Katinka Matson's scanned flower art : technology lets the flowers speak. "...imagine a painter who could, like Vermeer, capture the quality of light that a camera can, but with the color of paints. That is what a scanner gives you.... In her flowers one can see every microscopic dew drop, leaf vein, and particle of pollen—in satisfying rich pigmented color....." (scroll down for images)
posted by troutfishing on Jun 24, 2003 - 16 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