Remember to Breathe

• US inflation-adjusted spending for entitlement programmes on all levels of government has soared from under about $1,000 per capita in 1960 to over $7,000 today.  Many families who describe themselves as self-sufficient members of the American middle class and opponents of government largess are drawing more deeply on government programmes with each passing year (such as Earned Income Credit, free school lunches, and Medicare).  The government safety net was created to keep Americans from living in abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits.  A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement.  The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom 5th, has declined from 54% in 1979 to 36% in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis.  Many people say they are angry because the government is wasting money and giving money to people who don’t deserve it.  But more than that, they say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives.  They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it, and resent the government for providing it.  (They sound like children.)
• Medicaid is health care for people who need it and can’t afford it. (These days, who can?)  It’s hard to abuse Medicaid — you can’t buy cigarettes or cake with it as it consists of reimbursements to practitioners.  The greatest percentage of Medicaid money is spent on the blind and disabled.  It’s going to be difficult to cut care from that group.  The next largest share goes to the elderly.  Yes, even after they get Medicare, the very poor among those age 65 or older also get Medicaid.  Should we cut from kids in foster care?  Or perhaps “BCCA Women” (women with breast or cervical cancer)?  (Why is this group more important than those with other life-threatening cancers?)  That pretty much leaves children or adults.  Medicaid is already marginal for non-elderly adults.  If you don’t have kids, then in the majority of states in the US, it doesn’t matter how poor you are, you can’t qualify.  Many of the adults on Medicaid are pregnant women.  Via The Dish.

• “A new study indicates that 1 in every 33 baby boomers (those born from 1946 to 1965) has the Hepatitis C virus, and many don’t even know.  Federal health officials say that since 2007, hepatitis C is now killing more people than the AIDS virus and most are over 45 years of age.  Unfortunately, once symptoms appear, the liver is already seriously damaged.  Major symptoms include pain in the right upper quadrant of the abdomen that goes on for days or months, eyes turning yellow, bleeding more than previously from a cut, and ruptured veins in the æsophagus.  If you had a blood transfusion before 1992 (when routine screening for hepatitis C in donated blood began) or have ever used intravenous drugs, you should tell your doctor.  A blood test can determine if you’ve been exposed to the virus.  Early treatment has more chance of success.
• In 2000, a team of Boston scientists discovered a peculiar gene in the human genome.  It encoded a protein made only by cells in the placenta.  They called it syncytin.  The cells that made syncytin were located only where the placenta made contact with the uterus.  They fuse together to create a single cellular layer, called the syncytiotrophoblast, which is essential to a fœtus for drawing nutrients from its mother — in order to fuse together, the cells must first make syncytin.  What made syncytin peculiar was that it’s not a human gene, but instead is a gene from a virus.  Viruses have insinuated themselves into the genome of our ancestors for hundreds of millions of years, typically by infecting eggs or sperm and inserting their own DNA into ours.  There are 100,000 known fragments of viruses in the human genome (over 8% of our DNA — 7 times more DNA than is found in all the 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome).  Most of this viral DNA has been hit by so many mutations that it’s now baggage our species carries along from one generation to the next.  Yet there are some viral genes that still make proteins in our bodies.  And it appears that syncytin is wildly important to our own biology.  Originally, syncytin allowed viruses to fuse host cells together so they could spread from one cell to another.  Now, it is the protein that allows babies to fuse to their mothers.  In pre-eclampsia, which gives pregnant women dangerously high blood pressure, levels of syncytin drop dramatically.  (What is cause and what is effect?)  Syncytin also performs another viral trick to help its human master: it tamps down the mother’s immune system so she doesn’t attack her baby as a hunk of foreign tissue.
• The borna virus is at once obscure and grotesque.  It can infect mammals and birds, but scientists know little about its effects on its victims.  In some species it seems to be harmless, but it can drive horses into wild fits.  The horses sometimes kill themselves by smashing in their skulls.  In other cases, they starve themselves to death.  (In both cases, is it possible they’re deliberately committing suicide?)  Some scientists have even claimed that borna viruses alter human behaviour, playing a role in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, although others say that solid evidence of such a link is thin or lacking.  But the virus turns out to have an intimate bond with every person on Earth.  A team of Japanese and American scientists report that the human genome contains borna virus genes.  The virus infected our monkey-like ancestors 40 million years ago and its genes have been passed down ever since.  The discovery of borna viruses in the human genome is a reason to wonder if we’re actually more viral than we know.  All fossil viruses discovered until now have been retroviruses, but borna viruses are not.  Its genes look remarkably intact, perhaps suggesting that our bodies use them for our own benefit.  Exactly what they do isn’t clear yet.  But some viruses have been found to help ward off invasions of other, possible lethal, viruses.

