Ork Powered

For those of you that wanted to check it out, here's my Ork Design-inspired Oita Prefecture painting I finished a couple months back. Not the world's most perfect place, but it's what I call my second home.

Let it be known that I am taking art commissions: if you are desperately needing to part with your cash I'm willing to negotiate any reasonable offer to reproduce my version of your dreams in acrylic.

--Matt

At the Edge of the Foodie Cliff

If there's one thing I extracted from The Kusu Experience--no matter the resulting pain--it is an acute appreciation for good food. A person can only take so much tori-ten, tonkotsu ramen, solid blocks of tofu, and other Japanese working-class fare before losing one's mind and taste buds. I'm not talking foie gras mousse spread like butter on artesian breads or daily lunches at French Laundry, no, just being knowledgeable enough about ingredients to make food that melts my troubles away while it melts in my mouth. And if they're more healthful than some of the dross I make these days all the better. Having an income would help this endeavor, of course...

So yesterday one of those pleasant morning surprises I mentioned was a very helpful tool to achieve gastronomic nirvana: a beautifully laid-out guide to the northern hemisphere's seasonal crops, meats, spices...everything, really! Check it out:

If this is available as a poster it's going on my wishlist.

--Matt

I'd Buy That for a Dollar!

With all the talk about Darren Aronofsky's "upcoming" RoboCop reboot I thought it would be a good idea for us all to take a virtual walk through YouTube user murphy38's merchandise collection from that landmark sci-fi film. Let's watch...

Why--WHY!?--did they stop producing RoboCop bubble bath? Certainly not because it's made from glycerin and Peter Weller's armpit sweat.

--Matt

His Name is Rio...

No, Duran Duran lyrics won't smudge the good name of this page.

The following is a painting I just finished for the birthday of my former VIZ coworker, Rio Yanez, now a mover and shaker in the Mission District arts scene. Hope he likes it (and doesn't read this blog).

--Matt

Do Not Look Directly at the LASER

Wow, I'm kind of reeling from this morning of happy surprises, the best being this recent discovery of a round of monthly science and art lectures hosted by Leonardo/ISAST ("The International Society for the Arts, Science and Technology"). Some of these talks...whew: "How Can Art Help Create a Sustainable World?"; "Rubisco Stars--An Active SETI Message From Arecibo"; and "A Hitchhikers' Guide to Scientific Training of Moon and Mars-Bound Astronauts."

This is my pornography.

Anybody want to attend with me, next Wednesday, January 11? Another binary day, that.

--Matt

When Setting the Periodic Table Thorium Goes Next to the Dinner Rolls

Running with the same theme of the web and education, last week I spent a couple hours at the University of Nottingham's chemistry department sub-site The Periodic Table of Videos, a YouTube powered tour through the entire, well, periodic table. Sound boring? Surprisingly it's not, coming across like an anthology of very short classroom educational video reels from the 50s that show us how life would be without zinc or whatever, but this time the narrators are lovable British chemists. The video collection's two main hosts, Drs. Poliakoff and Licence are like the Laurel and Hardys of chemistry, the former being the wiry archetype of a white-haired mad scientist while the latter wisecracks and likes to blow stuff up with the group 1 alkali metals.

Hide the tesla coil from Dr. Poliakoff if it's not too late. And yes, that is a periodic table tie he's wearing.

While sites like this probably account for a fraction of one percent of the net's available content they are nevertheless highly encouraging signs that Web 2.0 won't be used just to shill for the corporations or find better ways to deliver porn. The University of Nottingham's physics department has a sister site about some of the important symbology used in physics and astronomy that I haven't even begun to dig into yet. The videos there are longer on average so I should break out the popcorn and find some time over the next few evenings to view them all.

*****************

While the periodic table as a whole fascinates me to no end there is one entry that has on two non-consecutive occasions assaulted my vision last week: atomic number 90, thorium. Located way down near the bottom in the actinides, between actinium and protactinium, thorium is a fairly common (more than uranium at least) slightly radioactive element that has gotten the short shrift thanks to the Cold War. According to the article featured in Wired that caught my attention, and now some other supplementary info I've found since, thorium was more or less the fuel of choice when nuclear energy was on the drawing boards in the late-1940s and early-50s thanks to its virtually "green" properties when compared against uranium.

I say "virtually" because obviously thorium is radioactive and its use will still result in waste, but unlike the half life of transuranic wastes measured in thousands of years thorium's is only about 500 years. Not only that, but the volume of waste is estimated to be 0.1% of today's reactors. And the reactors are pint-sized next to the mammoth eyesores scattered about the world.

How this all works is with what's called a Molten Salt Reactor, or MSR for short. I'm sure this is a gross oversimplification, but basically what happens is that thorium gets dissolved into cannisters filled with molten fluoride salts and these containers boil the water to create steam to turn the turbines. The advantages to this system are multiple, but I would say the best two are that the waste from non-breeder type reactors isn't weapons grade anything, plus the reaction can not go into meltdown since the molten salts would simply boil over in its cannister and disperse into water or other liquid coolant.

The MSR-type reactor is getting a lot of attention from France, India and China, Russia's working on a variant and, damnit, this country should be too. The only reason America didn't pursue the very advance it spawned was because safe thorium reactors don't make the weapons-grade nuclear material our bloated military-industrial complex needed to roll out massive stockpiles of "Soviet deterrents." I'll be curious to see what Kirk Sorensen and his Energy from Thorium team cook up in the next decade or so.

--Matt

The Web Really Does Improve Education

Maia and I were frittering away some time today on the web and we both partook of Akinator.com, the net's take on twenty questions that guesses who you're thinking about. As long as you answer honestly. But that's just the thing: how much do you really know about many of the famous names we see in the history books or in the media? I for one had to refer to Wikipedia several times to get the details just right for author Paul Auster (not that he's in Akinator's database) and learned quite a bit about him. So bravo, Akinator, your persistent prodding and wondering "Is your character a warrior?" and "Is your character made of stone?" has spurred me to do some biographical research into the lives of people I may not have otherwise delved into. Bravo indeed.

--Matt