fractalotl

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I had this idea for a looping animation in which a single dot has a pretty long loop, but the animation as a whole is much shorter. Because of the repetition this animation is only 1 second long!

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found this abandoned quilt top while cleaning and had to finish it up finally. screen printed and sewn last semester and finally quilted and bound yesterday. using holographic foils to emulate the glassy appearance of diatoms under the microscope, i sewed a log cabin pattern as a playful nod to the idea that diatoms live in tiny glass houses.

Glass Cabin, 2023, 40x42in, pieced cotton with textile foil screenprints, polyester batting, gifted fabric backing

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holy SHIT please read the whole thread and many more of these images right here, this artist put together an updated Opabinia reconstruction where every single one of these minute details (except coloration, obviously) are fully sourced making this most likely the first depiction factoring in 100% of current knowledge about it. Even I didn’t know it had little feet like a velvet worm and could have walked around on them! I never knew exactly how the trunk is oriented or how many “teeth” it is! I especially didn’t know the mouth was that weird! And I kind of assumed this since it’s a lobopod and all, but the whole animal was soft and squishy except for the eyes and the teeth. It did not have armor plates or a jointed exoskeleton like a lot of people portray. This also means all five of the eyes would have been able to bend and look around independently! The eye structure in fossils also indicates that they would have PSEUDOPUPILS! That’s the pupil-like dot in the eyes of insects like mantises!

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anemones seen here using specialized body growths called acrorhagi to attack each other during an argument in the intertidal zone.

Anthopluera xanthogrammica San Mateo county CA, Aug. 2015 / T3i /

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Still in awe that more than zero people in the world believe corals are just inanimate mineral formations, or that sea anemones are plants, or that sea urchins are just stationary objects, or that so many people didn’t know that every single seashell in the world comes from the death of its original owner and isn’t “molted” or “shed” from live snails. People deserve to know marine invertebrates as well as they do so many other animals :(

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Evoking Organic Growth, Toru Kurokawa’s Ceramic Sculptures Stretch and Swell into Abstract Forms

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Perfect standing wave on a computer-controlled wave pool

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Morphing Particle Rafts

A layer of tiny glass beads sitting atop a pool of castor oil becomes a morphing surface in this video. Applying an electric field creates enough electrostatic force to draw the interface upward against the power of both gravity and surface tension.  (Image and video credit: K. Sun et al.) Read the full article

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thinking about the northern stargazer ♥

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(source)

[fractalotl]

Here’s something cute

When lockdown happened in the UK it happened very suddenly. At the law firm I work at, our office building emptied overnight when everyone was told to work from home. No time to clear our desks, no time to bring office plants home.

Fast forward three and a half months - everyone assumes that their plants are dead.

But then! An email goes round! It’s turns out that one of our security guards is a florist, and -

-the security team has moved EVERY SINGLE PLANT from all 12 FLOORS of our office building into the cafeteria. It’s been turned into a temporary greenhouse. Cacti and succulents and spider plants and terrariums and potted ferns

AND! Each plant has been INDIVIDUALLY LABELLED by hand with post-it notes with name and desk location so the plants can go home after lockdown ends

To give some indication of the scale of the endeavour:

If you zoom into the centre right photo you can see one of our security team happily waving

The plants are being taken care of tenderly. They get sun and water and are spending happy times with other plant friends

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The beautiful colors of a soap film reflect its variations in thickness. As a film drains and evaporates, it turns to shades of gray and black as it gets thinner. More than fifty years ago, one scientist proposed a free-energy-based explanation for how such ultrathin films might evolve. But it’s taken another half a century for experimental techniques to reach a point where the thickness of these ultrathin films could be measured well enough to test that theory. The new mechanism, known as spinodal stratification, has been observed in both vertical films (top) and foam (bottom) but has so far not been observed in any horizontal configuration, suggesting that buoyant effects are likely important, too. (Image and research credit: S. Yilixiati et al.; submitted by James S.)

[fractalotl]

What's the most surprising thing you've learned as a psychiatrist?

How innocently people are awful at communication. I know the word “innocent” sounds out of place here, so let me explain what I mean.

(I’m going to use the example of a male patient, but it happens with both sexes.)

He will say “My wife keeps getting mad at me for no reason, I don’t know what to do”. I ask him for details. He says something like “I ask her when dinner will be ready and she just flips out at me”.

I suggest that we roleplay the conversation: I’ll pretend to be his wife, and he’ll talk to me the way he usually talks to her. It will go something like this:

ME: (in falsetto voice) Hi honey, welcome home!

HIM: Why isn’t dinner ready yet? What’s wrong with you? All I want is to have dinner ready when I get home, and you can never do it!

ME (no longer in falsetto voice, speaking normally): Wait, are you exaggerating this or is that how you normally talk to your wife?

HIM: That’s how I normally talk to my wife.

ME: And just to be clear, you’re confused why she gets angry when you talk to her that way, and you’re asking me to figure out this mystery, right?

HIM: Yes.

ME: And you didn’t exaggerate that at all, that’s definitely how you usually talk?

HIM: Yes.

ME: When I was pretending to be your wife, I felt attacked by the way you asked me if dinner was ready.

HIM: Why?

ME: Well, I wrote down what you said on my notepad here, and it was “Why isn’t dinner ready yet? What’s wrong with you? All I want is to have dinner ready when I get home, and you can never do it!” Do you think you could have asked this more like “Hi honey, when will dinner be ready?”

HIM: I’m afraid she wouldn’t take me seriously if I did that. She might just say something like “It’ll be ready later”, and then she wouldn’t know that I’m really hungry and really upset that she didn’t make it already.

ME: It sounds like dinner being ready on time is very important to you. Is there any way you can talk to your wife at some other point, like when you’re out on a date, let her know how important that is to you, and ask her if the two of you can come up with some system? Like maybe on days when she has lots of time, she can make dinner for you, and on days when she’s busy, she can let you know she won’t be making dinner and then you can bring some food home?

HIM:

It’s really surprising to me not just how many people are terrible communicators, but how many people, when asked to simulate their communication style in front of a psychiatrist, will be so innocent about how bad a communicator they are that they won’t try to hide it, they won’t try to change their answers in order to look better, they’ll just say things that are totally awful and offensive and then in all honesty ask me why I think their partner gets angry.

I assume there’s some cultural difference here, and maybe I’m the person who’s in the wrong in some subtle hard-to-understand way, but usually they tell me their wife miraculously stopped being temperamental and incomprehensible around the time they worked out some alternative dinner-assurance system besides yelling at her.

I guess this is another thing that surprises me, is how un-systematic some people are. If it were me, by the 50th time I yelled at my wife for not making dinner on time, I would be considering the hypothesis that there’s a better way to solve this than more yelling, but a lot of people can’t seem to figure that out.

Eliezer had a phrase I like, “technical solutions to human problems”, of which the classic example is that if you don’t like your partner making noise, instead of arguing with her about what’s appropriate, you get earplugs (I realize earplugs don’t always work well in real life, it’s just an example). I’ve heard some people debate whether this is really a good idea or not. But it seems like some of my patients are the total opposite end of the scale, so fixated on human solutions to human problems that they can’t imagine addressing any of their issues other than by yelling at the other person to change even louder than they were yelling before.