• If a dolphin has a right to life equivalent to a human, what happens if it falls prey to another non-human species that eats it to survive?  Would humans be required to ride to the rescue?  Expanding the concept of “personhood” to include non-human animals and the unborn is a dangerous idea.  It might be trendy, and effective from a marketing perspective, but it would further erode the notion of personal responsibility, already diminished in our rights-heavy society.  The reality is that you don’t need to confer personhood to offer protection.  Shielding living beings from abuse or degradation does not require making them persons, but instead requires the exercise of two very human qualities: compassion and common sense.
• At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up a reputation.  All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold on to any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish.  In this way, the dolphins help keep their pools clean.  Kelly took the task a step further.  When someone drops paper litter into the water, she hides it under a rock.  The next time a trainer passes, she goes down and tears off a piece of paper to give the trainer.  After her fish reward, she goes back, tears off another piece, gets another fish, and so on (another example of unintended consequence).  This behaviour shows Kelly has a sense of the future.  Once she realised a big piece of paper got the same reward as a small one, delivering only small pieces guaranteed future food.  David Graham, a libertarian writer and animal rights advocate, says, “Unlike incoherent positive rights, such as the 'right’ to education or health care, the animal right is, at bottom, a right to be left alone.  It doesn’t call for government to tax us in order to provide animals with food, shelter, and veterinary care.  It only requires us to stop killing them and making them suffer.”  (All animals?  Cows and pigs and chickens and goats as well?
• Animals having rights is a contentious notion, and there is a strong argument against it: Rights belong to moral agents, and animals lack moral agency.  Driven by instinct, they lack the higher-order thinking skills that enable people to choose between courses of action.  (Since group animals have been observed punishing members of their group who “cheat”, I doubt that assertion is entirely true.)  First: Some animals, certain primates especially, actually do think rather well.  Second: Humans can give informed consent, but animals cannot.  If one believes that relationships ought to be delineated by consent as much as possible, then it follows that scientists should experiment only on people.  Third: What about the senile, the comatose, or the severely mentally retarded?  If it’s okay to hunt deer because they lack critical thinking skills, then can we hunt children with Down syndrome?  Sane people would answer, “No!” saying that persons with severe mental retardation have a right not to be hunted for sport, even if they can’t articulate it themselves.  A conundrum pointed out by Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation: Any quality only human beings have (such as moral agency) that might provide the basis for human rights will be absent from some humans — but any quality that all humans have (such as self-awareness) will be shared by many animals.  Either not all people are equal (obviously true), or people are equal to (some) animals (arguably true).

