Booze Under a Microscope

I am forever amazed how you can find art in nature, in science or even in that glass of alcohol you're sipping. Place anything under a microscope and it will most certainly reveal another world unbeknownst to the naked eye. Micro-miniature Art, the brainchild of Florida State researcher Micheal Davidson, was developed as a way to fund his lab (he originally printed the images on neck ties). He placed various alcohols or cocktails under a microscope produced there beautiful kaleidoscope images. The alcohols were crystalized on a microscope slide, then polarized light was passed through it and magnifying it 1000x. Even more interesting is that each image seems to evoke the same mood that associated with each drink. Next time I'm sipping a glass  of chilled Rosé, I'll have to imagine all the colours dancing around in my mouth like tiny snowflakes.

Margarita

Tequila

Rosé

Vodka

Sake

Whiskey

Daiquiri

Champagne

White Russian

Pina Colada

Pencil This In: Dalton Ghetti’s Awesome Graphite Art

"Pencil This In: Dalton Ghetti’s Awesome Graphite Art: "

I don't even have the patience to sharpen a pencil any more. With the internet, iPhones, email, texting, tweeting, facebook updates, etc, how often you do really have to pick up a writing tool? I think students and educators may be the only remaining consumers of these otherwise obsolete relics. When I think of the writing-induced hand cramps I get after using a pencil for a couple of hours, it's amazing to think the Brazilian-American carpenter, Dalton Ghetti, spent 25 years carving these remarkable mini graphite works of art using only a sculpting knife, razor blade, and sewing needle.

Happy Sequential Day

Fly Me to the Moon

Sometimes it's just nice to imagine...

Nostalgic Rainy Sundays

Teacher's Pet Shortbread Cookies

Anyone who knows me, knows I am chronically disorganized. I consistently forget to charge my cell phone, misplace everything and always forget things that I'm suppose to do. Such is the case every end of school year when it comes time to give my daughter's teachers a little something thank you for resisting the urge to strap my child. Every year I mean to bake cookies but only end up remembering late the night before and rushing out to Jean Coutu to buy the last remaining $5-boxes of chocolates on the shelf. However considering there's roughly a dozen people I need to thank for their restaint, this adds up to being quite expensive. Again this year I forgot till the night before but decided to make them anyways and avoid the expense... it was early enough in the evening.


These are about the easiest cookies you can make, in terms of minimal number of ingredients.


Shortbread Cookies
1 lb unsalted butter (make sure it's unsalted!!)
1 cup fructose (fruit sugar)
4 cups white flour


Make sure the butter is still firm but not too hard to work with. Leaving it out for an hour or two usually does the trick. Cream the butter and sugar then add the 1 cup of flour at a time. This is the fun part where you can get your hands all gooey.

The worst part of making shortbread would have to be the time and trouble it takes to roll out the dough and carve it up with cookie-cutters, so we just decided to make little discs out of the dough. Er, well I tried to make little ones anyway.

Bake at 275 F for 20-25 minutes and transfer to another try for cooling.

We decided that to make them extra yummy we'd drizzle melted chocolate over them. Just throw a square or two of semi-sweet chocolate in the microwave, drizzle over them with a spoon and voila! Make sure to put them in the fridge so the chocolate can harden. (And for some reason these cookies taste so much better after they've been chilled).

Lastly—after a trip to the dollar store—we put them in bags, tied them with ribbon and added some little flowers to make our efforts extra pretty. 

The whole thing took under two hours and rang in at a cost of under $15. I hope they like them!

My December

Snow flakes dance upon the window sill

sparkling in their own delight

majestic and wondrous

making everything seems anew

and vivid with possibilities

inside ballerinas dance 

churning the room beneath their feet

their laughter seeps into our souls

the air thickened by cocoa

and the sweet smell of serenity

tucked in, safe and warm

in calm calamity

your timid smile reaches mine

your eyes say it all

I've found my place

home.

Felicity's School Concerts

Ok, ok, so I suck at taking video with a camera—the picture is fuzzy, the sound is off and at one point I almost fall over and dropped the camera—but these kids were amazing none the less. Felicity isn't in the choir but the kids did such an amazing job singing Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen and Waving Flag by K'Naan. Plus the choreography to waving flag is so adorable.

Verdun Elementary Senior Band Concert from Stephanie Little on Vimeo.


Verdun Elementary Senior Band Concert, Part 2 from Stephanie Little on Vimeo.


Verdun Elementary Choir from Stephanie Little on Vimeo.

Michelangelo's secret message in the Sistine Chapel: A juxtaposition of God and the human brain

Michelangelo's secret message in the Sistine Chapel: A juxtaposition of God and the human brain: "

R. Douglas Fields in Scientific American:

At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti—known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor and architect—was also an anatomist, a secret he concealed by destroying almost all of his anatomical sketches and notes. Now, 500 years after he drew them, his hidden anatomical illustrations have been found—painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cleverly concealed from the eyes of Pope Julius II and countless religious worshipers, historians, and art lovers for centuries—inside the body of God.

