically incorrect and Hawaii-leaning, California-dreaming, somewhat Englishly-challenged set of video tutorials comes into its own! Truth be told, for the price of one fresh mackerel, one sardine, a slice of salmon... and sashimi is yours! [
But who am I kidding? It's just not the same. Oh well, Windows Media required for the vids.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Apr 19, 2003 -
28 comments
Ever wonder where that salmon steak on your plate came from? It turns out that it was either farmed or caught in the wild, and like everything else these days, the origins of salmon can spark a
political debate. On one side are those how believe there are
great costs in the farming of salmon, while others feel
farming salmon is good for industry and the environment. "If you are what you eat, but don't know what you're eating, do you know who you are?"
I cannot for the death of me remember where I heard this quote
posted by elwoodwiles
on Feb 13, 2003 -
32 comments
Gourmet Magazine had a pretty interesting article (wish it was up on line) about farm-raised salmon v. wild salmon. Farm-raised salmon is scary, especially with regards to
disease,
waste handling, food (feather meal, blood meal, bone meal and other things that wild salmon do not eat) and an industry which is controlled by a very small number of multinational companies.
posted by plinth
on Aug 29, 2002 -
23 comments
