Over at the Centives economic blog, they figured out how much it would cost to build the Death Star in 2012 dollars. Spoiler: A lot. It would cost a lot.

We began by looking at how big the Death Star is. The first one is reported to be 140km in diameter and it sure looks like it’s made of steel. But how much steel? We decided to model the Death Star as having a similar density in steel as a modern warship. After all, they’re both essentially floating weapons platforms so that seems reasonable.

(via marginalrevolution)

Tags: economics   movies   Star Wars

Recent research suggests that domestic dogs seem capable of displaying a rudimentary “theory of mind” — a very human characteristic whereby you are able to attribute mental states to others that do not necessarily coincide with your own (in a nutshell). Stray domestic dogs, meanwhile, do not display this trait, suggesting that such mental attributes are developed through close contact with humans. That’s interesting, but not the main reason I’m sharing this information with you.

This cognitive difference between stray domestic dogs and their housebound brethren was uncovered by testing whether or not they understood the very human action of pointing (y’know, with your index finger). What struck me most in this discussion was this brief theory of how the action of pointing evolved:

Go ahead, let your wrist go limp and look at your hand from the side, or if you’re too insecure in your own sexuality, just picture Adam’s limp wrist at the moment of creation in Michelangelo’s masterpiece on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. See how even in this relaxed state the index finger is slightly extended? By contrast, when chimps do this […] their index finger falls naturally in line with their other fingers. Povinelli and Davis reason that this subtle evolutionary change in the morphology of our hands, which occurred after humans and chimpanzees last shared a common ancestor five million to seven million years ago, is at least partially responsible for the fact that human pointing with the index finger is so culturally ubiquitous today.

The argument goes something like this. When young infants begin reaching for objects just out of their range, adults are most likely to respond to those reaching attempts and to retrieve the item for the baby when the latter’s index finger is more prominently extended. That is to say, initially, the adult mistakenly reads into the child’s reaching attempt as a communicative gesture on the part of the child. Over time, this dynamic between the child and adult serves to further “pull out” the index finger because the child implicitly learns the behavioral association, so that it slowly becomes a genuine pointing gesture.

---

Like this? Then you’ll love these:

• Evolutionary Consumption
• What Makes Us Human: Tolerance and Cooperation
• An Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs

An ingenious clock made of books on a shelf, the numbers printed on the spines while the clock itself is embedded in the central book. This will be immediately added to the Colossal headquarters project list. I’m not sure who to credit for the clock itself, but the photo was taken at a client’s home by Shokoofeh Z.Dezfuli. (via razorbladesalvations)

Update: Turns out this is something you can buy, but it has terrible reviews. Seems like more fun as a DIY project anyway. Thanks, everyone.

tweet this   |   share on facebook   |   stumble it   |   see more items on colossal tagged with books, clocks, design.

Need some “artisanal text filler” for your latest project? Hipster Ipsum provides dummy text in two great flavors: “Hipster w/ a shot of Latin” and “Hipster, neat.”

Organic sustainable lomo, +1 irony McSweeney’s skateboard Portland PBR tattooed farm-to-table Terry Richardson Williamsburg. Organic farm-to-table wolf, next level shit put a bird on it freegan American Apparel Williamsburg chambray gentrify viral you probably haven’t heard of them keffiyeh Cosby sweater. Pitchfork photo booth fuck, DIY cardigan messenger bag butcher Thundercats tofu you probably haven’t heard of them whatever squid VHS put a bird on it. Thundercats fixie Williamsburg, photo booth synth vinyl dreamcatcher Wes Anderson cliche. You probably haven’t heard of them DIY mlkshk biodiesel McSweeney’s raw denim. Skateboard Pitchfork Etsy, photo booth messenger bag artisan raw denim beard Tumblr retro Austin. Wes Anderson sustainable keffiyeh, blog lomo craft beer cliche brunch homo skateboard biodiesel fanny pack Pitchfork you probably haven’t heard of them Stumptown.

