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Graphene - sheets of carbon just one atom thick - is one of the strongest artificial materials, and spider silk is one of the strongest natural ones. So Nicola Pugno of the University of Trento, Italy, wondered what would happen if you combined them.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27468-spiders-sprayed-with-graphene-or-carbon-nanotubes-spin-super-silk.html

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/537301/spiders-ingest-nanotubes-then-weave-silk-reinforced-with-carbon/

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David Veale, a psychiatrist published a scientific study about penis size…

Veale and his team set out to settle the score on penile proportions, they decided to compile data from clinicians who followed a standardized measuring procedure. Published today in the British Journal of Urology International, their new study synthesizes data from 17 previous academic papers that included measurements from a total of 15,521 men from around the world. The data enabled the researchers to calculate averages and model the estimated distribution of penile dimensions across humanity. “It still just strikes me how many men have questions and insecurities and concerns about their own penis size. We actually do need good data on it,” says Debra Herbenick, a behavioral scientist at Indiana University, Bloomington, who was not involved in the study. According to the team’s analysis,the average flaccid, pendulous penis is 9.16 cm (3.61 inches) in length; the average erect penis is 13.12 cm (5.16 inches) long. The corresponding girth measurements are 9.31 cm (3.66 inches) for a flaccid penis and 11.66 cm (4.59 inches) for an erect one. A graph of the size distribution shows that outliers are rare. A 16-cm (6.3-inch) erect penis falls into the 95th percentile: Out of 100 men, only five would have a penis larger than 16 cm. Conversely, an erect penis measuring 10 cm (3.94 inches) falls into the 5th percentile: Only five out of 100 men would have a penis smaller than 10 cm. ” (David Shultz, AAAS)

The full article can be read here: Am I normal? A systematic review and construction of nomograms for flaccid and erect penis length and circumference in up to 15 521 men.

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„People may say I can’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.“

#florence foster jenkins

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Ghost Song

Right now, you’re probably listening to music on your computer. The source of that music — whether you’re listening to an mp3 file or streaming — is a compressed version of a file that was much more detailed, but way larger. It’s worth interrupting your music for a moment and asking: What sounds are you missing? Watch and listen to Ryan Maguire's "The Ghost In The Mp3". It’s a song made with only the sounds that were left out when compressing Suzanne Vega’s 'Tom’s Diner' to mp3.

#mp3 #Ryan Maguire

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"It's time for the need for sex and the need for love to be granted equal standing, without an added moral gloss. Both may be independently felt and are of comparable value and validity."

#Alain de Botton #quote #how to think more about sex

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"Deep inside, we never quite forget the needs with which we were born: to be accepted as we are, without regards to our deeds; to be loved through the medium of our body; to be enclosed in another's arms; to occasion delight with the smell of our skin - all of these needs inspiring our relentless and passionately idealistic quest for someone to kiss and sleep with."

#Alain de Botton #quote #how to think more about sex

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Researchers have found that, based on enough Facebook Likes, computers can judge your personality traits better than your friends, family and even your partner.

By mining Facebook Likes, the computer model was able to predict a person's personality more accurately than most of their friends and family. Given enough Likes to analyse, only a person's spouse rivalled the computer for accuracy of broad psychological traits. Researchers describe the finding as an "emphatic demonstration" of the capacity of computers to discover an individual's psychological traits through pure data analysis.

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James Turrell Tunnel by HomemadePants on Flickr

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Porto Universidade do Porto, Rua Jorge Viterbo Ferreira

© piXXXeljunk

#Architecture #Porto

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Choi Xoo Ang

#hands

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Lonely Sculpture by Tully Arnot (2014)

#tully arnot #art #technology

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The Sad Internet

The Sad Internet is a place full of unwatched videos, unliked photographs, unheard music, tweets that no one cared about, and crowdfunding projects that nobody backed.

Forgotify plumbs Spotify’s unheard depths to present you with a random selection from the zero-listen archives.

There’s a note of optimism, or at least yearning, in the name of No Likes Yet - yet! As a practical matter, the site is designed to let you “discover” Instagram photos with zero likes. Or you can just indulge in the potential schadenfreude of narrowing results to your own circle of Instagram contacts. Or wallow in the self-pity of reviewing your own unliked pictures.

Sad Tweets: Connect the application to your Twitter account, and it presents you with a lowlights reel of your attempts at “sharing” that attracted no likes, and no retweets. It’s “a graveyard for your most depressing Twitter failures”. And despite his (rather depressing!) wish that the service would expand to allow users to peruse other people’s sad tweets, for now it remains purely a mechanism for self-loathing.

Petit Tube plays a stream of YouTube videos with zero views.

Kickended, a site that collects campaigns launched on the crowdfunding platform that failed to attract a single backer.

A pioneer of the form: the Tumblr Screenshots of Despair. It set out to collect “a bunch of screenshots illustrating the feelings of desolation that can often accompany social networking and life online,” its creator wrote.

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This Exquisite Forest is an art-meets-data visualization-meets-crowdsourcing experiment. Inspired by a Surrealist artistic movement called The Exquisite Corpse, in which a collection of words or images is assembled without narrative constraints, Koblin and Milk envision a forest of collaborative storytelling driven by short animations, writing, and music.

“Trees” in the Forest are grown from “seeds” created by leading contemporary artists, including Miroslaw Balka and Olafur Eliasson. Using a web-based drawing tool, contributors add short animations that become the leaves and branches of each tree. A Web Audio API also allows for the addition of music. The stories grow into a forest and, in what the artists call “a natural selection process,” visitors to the site will help select the strongest contributed elements and ensure they survive.

More: http://www.creativeapplications.net/javascript-2/this-exquisite-forest-project-by-aaron-koblin-and-chris-milk/ http://pando.com/2012/07/19/google-data-artist-aaron-koblin-and-chris-milk-launch-this-exquisite-forest/

#the exquisite forest #chris milk #aaron koblin

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"I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent. Many times I have stood mesmerized by an aquarium tank, wondering, as I stared into the horizontal pupils of an octopus’s large, prominent eyes, if she was staring back at me - and if so, what was she thinking?"

#octopus

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This isn’t animation. These are literally sound waves. Watch and listen: How to Draw Mushrooms on an Oscilloscope with Sound [VIDEO]

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UK laws governing online porn changed

Acts that are no longer acceptable include: spanking, caning and whipping beyond a gentle level; penetration by any object "associated with violence"; activities that can be classed as "life-endangering", such as strangulation and facesitting; fisting, if all knuckles are inserted; physical or verbal abuse, even if consensual; the portrayal of non-consensual sex; urination in various sexual contexts; and female ejaculation.

It's quite a list, but one mostly made up of stuff that seems to have been picked out pretty arbitrarily (women orgasming, exactly which items can or can't be inserted into a consenting adult's body).

"It's a set of weird and arbitrary censorship rules [...] There appear to be no rational explanations for most of the [...] rules – they're simply a set of moral judgements designed by people who have struggled endlessly to stop the British people from watching pornography." Jerry Barnett, founder of anti-censorship campaign Sex and Censorship

"While mainstream porn will be peddled without fear by the large studios – often owned by the same media moguls who denounce the 'sexualisation' of our culture – more niche, less clichéd sexual interests will disappear." Itziar Bilbao Urrutia (aka Ms Tytania)

#censorship #uk #internet #ms tytania #sex and censorship

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100 Years of Beauty