beyond the uncanny valley of the dolls

Apparently, there is a market (novelty restaurants or Renaissance Faires, I am thinking) for talking automaton, which a firm specialising in such custom, made-to-order dolls.
Dangerous Minds features a selection from the company’s exactingly bizarre and surpassingly creepy catalogue, and while these animatronic characters aren’t realistic they nonetheless can elicit unease and there’s a strange resemblance in all of the models to celebrities and politicians that does not seem intentional but comes through.

vegetable lamb of tartary

I had heard of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary beforehand—the way that scribes in the Middle Ages first passed on their second-hand accounts of a mysterious thing called cotton, but all the fantastic taxon of chimera put forth in this bestiary from the Medievalists’ Network.
All these strange creatures, with the exception of the Monoceros (the unicorn), were new to us, and we especially enjoyed learning about the legendary Barnacle Geese that were believed to spontaneously generate at sea on pieces of drift-wood, instead of the usual route of reproduction. It reminded me of how post-Enlightenment biologists thought that exotic birds of paradise lived a purely ethereal to never touch ground nor roost. The name for both the barnacle goose and the goose barnacle (from whence they were thought to hatch) has persisted as well as the prohibition of the eating of these geese during Lent for their unnatural life-cycles. Be sure to check out the whole strange menagerie and find more interesting articles at the link above.

krebs’ cycle

Researchers at the University of Chicago are perfecting a solar-capture process that mimics closely the process of photosynthesis rather than traditional photovoltaic that converts sunlight directly into electricity. Instead, the membrane of an “artificial leaf” uses solar energy to convert atmospheric carbon-dioxide into a fuel that can be burnt. The engineers are achieving efficiencies not quite at botanical levels but at least as something comparable to the (sunk) costs of refining gasoline.

foot traffic

Quite used to our Ampelmännchen, I haven’t encountered a wordy pedestrian crossing signal for years but I did rather enjoy pondering the poor punctuation of the lack of an apostrophe in don’t—which I’d never noticed.
Granted, apostrophes can be confusing and prone to abuse and especially glaring and galling and when superfluous but I suppose in its omission—not so much, but it is wholly unrelated to the recent assault that British civil engineers launched on diction on the roadways in hopes of staving off confusion for navigation devices. It turns out—and there’s some interesting diversions and detours along the way—no one really knows why that tradition was carried on, but one’s best guess is that it was for symmetry and easier to make the NT a ligature with the earliest sign illuminated by neon tubes and skip the apostrophe.