I suppose the foregoing is a lead-in to this next topic:

• An article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, tenders the idea that newborn babies are not “actual persons” and don’t have an automatic “moral right to life”.  These academics argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it is determined to be seriously disabled at birth.  Certainly, most people’s reaction would be scorn, but I think the authors intend to promote thought rather than actually promote infanticide.  They argue that parents should be able to have the baby killed if the disability was unknown to them before birth.  Now, once such children are born, there remains “no choice for the parents but to keep the child.  To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, where the state economically provides for their care.”  However, the authors did not argue that some baby killings were more justifiable than others – their fundamental point is that, morally, there was no difference in infanticide and abortion as already practised.  The goal of the Journal of Medical Ethics isn’t to present Truth or to promote a particular moral view but instead to present well reasoned arguments based on widely accepted premises.  (Nevertheless, the inevitable death threats to the authors followed.)
• There is a consistency between the view presented by the authors and those who abhor abortion in any circumstance: both viewpoints place newborns and fœtuses in essentially the same group with the moment of birth itself having little meaning.  In the authors’ view, neither fœtuses nor newborns are “actual persons” and therefore both can be justifiably extinguished according to the superior will of adults.  In the view of anti-abortionists, both newborns and fœtuses are indeed “actual persons” and the termination of either is wholesale murder.
• If babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life,” then why is it only their parents who are entitled to kill them?  Shouldn’t they be fair game for anyone?  In particular, as the authors note, the state has a legitimate interest in the cost of dealing with disabilities.  So does the state have a right to mandate an “after-birth abortion?”  If not, why not?  Second, what exactly is a “newborn?”  How old does a child have to be before he or she becomes a “person?”  Not all disabilities are apparent at birth.  What if a child is 3 years old, say, when the parents realise that there is a disability of some sort?  Or what if the child is 10, and the state finds out that the child has a hitherto-undiscovered condition that will require lifelong expensive medical treatment?  Is it too late to kill the child then, or not?  And what about mentally disabled infants?  Do the mentally disabled ever become “persons?”  Are they thus always in danger of termination?  (This slope is so slippery, it requires speed bumps.)

I have known 3 families with a severly disabled child.  In all the families, the parents carried a huge burden of guilt.  In 2 of the families, the other children were deprived of care, attention, and family resources because the disabled child needed such a hugely disproportionate share.  Does that constitute an injustice?  Not necessarily.  But the decision to make up for a disabled child’s unfair burden has ripples that affect many other people and is one that bears looking at objectively.  Not at ALL am I advocating capital punishment for the imperfect (where would it stop?), but, stating the obvious, this is a very complex issue, one perhaps not fully appreciated unless you’ve been there or studied it.

The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilisations and lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilisations.  There have been attempts to resolve the Fermi paradox by locating evidence of extraterrestrial civilisations, along with proposals that such life could exist without human knowledge.  Counterarguments suggest that intelligent extraterrestrial life does not exist or occurs so rarely or briefly that humans will never make contact with it.  But there could be another reason we’ve heard from no aliens.  Since the invention of radio more than a century ago, man has been broadcasting into space in the hope that any listening aliens could learn of our presence.  Yet, despite waves travelling a distance of 200 light years in all directions, they still have 118,800 light years to go until the entire Milky Way has heard the word.  The small yellow dot — with the even tinier planet Earth buried somewhere in its centre — reveals the limited extent of broadcasts since Marconi invented the radio in 1895.  Be patient.

