Images

Work and art

Finally finished the mind-numbingly boring work of reading proofs for a manual on the GPL license. It’s so boring that I have broken records in procrastination but today surrounded by loud music I stayed at home and finished. In front of me is my latest acquisitio, a color lithograph graphic by Claude Weisbuch which I brought home today.

claude

While on the subject of art I cannot help but spreading this anecdote about Dali which I just read on _Paddy K_

Apparently Dali liked to eat out, with large groups of friends in tow, but was not so fond of paying the bill. So he made a point of paying using a check from his checkbook and, just before handing the check over, scribbled a little drawing on the back and signed it.

And now the owner, suddenly in possession of a signed Dali, would usually just frame it and hang it on the wall and show it to his friends instead of cashing it at the bank.

Sitting with licenses is sooo boring.

Posted on by mklang

Stuffed birds in the Cathedral?

About five years ago the artist Banksy performed hang and run art. What he would do was to take art with him into a museum and hang it up among the other artwork. This is a fun idea since most museum security is concerned with keeping the visitors from destroying or removing art – not adding to it.

See more about Banksy’s hang and run here.

While in Uppsala this week I came across an interesting variation on the theme. While attending a workshop on mashups we were taken on a guided tour of Uppsala Cathedral. It’s an amazing building filled with loads of dead kings, queens, nobility and a random selection of famous people. In short its a nice place to tour.

At the end of the Cathedral is the Vasa Chapel were the Gustav Vasa is buried with his wife (nr 9 on map). The chapel has a gate and sitting on the gate someone has stuck small stuffed birds…

photo: stuffed birds by wrote (cc by-nc)

The birds may look realistic but I can assure they they are very dead. When I asked our guide he was surprised to see them and my guess is that this is a variation of Banksy’s guerilla art project. Lots of fun. I wonder how long they have been there and how long they will remain there.

Posted on by mklang

Catching the runner

What would happen if the poor old Wile E. C0yote ever caught Road Runner? Everyone needs goals in life and what happens when we attain the goals? In the worst case we end up like this brilliant cartoon on Popped Culture

Popped Culture is also looking for the origins of the cartoon – So if anyone knows where it’s from contact Popped Culture.

Anyone know where this image is from? I’ve been scouring the interwebs trying to source it, but to no avail. It has the look of Family Guy, but doesn’t appear to be.

Posted on by mklang

On philosophical advice

Not all intelligent sounding advice is actually good advice and most philosophical advice is on the level of a bad sound-bite. Most of it just sounds cool but is totally useless real life applications. The latest strip from Jorge Cham of PhD comics has come online:

What this means in real life thesis writing (if I now may offer some advice…) is not to dig to deeply into “how-to-write-a-phd-or-masters” books since they are filled with obvious advice and keep you busy reading the wrong things. I think that Nike had the right approach with their slogan “Just do it”.

Posted on by mklang

Cool images of seeds and pollen

The Guardian maintains some pretty neat photo galleries – the photo below is from there. Actually I am pretty sure I saw someone like this at the bus stop yesterday!

These strange alien structures are among the seeds and pollen conserved at the Kew Millennium Seed Bank. Seeds from more than 10% of the world’s flowering plants – around 30,000 species – have been collected in the decade since the bank was established. Kew is celebrating this milestone with an exhibition Banking on Life (4 April – 13 September), and a book of electron micrographs The Hidden Sexuality of Flowers by Rob Kesseler and Madeline Harley (Papadakis, £35)

Posted on by mklang

Brilliant protest

Bit late but what a great idea!

A woman in Paris holds condoms with a picture of Pope Benedict XVI. This condoms were released to mock the pope after he rejected condoms as a weapon against AIDS during his African trip.

From the Guardian.

Posted on by mklang

More images in the commons

The Creative Commons blog writes about 250,000 images recently donated to Wikimedia Commons, a sister project of Wikipedia.

The images, part of the German Photo Collection at Saxony’s State and University Library (SLUB), are being uploaded with corresponding captions and metadata. Afterward, volunteers will link the photos, all available under Germany’s ported CC BY-SA 3.0 license or in the public domain, to personal identification data and relevant Wikipedia articles. The collection depicts scenes from German history and daily life.

As a bonus for the donating library, the metadata supplied by the German Photo Collection will be expanded and annotated by Wikipedia users, and the results will be seeded back into the collection’s database.

The donation marks the first step in a collaboration between SLUB and Wikimedia Germany e.V., the pioneering Wikimedia chapter who faciliated a similar 100,000-image-strong cooperation with the German Federal Archives last December.

Creative Commons license Creative Commons Attribution Creative Commons Share Alike

This file is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License.

Posted on by mklang

Museums are doing it

Today I came across a notice that the Powerhouse Museum is adopting the attribution, non-commercial, no-derivatives Creative Commons license (for the material it owns)

This licence is used on some parts of our website. Examples are our own photography in the Photo of the Day blog and also for children’s activities on our Play at Powerhouse website. This licence means that you can republish this material for any non-commercial purpose as long as you give attribution back to the Powerhouse Museum as the creator and that you do not modify the work in any way. A more detailed explanation of this licence is available from Creative Commons.

And not long ago I found that the Brooklyn Museum was also using the same license.

This is in addition to the great collection of museums and institutions which have chosen to join the Flickr Commons.

The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

Among the 23 organisations in the Flickr Commons is the Swedish National Heritage Board which has begun putting photographs online. How about this photo from the small fishing town of Lysekil

Photograph: People in old Lysekil by Carl Curman (c:a 1870) uploaded RÄA

Posted on by mklang