This is the conclusion of Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo, in their paper in the May 2010 issue of the scientific journal Neurosurgery. Suk and Tamargo are experts in neuroanatomy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1990, physician Frank Meshberger published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association deciphering Michelangelo’s imagery with the stunning recognition that the depiction in God Creating Adam in the central panel on the ceiling was a perfect anatomical illustration of the human brain in cross section. Meshberger speculates that Michelangelo surrounded God with a shroud representing the human brain to suggest that God was endowing Adam not only with life, but also with supreme human intelligence. Now in another panel The Separation of Light from Darkness (shown at left), Suk and Tamargo have found more. Leading up the center of God’s chest and forming his throat, the researchers have found a precise depiction of the human spinal cord and brain stem.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Altaf.] 

Marinade FAIL

Thanks LEE KUM KEE, but I prefer my chicken sober!

Found at my local Chinese Market

FAILblog seems way to inundated with posts to included mine so I'll post them here for you blog-nuts. 

Math That Cuts Like a Knife

"Beautiful Nesting Knives Designed by Mathematics:"


Instead of actually designing a set of knives to match their individual purposes, designer Mia Schmallenbach turned to math to tell her what shape they should be. The beautiful Meeting set is the result of drawing a diagram based on the Fibonacci sequence and almost literally joining the dots.

Despite this arbitrary choice, the knives look pretty handy, comprising a paring knife, a carving knife, a 15cm (6-inch) utility knife and a 20cm (almost 8-inch) chef’s knife. All of these knives nest together like Russian-dolls and fit perfectly inside a big stainless-steel (or wooden) block.



The Fibonacci sequence, you’ll no doubt remember from school, starts with 0, 1 and continues by adding the previous two numbers together: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and so on. It can then be used to make shapes. Plotting squares whose sides are the length of successive Fibonacci numbers and then drawing an arc through their opposite corners will give the Golden Spiral, a shaped found in nature: the nautilus shell, for example. By making this shape, along with others suggested by the sequence, Schmallenbach came up with the design

These knives don’t come cheap, though. The full-metal set, made by French cutlery manufacturer Deglon, will cost you over $900 (if you can find it in the US). The wood-encased set is a more reasonable €400, or $490.

Kitchen knives [Mia Schmallenbach/Coroflot via Oh Gizmo!]

A Thin Line Between Entertainment and War

"Creative people are just high functioning schizophrenics: "

New research shows a possible explanation for the link between mental health and creativity. By studying receptors in the brain, researchers at Karolinska Institute have managed to show that the dopamine system in healthy, highly creative people is similar in some respects to that seen in people with schizophrenia.

High creative skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in people who have mental illness in the family. Creativity is also linked to a slightly higher risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Certain psychological traits, such as the ability to make unusual or bizarre associations are also shared by schizophrenics and healthy, highly creative people. And now the correlation between creativity and mental health has scientific backing.

'We have studied the brain and the dopamine D2 receptors, and have shown that the dopamine system of healthy, highly creative people is similar to that found in people with schizophrenia,' says associate professor Fredrik Ullen from Karolinska Institutet's Department of Women's and Children's Health, co-author of the study that appears in the journal PLoS ONE.

Just which brain mechanisms are responsible for this correlation is still something of a mystery, but Dr Ullen conjectures that the function of systems in the brain that use dopamine is significant; for example, studies have shown that dopamine receptor genes are linked to ability for divergent thought. Dr Ullen's study measured the creativity of healthy individuals using divergent psychological tests, in which the task was to find many different solutions to a problem.

'The study shows that highly creative people who did well on the divergent tests had a lower density of D2 receptors in the thalamus than less creative people,' says Dr Ullen. 'Schizophrenics are also known to have low D2 density in this part of the brain, suggesting a cause of the link between mental illness and creativity.'

The thalamus serves as a kind of relay centre, filtering information before it reaches areas of the cortex, which is responsible, amongst other things, for cognition and reasoning.

'Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus,' says Dr Ullen, and explains that this could a possible mechanism behind the ability of healthy highly creative people to see numerous uncommon connections in a problem-solving situation and the bizarre associations found in the mentally ill.

'Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box,' says Dr Ullen about his new findings.

From www.sciencedaily.com. Posted by Jedi Mind Traveler."

A Terrific Gay Wedding Announcement

I love an engaged lesbian couple with a sense of humor:




Is there anything that’s equally funny that you could use when two atheists get married?

(via Joe. My. God.)

Happy Pepper

Some people see the Virgin Mary in their grill cheese... Me, I gots a smiley-face in my peppa.

Fantastic photo by Laz Burke—absolutely no photoshopping. 

Treasured Friend

I saw this poem in this book I'm reading. Wow, major props Cherie, whoever you are...

TREASURED FRIEND

By Cherie Dawn Mills

You are my hope.

You meet me where I am, and love me there—

not pushing, nor blaming, but only rejoicing

with me, or lending me your handkerchief.

You gently hold me earthbound in the blackness

of my fears, or during my endangerment from

fights of fantasy.

You do not fear the depths of my weakness,

nor the heights of my strength.

You see in me the wondrous possibilities

that my sins and sorrows and daily concerns

have caused me to forget.