• Lake Nyos in Camaroon (1 square mile surface area, 690 feet deep) is an active crater lake formed by an eruption about 500 years ago.  Nyos and Lake Monoun (95 kilometres to the southeast), and also Lake Kivu (on the border of The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda) are thought to be the only 3 lakes in the world that contain dangerous amounts of CO² dissolved at depth.  In 1984, Lake Monoun released enough gas to suffocate 37 people nearby.  Two years later, Nyos killed 1,746 people (as well as every living mammal within a 15-mile radius, including 3,000 cattle).  The CO² dissolves in groundwater due to volcanic activity.  Whereas in most crater lakes, turnover of stratified waters occurs periodically and harmless amounts of dissolved gases are released — but these lakes don’t release their gas until concentrations reach lethal levels.
• After gas erupted, the normally clear blue waters of Lake Nyos turned a deep, murky red from dissolved iron brought up from the lake bottom.  The waters of Lake Nyos are among the most still in the world — tall hills surround the lake, blocking wind and causing it to stay unusually consistent in temperature top to bottom.  And because Lake Nyos is in a year-round hot tropical climate, its temperature doesn’t vary much from season to season, either.  Last, because the lake is deep, even when the surface is disturbed, little agitation finds its way down to the lake floor.  The unusual stillness of these 3 lakes makes them deadly.  Eyewitness accounts from people high enough in the hills to survive the eruption described how the lake began strangely bubbling on 17 August, causing a misty cloud above its surface.  Without warning on 22 August, the lake exploded; water and gas shot up more than 200 feet.  Then gas poured over the crater’s edge into the valley below, travelling an estimated 45 miles per hour.  People who stepped outside their homes to see where the noise came from collapsed and died on their doorsteps.  The sight of these victims passing out often brought other household members to the door.  They, too, were overcome and died.  People inside homes with windows and doors shut had a chance of surviving.  Sometimes enough CO² seeped in to smother people lying asleep, but those standing had their heads above the heavier-than-normal-air gas.  Some survivors didn’t realise anything bad had happened until they checked on sleeping family members and discovered they were dead.
• Several researchers independently proposed the installation of degassing columns from rafts in the lake.  The principle is simple: a pump lifts water from the bottom of the lake, heavily saturated with CO², until the loss of pressure releases0 the gas from the diphasic fluid.  After that, the process self-powered.  In 1992 at Monoun, and in 1995 at Nyos, a French team demonstrated the feasibility of this approach.  In 2001, the US Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance funded a permanent installation at Nyos.  Unfortunately, more tubes are needed to stay ahead of the gas, though these have not been forthcoming from anywhere.

• Hops gives beer both its bitter taste and fruity aroma.  It’s also a powerful cancer-fighter.  Hops are a better source of cell-damage-fighting antioxidants than red wine, green tea and soy products, according to a 2000 study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.  The reason is xanthohumol, a compound found only in hops.  The bad news is that you’d have to drink about 118 gallons (450 litres) of beer a day to see a health benefit from that.  Eventually, researchers hope to distill that hoppy, anti-cancer goodness down to a pill to help prevent cancer.
• Cooks use beer to flavor barbecue sauce, season bread and moisten grilled chicken.  Then there’s John Milkovisch, a retired railroad upholsterer, who builds with the cans.  Starting in 1968, Milkovisch spent 18 years lining the outside of his modest Houston home with flattened beer cans.  He strung the lids from the eaves and turned them into chain-link fences.  He died in 1988 and his home is now a museum.
• Beer that goes bad can ruin a party.  Though many people blame a “skunked” taste on age or prolonged refrigeration, it’s actually light that spoils the brew.  A 2001 study published in Chemistry – A European Journal traced the breakdown of beer to light-sensitive hop compounds called isohumulones.  Prolonged exposure to light causes a reaction in which isohumulones become “skunky thiol,” so dubbed because it resembles a compound found in skunk glands.  (Not so refreshing then.  For that reason, beer is normally stored in protective brown or green bottles.)

