Brights News Feed

What colour is the world? It is one of those great scientific or philosophical questions.

Well, no, it isn’t really. But in 80 million tiny images from MIT, you can get a pretty good idea of the answer anyway.

The mosaic is comprised of smaller images each of which is an average of several other images each representing the same noun. The images are organised by semantic meaning, hence the areas of similar colour, such as the large green area which is related to vegetation etc.

(Via)

Having been suspended by its own opera house on Monday, on the advice of German security services, the Deutsche Oper production of Mozart’s Idomoneo was last night touted to be staged “as soon as possible”, following a series of high profile criticisms of the “self-censorship”, as well as the consent of a new German-Islam dialogue forum.

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Around 10 million Americans hang a Thomas Kinkade painting in their homes. Paintings, prints and inevitable spin-off merchandise from the “painter of light”, fetch in the region of $100 million a year. The paintings are marketed in part on the basis of Kinkade’s Christian faith; many of his fans and Signature Gallery owners are Christian. Critics have slated the works for being mawkish.

Sunset on Lamplight Lane by Thomas Kinkade

Now Kinkade’s business dealings are reportedly being investigated by the FBI (SFGate.com: “Artist Thomas Kinkade under FBI investigation ex-dealers say“), with the help of at least six former Kinkade Signature Gallery owners. Read the rest of this entry »

David, one of the brightsOnline bloggers, points out (Science and sensibility: “Blogging about the natural world“) two recent “blog carnvials“.

Tangled Bank #59 is at ScienceAndReason.blogspot.com (all issues of Tangled Bank can be found here).

And the invertebrates’ Circus of the Spineless latest carnival is at Roger Butterfield’s Words & Pictures.

Butterfield links for example to Via Negativa and Dave Bonta’s original photographs of various spineless critters, including these Monarch butterflies (“Love and death at the milkweed saloon”).