Your love empowers me to give my love to others—

to mold the dirty clay of my feet into

sparkling angel wings. 

Deluxe Gourmet Mushrooms

This stuffed mushroom recipe was so good, not only did I have to make them twice but I also had to repost them here. The recipe is from Miss Deluxe Gourmet Beats herself, Erin Saucke-Lacelle. I first made them of Easter dinner and everyone loved them... except of course the kiddies who insist mushrooms are yucky.

I wish I could take credit for these great photos. They're taken by Fahim Moussi.

http://candyvsmedicine.blogspot.com

Stuffed Mushrooms
*measurements are EXTREMELY approximate. I do it slightly different each time :)
1 basket mushrooms
1 egg
1/2 c breadcrumbs
1/2 c olive oil
1/2 c parmasan
1/2 c cheese- any kind. I love them with gouda, swiss, or just cheddar
mad garlic
basil and/or parsley
salt & peppa

First you snap the stems off the 'shrooms. Place mushrooms caps hollow-side up on a cookie tray. Sprinkle olive oil all over them.

Stuffing: Take ALL other ingredients (including mushroom stems) and either grind everything in food processor, or else chop really fine by knife and mix well.

Fill mushroom caps with mixture, and bake at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes


*My own person variation is that I add zucchini and ground almonds or walnuts. I also Use ground up wheat bran, instead of white bread crumbs, for a slightly healthier touch. 

Bathroom FAIL

The bathroom sign at my dentist's office.

Like Big Bird Says: "I'm The Only Me There Is".

As a both child and an adult with ADD I have often times been called lazy, stupid or selfish because of my shortcomings. Try as I have, it's been very hard at times to shake the stigma.  However, every once and a while I stumble upon something like this that reminds me that even along the path to betterment, you still have to stop every now and then to be proud of who you are. 

Misfortune Cookies

I find there's nothing quite like sardonic humour on days when I'm feeling particularly surly. I could think of a few people I wouldn't mind sending some of these dark and twisty treats to—you know who you are. These tasty jabs are the brain child of biological anthropologist turned stay at home mom/ baker/ blogger Ms. Humble. She notes that you can also add different flavours to the recipe. I wonder if chocolate ex-lax flavour would work well for my unknowing recipients? ...Ah, fantasies.

On a lighter note, recently I cracked open a fortune cookie and found a note that read: "You love chinese food".

Fight or flight

Kicking and screaming
I await

I wait for what?

Is it you?

Is it me?

It must be me

static crunching

channels changing

dreams collapsing

I fall

I sink

I let down

Guilt sets in

I get back up

I dream again

Promise a better tomorrow

I'll be me

I'll be good

You'll be proud

You'll like me

maybe one day

again

Thinking Outside The Box

Long time no posts...

These nifty chines zodiac cravings are from artist Diem Chau who normally works in porcelain but occasionally ventures over to crayons. I think I am the monkey.

Heart Of Glass

I once took a personality test that said I'm a realist with a touch of hopeless romantic. I think that might have just been a polite way of saying: "cynical bitch that doesn't want to die alone". And I know Valentine's day is just some ridiculous, over commercialized, fake, hallmark holiday but I have to admit part of me still gets all gushy, like a 12 year old school girl thinking about her first crush. Besides, I do loves me some of those Hershey's Kisses!

HAPPY V-DAY ALL!

Ventricle Vessel by Eva Milikovic

Your Six Word Memoir Goes Here

"Everybody's got a story to tell. Six words is all you need."

Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a complete novel in only six words. He wrote: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Recently, Larry smith of smithmag.net challenged readers to come up with their own six word life story. Nearly 15,000 people had a story to tell. The best entries created the NY Times best-selling book: Not Quite What I Was Planning.

Here's some of the best entries that I saw:

"Reinventing myself again, and again, and..."

"Bet you think it's about you."

"It all changed in an instant."

"Write about sex learn about love."

"After Harvard, had baby with crackhead."

This got me thinking, how exactly could I sum up my life story? It seems so simple, until you have to actually take an introspective look at your life up to now and who you are. It can prove very cathartic. Frankly, I think I would have trouble writing a complete memoir in six hundred words, let alone six.  What's even more paradoxical is that my life story might be completely different today than it is a year from now.

In any case, Here's the nugget I came Up with:

Objective: failure is not an option. 

US and them

Even though a great many of my friends and my boyfriend are Americans, I saw this image and couldn't stop myself from reposting it—I love stereotypes! I showed it to my Californian co-worker and even he thought it was hilarious.

Quoted from: 19073_457777085692_693975692_10919838_2829184_n.jpg 

hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net/hs163.snc3/19073_457777085692_693975692_10919838_2829184_n.jpg

Art vs. Anatomy

There is something inherently beautiful about the inner-workings of the human body. Crack open a anatomy book and you will see an infinite number of biological systems, all independent of each other, yet all working together to bring life to design. Organelles, cells, tissue, organs, organs systems each with a specific role selected through millions of year of evolution. Ashkahn Honarvar portrays this beautifully in this piece about life, science and human nature.