Göbekli Tepe (“Potbelly Hill”) is a Neolithic (stone-age) hilltop sanctuary erected at the top of a mountain ridge in southeastern Anatolia, some 15 kilometers (9 miles) northeast of the town of Şanlıurfa.  It is the oldest known human-made religious structure, most likely erected by hunter-gatherers in the 10th millennium BCE (around 12,000 years ago) and has been under excavation since 1994 by German and Turkish archæologists.  It has revolutionised understanding of the Eurasian Neolithic.  The site contains 20 round (buried) structures, 4 of which have now been excavated.  Each round structure has a diameter of between 10 and 30 metres (30 and 100 feet), all decorated with massive, mostly T-shaped, limestone pillars that are the most striking feature of the site.  The limestone slabs were quarried from bedrock pits located about 100 metres (330 feet) from the hilltop, with neolithic workers using flint points to carve the bedrock.  That neolithic people with such primitive flint tools quarried, carved, transported uphill, and erected these massive pillars is astonishing and must have required a staggering amount of manpower and labour.  Two pillars are at the centre of each circle, possibly intended to help support a roof; up to 8 pillars are evenly positioned around the walls of the room.  The spaces between the pillars are lined with unworked stone and stone benches are placed between each set of pillars around the edges of the wall.  Many pillars are decorated with carved reliefs of animals and abstract enigmatic pictograms.  The reliefs depict lions, bulls, boars, foxes, gazelles, donkeys, snakes and other reptiles, insects, arachnids, and birds, particularly vultures.  (At the time the shrine was constructed, the surrounding countryside was much lusher and capable of sustaining a variety of wildlife.  millennia of settlement and cultivation resulted in the near-Dust Bowl conditions that prevail today.)  Hunter-gatherer life, in that region of Turkey, was obviously far more sophisticated than anyone previously thought.  Archæologist Klaus Schmidt views the Eden story as folk-memory, or allegory.  Seen this way, Genesis tells of humanity’s innocent and leisured hunter-gatherer past, when fruit could be plucked from trees, fish scooped from rivers, and days spent in pleasure.  Then man “fell” into the harsher life of farming, with ceaseless toil and daily grind.  The move to farming first happened near Göbekli Tepe.  The world’s first farmyard pigs were domesticated at Cayonu, 60 miles away.  Sheep, cattle and goats were first domesticated in eastern Turkey.  Worldwide wheat species descended from einkorn wheat — first cultivated on the hills near Göbekli.  Other domestic cereals — such as rye and oats — also started there.  It changed the landscape and the climate; when trees were chopped down, soil leached away; ploughing and reaping left the land eroded and bare.  What was once an agreeable oasis became a land of stress, toil and diminishing returns.  And so, paradise was lost.  Adam the hunter was forced out of his glorious Eden, “to till the earth from whence he was taken”.  Mockup video.

• I could spend hours looking at satellite images.  I captured this one off Google Maps, intending to show the relationship of Newark Airport (red dot far left) and JFK Airport (yellow dot far right) to Manhattan.  But what caused the two odd round water features (in the red circle)?  For me, Google Maps usually raises many more questions than it answers.
• The Niagra River (a Native American word for “at the neck”) links Lake Erie and Lake Ontario; it flows around Niagara Island and then plummets over Horseshoe and American Falls (better known together as Niagara Falls).  The port city of Buffalo (New York) is located at the northeast corner of Lake Erie where the river first leaves the lake.  The river and falls have a history of major accidents, rescues, and tragedies.  One example from 1853: A dredging scow was anchored in the Niagara River east of Goat Island.  The only way to shore for the 3 workers at the end of the day was via rowboat — but the men soon discovered the current was unusually strong.  Unfortunately, just then an oar broke; the boat was swept downstream in the rapids and capsized; 2 men were swept to their deaths over the falls.  The 3rd man grabbed tree roots growing from a rock and spent the night stranded in the fast-flowing water.  No one heard his screams.  The next morning, several tourists observed his plight and began rescue efforts.  A boat tied to the Bath Island Bridge with a long rope was able to reach the man, who managed to climb in — but it immediately overturned, throwing him back into the water.  With no strength left, he threw his hands up in surrender, fell backwards into the water and was swept to his death.
• This natural-colour image combines cloud-free data from over 500 Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) orbits with shaded relief Digital Terrain Elevation models from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) and other sources.  An astonishing diversity of geological features, ecological systems and human landscapes across North America is indicated within the image, which spans from 56°N 136°W at the upper left to 16°N 48°W at lower right.

