{ feuilleton }

In which Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature are given the Mandelbrot treatment. The example above is one of a number of variations created using the splendid Gorgon-headed Starfish, a creature I’ve messed with myself a couple of times.
These fractal images have been created by the Subblue people using their Fractal Explorer plug-in for Adobe’s [...]

Large E-Coli.
Or art as virus…. Just because micro-organisms can make us seriously ill doesn’t mean they can’t be beautiful. Luke Jerram’s glass renderings of some of the most deadly examples are on display at the Smithfield Gallery, London, until October 3rd.
The sculptures were designed in consultation with virologists from the University of Bristol using a [...]

Sometimes petitions work. A few weeks ago one such was launched by computer scientist John Graham-Cumming on the UK government website requesting a public apology for the terrible treatment accorded mathematician and wartime codebreaker Alan Turing in 1952. Turing was prosecuted after admitting a gay affair to police investigating another matter and given the choice [...]

Le Phallus phénoménal (1793–1794).
This blurred and discoloured picture arrives following a discussion with Paul Rumsey in the comments for an earlier post about engravings of monstrous whales. The pictures there were by engraver Hieronymus Cock whose surname gives us an additional resonance when discussing Moby Dick and sperm whales. The picture I posted of [...]

When Herman Melville complains in chapter 55 of Moby Dick about erroneous representations of whales, this is the kind of thing he had in mind. Among those he takes to task, however, I don’t recall any of them having two blow-holes like the creature above.

The coat of arms of Portugal.
These fanciful beasts are the work [...]

Still reading Moby Dick at a leisurely pace. After finishing Melville’s chapters on the representations of whales I thought I’d see if the pictures he most prefers are online anywhere. A vain search, as it turns out, but I did discover this splendid depiction, Stranded Sperm Whale, by Dutch artist Jan Saenredam (1565–1607).
On 19 December [...]

Reading Moby Dick at the moment, and thoroughly enjoying it, so I felt the need to look again at Rockwell Kent’s tremendous illustrations. The Rockwell Kent Gallery at the Plattsburgh State Art Museum doesn’t have a complete set of these, unfortunately, but there’s more of them than in the Flickr set I pointed to earlier. [...]

Two Apollo 11 pictures from NASA’s endlessly fascinating collection of high-res photos. Both these are of Buzz Aldrin taken with Neil Armstrong’s suit-mounted Hasselblad. The one above is the most famous of the lot, of course, reproduced endlessly (I even copied it once as part of a drawing), but you hardly ever see it in [...]

I was a Space Age boy. John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in Project Mercury’s Friendship 7 a month before I was born, and growing up in the 1960s it was impossible to be unaware of the NASA missions. The first encyclopaedia I was given in 1967 had a whole chapter [...]

Forty years ago I was seven years old and this sight, dear reader, was the most thrilling thing in the whole world. Even now, seeing again the classic fisheye moment of Apollo 11’s launch sparks a buried flare of childhood excitement, resurrecting a deep obsession with astronauts, Saturn V rockets, command modules and lunar landing [...]

The moon shoot: film of Apollo mission on show again after 35 years in the can

A shame I didn’t discover these 360º views of the Jaipur Observatory in January when I posted a series of panoramas from different cities. The structures at Jaipur are one of five extraordinary astronomical observatories built by the Maharajah Jai Singh II in the 18th century. Would be nice to see VR photos of the [...]

‘Hallucination’ fish netted in English Channel | Mediterranean Sarpa salpa, said to cause LSD-like effects, turns up off Cornwall.

Coincidence abounds: on Wednesday I was following a few referral URLs to see who’d been linking here and was led to a Lexic.us page about hermaphrodites which in turn had me looking again at the wonderful Borghese Hermaphroditus in the Louvre. Thursday’s postal delivery brought issue 1 of The Gnostic which prominently features the Louvre [...]

Marvellous. Typefaces sorted by popularity according to surveys. Interesting for this Bodoni fan finding Bodoni as the first serif at no. 3. Some surprises too—is Univers really that popular?
Created by Squidspot. See the whole thing here. Via Metafilter.

With sound effects, yet, so it’s like you’re there. 360º views by Peter McReady.
Via New Scientist.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Passage des Panoramas
• Bruges panoramas
• Paris panoramas
• Venice panoramas
• St Pancras in Spheroview
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Whirling Istanbul

Man is But a Worm by Edward Linley Sambourne (1882).
Happy birthday Charles Darwin. The reaction to Darwin’s work from Punch and other journals was typical. While his studies remain controversial among those who believe there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, his life and work are now celebrated on the Bank of England’s Ten Pound Note [...]

Attenborough: Genesis? It can go forth and multiply

Cosmic Zoom (1968) is a short, semi-animated film by Eva Szasz, one of the many great shorts financed by the National Film Board of Canada. When I wrote about this in 2006 there was only a low-res version available for viewing on the NFB site while Powers of Ten (1977), a very similar film by [...]

I was going to post something about jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard who died this week (yes, another one). But enough people have been doing that elsewhere and I wrote about the album of his that I know best, Sing Me a Song of Songmy, back in April. Better, then, to leave a gloomy year with [...]