(via ★dansays)

Tags: language

back	buy this print

digg facebook reddit stumbleupon

next

New to me, these embroidered car doors by Lithuanian textile artist Severija Incirauskaite-Kriauneviciene who has an enormous body of work involving stitched objects including bowls, irons, lamps and much more. Photos via OutsaPop. (via yellowtrace)

tweet this   |   share on facebook   |   stumble it   |   see more items on colossal tagged with art, embroidery, textiles.

Behold the breathtaking sculptural work of Canadian artist Maskull Lasserre who deftly extracts the most delicate anatomical forms of humans and animals from common objects. Lasserre was born 1978 in Calgary, Alberta and has lived in South Africa and Ottawa and now works and lives in Montreal. Via his website:

Lasserre’s drawings and sculptures explore the unexpected potential of the everyday and its associated structures of authority, class, and value. Elements of nostalgia, allegory, humor, and the macabre are incorporated into works that induce strangeness in the familiar, and provoke uncertainty in the expected.

His snake skeleton axe entitled Secret Carpentry is one of the most superb sculptural objects I’ve ever seen and don’t miss his work with computer software manuals, newspapers, coat hangers, and tree branches. Lasserre is currently part of a group exhibition at the Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain (PFOAC) in Montreal through August 6, followed by a solo show in the same space starting in November.

tweet this   |   share on facebook   |   stumble it   |   see more items on colossal tagged with anatomy, art, sculpture, wood.

The methods through which we create and maintain relationships are constantly changing, with recent decades boosting the move from a purely location-based model to one where relationships can spawn and develop remotely, thanks to the Internet (and, to a lesser degree, the telephone and mail systems). However, while this new way of creating and maintaining relationships has distinct advantages over the ‘traditional’ concept of location-based friendship creation, many perceive it as inferior.

Taking his cue from a quote that did the rounds on Twitter last year–Twitter makes me like people I’ve never met and Facebook makes me hate people I know in real life–David Hayes attempts to shed light on the advantages of Internet-originating relationships by perfectly describing the way friendship creation has evolved over time (by means of describing the constraints to doing so). The conclusion echoes my sentiments exactly:

I view the higher value placed on place-originating (or “real-life”) friendships as wrongheaded. It seems only logical to me that it is better to build your relationships from a pool of people who speak your language and have similar soft-qualities to you, than to attempt to start from a geographically constrained group and then attempt to find soft-quality matches in a face-to-face series of interactions. This is fundamentally what the internet allows: the friendship process to start from a set of commonalities around soft attributes, and then potentially aim for geographic matching. This is the opposite of the standard process, but certainly the one more likely to yield deep and long-lasting relationships.

Interestingly, even though our only communication has been through numerous backlinks and a couple of tweets, I wouldn’t hesitate in calling David a friend. Most likely, the majority of my Facebook friends (i.e. my physical world originating friends) would not understand this.

---

Like this? Then you’ll love these:

• Friendship Differences by Gender
• Why Urban Legends Spread
• Social Ignorance and Surrogacy

A paper authored by Tatu Westling of Helsinki University explores the relationship between the GDP growth of countries and the penile length of their residents.

The size of male organ is found to have an inverse U-shaped relationship with the level of GDP in 1985. It can alone explain over 15% of the variation in GDP. The GDP maximizing size is around 13.5 centimetres, and a collapse in economic development is identified as the size of male organ exceeds 16 centimetres.

That “U-shaped” curve…it looks like something flaccid-ish, innit? (via @atenni)

Tags: economics

New work by artist Evan Drolet Cook, who doesn’t seem to have a website, but the above photo was taken by Cameron Wittig. (via eyeteeth)

tweet this   |   share on facebook   |   stumble it   |   see more items on colossal tagged with art, maps.

These photos have apparently been around for a while, but this is totally new to me. An enterprising group of robotic vacuum cleaner owners have used LEDs affixed to the top of their Roombas to create these amazing long exposure photographs. Check out Roomba art group for more. Photos via IBR Roomba, Mike Bala, and Steve Doll. (via laughing squid)

tweet this   |   share on facebook   |   stumble it   |   see more items on colossal tagged with lighting, photography, robots.

