Chop Cup. There is a fault in reality. Do not adjust your mind. [more inside]
posted by lazaruslong on Oct 4, 2009 - 44 comments

Apropos on Black Friday, Charles, Prince of Wales addresses the Foreign Press Association with a comprehensive lecture on the dangers of unchecked consumerism and the need for an increasingly holistic worldview in light of the global social, economic and environmental challenges. The credit crisis is a side effect of a throwaway society and consumerism is no cure for depression, he says, and we need to question the concepts of "Modernity" and "Economic Growth" we take for granted.
posted by infini on Nov 28, 2008 - 102 comments

Of all the People in the World "uses grains of rice to bring formally abstract statistics to startling and powerful life" . via
posted by Dormant Gorilla on Oct 30, 2008 - 13 comments

Twin brothers Trevor and Ryan Oakes have a new technique for drawing perspective. Unlike the camera obscura and camera lucida (allegedly) employed by Renaissance masters, their method uses an easel with a curved steel frame which splits the artist's view into a grid and a skullcap to lock his head into place. By employing an optical trick similar to magic-eye stereoscopy, the artist can superimpose what he sees onto a thin strip of his paper. The result? Richly detailed line drawings on concave surfaces. Their website. (Look for Trevor's pipe cleaner weavings and the see-through concave cardboard wall). More, more and more.
posted by hydrophonic on Oct 26, 2008 - 24 comments

Coign of Vantage is an unassuming, soothing kind of game - manipulate and move around a 3d cloud of pixels until they line up and melt into a simple image. Easy, zone-outtable, quite addictive.
posted by peachfuzz on Aug 14, 2008 - 13 comments

"A Hydrogen Atom is only about a ten millionth of a millimeter in diameter, but the proton in the middle is a hundred thousand times smaller, and the electron whizzing around the outside is a thousand times smaller than THAT. The rest of the atom is empty. I tried to picture it, and I couldn't. So I put together this page - and I still can't picture it." Awesome illustration on perspective and particles - *warning* very wide page, may be dangerous to your browser. Also, the relative size of planets (via the always interesting 37signals blog.)
posted by rsanheim on Aug 29, 2006 - 26 comments

The Death of Perspective. Among the greatest achievements of the renaissance artists was the perfection of the art of perspective: Giving the appearance of depth to a flat surface. Felice Varini uses perspective to do the opposite.
posted by empath on Jun 9, 2006 - 38 comments

Reasons and explanations.
posted by semmi on Apr 3, 2006 - 28 comments

Here's an interesting series of scale/perspective images showing what all the water on Earth (1.4087 billion cubic kilometres of it), including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc. would look like in comparison to the total spherical area of the Earth, and then again showing All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Both illustrations shown on the same scale as the Earth. via
posted by jonson on Nov 13, 2005 - 36 comments

There's one man that represents where I was brought up in Lancashire. Steeplejack Fred Dibnah. His interests include industrial archeology, traction engines and wearing flat caps. Recently he has been making history programmes for the BBC where his enthusiasm and interest in what other people are saying is given a fresh twist by his working class perspective and respect for the builders of castles, mills etc. A great man with his own way with words. So, who are your local heroes?
posted by quarsan on Dec 18, 2002 - 8 comments

Kat's Window on Thailand Kat's slice-of-life articles on what it is really like to live in Thailand. (Kat writes her weekly column for the Bangkok Post.)
posted by konolia on Oct 3, 2002 - 3 comments