subterranean home-sick blues

Rather surprisingly (but not undeservedly) it was announced that activist and song-writer Bob Dylan will be awarded the Nobel prize for literature.
Aside from praise and excitement, this news is inspiring a small measure of disbelief, and perhaps the committee wanted to make some amends to a year so horrendously cruel to the music world, but the selection of laureates has always been an inscrutable process—often refraining from giving out prizes in certain categories when no one was up to muster that particular year and has a history of being rather flexible with the definitions, say by awarding all EU citizens the peace prize or honouring the doubtless worthy and encouraging speeches of Winston Churchill as literature. What do you think? I wonder if Dylan will accept an honour funded with the legacy of violence and destruction—albeit they are trying to make amends for that as well.

7x7

a sweep is as lucky as lucky can be: a look at the brilliant decorative chimneys of Hampton Court

elvis, elvis let me be: a meeting of the minds (and spirits) with Presley and Ann-Margaret, via the fantastic Nag on the Lake

abecedarium: the alphabet for spoiled children, via Kottke’s quick links

point of origin: artists’ palettes transformed into canvases

stowaways: an investigation into how even orderly, ornamental nature can propagate invasive species, raising an interesting counterpoint to extinctions that humans have caused through the speciation and advantage it has imparted for some so called weeds and pests

portable hole: the laws of cartoon physics

atomteller: a line of commemorative porcelain plates of German nuclear reactors either already taken off-line or scheduled to be mothballed soon

chrysalis, crystalline

Researchers in China have discovered that silk-worms whose diet is supplemented by mulberries washed with carbon nanotubes (which is apparently inert and harmless to the already doomed caterpillars and for the most part, just passing through—though the verdict is still out on general safety and whether we might not be creating mutant super-worms that might be less willing to give up their cocoons and sacrifice themselves for fashion) will then produce a high strength silk (nano-fibre) that has at least a share of the properties of nano-structure—conductivity, mechanical resilience.
Of course, the silk returns to normal once their diet is changed but the idea of spiders out there in the wild that could weave a web that could snag a jet plane is a frightening prospect. Nonetheless, it is an interesting extra dimension to ponder in our partnership with the animal and plant kingdoms in the advancement of medical science and technology—in addition to bio-fuels, vaccines replicated in chicken eggs, or more controversially, surplus organs grown in other barnyard surrogates.

landmark and legacy

Though probably more out of oversight (which can be just as cruel) rather than any sense of institutionalised prejudice—unlike that town in Alabama that choice to honour a pest rather than the individual whose advice against monoculture stopped it—there’s been no monument created for the inestimable contribution to medical science and genetics called Henrietta Lacks, not at least as a tangible destination, until now with this pop-up tribute from artist Elisabeth Smolarz.
Without Mrs Lacks’ knowledge or consent, her cells—deemed uniquely immortal (see previous link)—became the subject countless trials and propagated directly played the main role in almost every study and therapy from the polio vaccine onward. This appreciation comes to us as part of the annual Art in Odd Places “intervention” in Manhattan that confronts different themes each year. Emphasising that art and message can be anywhere, the focus of AiOP this time was on race, and also included a poignant installation of an interactive bubble-blowing frame, that recalled the rather ironic kaon “how many bubbles in a bar of soap” that appeared among the list of questions on the Jim Crow-era voter literacy tests in the US.