I’m slowly working my way through Charles Mann’s 1493 and there are interesting tidbits on almost every page. One of my favorite bits of the book so far is a possible explanation of the Little Ice Age that I hadn’t heard before put forth by William Ruddiman.

As human communities grow, Ruddiman pointed out, they open more land for farms and cut down more trees for fuel and shelter. In Europe and Asia, forests were cut down with the ax. In the Americas before [Columbus], the primary tool was fire. For weeks on end, smoke from Indian bonfires shrouded Florida, California, and the Great Plains.

Burning like this happened all over the pre-Columbian Americas, from present-day New England to Mexico to the Amazon basin to Argentina. Then the Europeans came:

Enter now the Columbian Exchange. Eurasian bacteria, viruses, and parasites sweep through the Americas, killing huge numbers of people — and unraveling the millenia-old network of human intervention. Flames subside to embers across the Western Hemisphere as Indian torches are stilled. In the forests, fire-hating trees like oak and hickory muscle aside fire-loving species like loblolly, longleaf, and slash pine, which are so dependent on regular burning that their cones will only open and release seed when exposed to flame. Animals that Indians had hunted, keeping their numbers down, suddenly flourish in great numbers. And so on.

The regular fires and forest regrowth resulted in less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the atmosphere traps less heat. It’s like global warming in reverse.

Tags: 1493   books   Charles Mann   climate   science   William Ruddiman

Having classes start later seems like it would be a great advantage, for night owls, at least, who can sleep a bit longer. A new study, however, associates later class times with more alcohol drinking, poorer sleep and lower GPAs. More »

I’ve been going ape-wild for congruent conflations lately and for good reason: they’re the most fun I’ve had with wordplay for a long time and I find they ring off the tongue nicely. Hopefully you’ll cut me a bone if I indulge a little more, as with just a couple more examples you will no-doubt be able to put the dots together.

Oh, OK, I won’t skirt around the bush any longer; it’s time to let the bean out of the bag with the help of Conflations.com’s introduction to congruent and incongruent conflations (and the accompanying lists thereof):

Simply put, a conflation is an amalgamation of two different expressions. In most cases, the combination results in a new expression that makes little sense literally, but clearly expresses an idea because it references well-known idioms. All conflations fit into one of two major categories: Congruent Conflations & Incongruent Conflations. Congruent Conflations are the more ideal (and more sought-after) examples of the concept. These occur when the two root expressions basically reflect the same thought. For example, “Look who’s calling the kettle black” can be formed using the root expressions “Look who’s talking” & “The pot is calling the kettle black.” These root expressions really mean the same thing—they are both a friendly way to point out hypocritical behaviour. Of course, without reference to a pot (which is just as black as a kettle), “Look who’s calling the kettle black” does not directly imply anything. Yet the implication is almost automatically understood because the conflation clearly refers to two known idioms.

Incongruent Conflation occurs when the root expressions do not mean the same thing, but share a common word or theme.

Congruent example: “Know-it-pants” from the root expressions “Know-it-all” and “Smarty-pants”.

Incongruent example: “A wild herring” from the root expressions “A wild goose chase” and “A red herring”.

via @siibo

---

Like this? Then you’ll love these:

• British, American, and German Senses of Humour
• Words and Phrases Lost in Translation
• The Numbers in Our Words: Words of Estimative Probability

You’ve tried waking up with loud noises and multiple alarm clocks, but you just can’t get out of bed in the morning. If you’re looking for some motivation, this DIY alarm clock will slowly shred money until you get out of bed to stop it. More »

I love Idan Friedman’s profiles project…he hand-embosses the profiles of everyday people into disposable aluminum pans.

Royals and world leaders are forever immortalized on coins and normal people get disposable pie tins. Makes sense. (via ★feltron)

Tags: art   Idan Friedman