• A couple in central Pennsylvania found a very unusual critter in their backyard — a purple squirrel.  Percy Emery managed to trap the squirrel by baiting the trap with a couple of peanuts.  “I thought, 'Nobody’s going to believe me,’” he said.  “Even the inside of its ears were purple.  It wasn’t like it fell into something.  It didn’t look like that at all.”  After the couple took photos, then released the squirrel (why?), Percy said a state game warden came by and took samples of purple fur that the squirrel left behind inside the cage, as well pieces of fur Percy took from its tail before leasing it.  “It looked like it was healthy, the only thing was that its teeth were brown,” he said.  Henry Kacprzyk, a curator at the Pittsburgh Zoo, said he thought it looked like a gray squirrel tinged in purple, after looking at a picture.  He knows of albino squirrels.  Black squirrels.  Gray squirrels.  Reddish squirrels.  “But the purple colouration, from the purple I saw looks to me like this animal came in contact with something that dyed its fur,” he said.  “One suggestion might be that it fell in a Portajohn that had blue colouration.  I don’t think it was born that way.  There are definitely birds that have colouration like this … but not mammals.  Mammals don’t normally uptake colour by ingesting something that comes out through their fur.”  Krish Pillai, professor at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, had a more serious theory.  “This is not good at all.  That colour looks very much like Tyrian purple.  It is a natural organobromide compound seen in mollusks and rarely found in land animals.  The squirrel (possibly) has too much bromide [from nearby fracking] in its system,” he said.  The Emerts say they didn’t dye the squirrel themselves.  Imagine my surprise when this exact photo showed up in a December 2008 article from Stubbington, Hampshire, England about a purple squirrel.  Perhaps the mistake was the reporter’s or perhaps the squirrel has the same hairdresser as Katy Perry…
• A one-of-a-kind orange alligator was spotted in Venice, Florida, prompting some to speculate that after remaining unchanged for 200 million years, the large reptiles are now taking a new evolutionary direction.  But a Florida Fish and Wildlife official said, “The official opinion from our alligator experts is that this alligator is not naturally orange.  We believe it’s orange from paint, stain, iron oxide or some other element in the environment that has left a coating on the animal, making it appear orange.”  Another possibility is that it is an elaborate publicity stunt by the University of Florida Gators, whose colours are blue and you-know-what.  In any case, the creature almost certainly needs protection, as its lack of natural camouflage could tempt hunters in search of a pair of very tacky shoes.
• Insects typically do not stand out — something to do with it being their one way ticket to certain extinction.  That just adds to the mystique of the extremely rare pink katydid.  What is perhaps strangest about this species is where they are turning up: the majority of pink katydid images are attributed to the most untropical places such as Osaka and the American Midwest.  Speculation is that their unusual colour is caused by the genetic condition erythrism, which is characterised by an unusual red pigmentation.  (Or maybe they’re just evolving overwhelming cuteness.)

Working with egg yolk thickened with water and powdered pigment, George Tooker (who died last year) addressed social alienation, withdrawal / isolation, and loneliness in his paintings depicting a decline in the quality of American life in ever-bigger cities.  Tooker focused on ordinary people and the many injustices imposed on them by uncaring infrastructures.  His style is described as “Magic Realism” — odd, because he was neither magical nor realistic.

• Most of these figures appear asleep or entranced, yet in the front rows are several with eyes open who may be about to emerge from their cells.
• A pleasureless lunch break — no one talks or even sees one another or has much room to eat.
• This setting, obviously, is a subway — but bars, a turnstile, stairwells, and concrete walls convey all the warmth of a maximum security prison with no trace of humanity.  The people might well be clones of one another.  According to Tooker, “The subway seemed a good place to represent a denial of the senses and a negation of life itself.  It being underground with great weight overhead was important.”
• This reminds me of going through Customs.  Tooker has depicted the interior of a typical mid-1950s New York local government office, with rectangular pillars and ceiling supports, neutral beige décor and pendant lighting globes.  The administrative workers in the office hide behind desks, shielded by frosted glass.  Their hands are visible, poised over call buttons ready to summon the next client.  Impersonal and anonymous faces look out through portholes of clear glass onto lines of equally anonymous and uniform men and women.  It’s a reminder of how not to do a job.

• A plane flies through the "Tribute in Lights" in lower Manhattan, New York, 10 September 2011.
• The moon casts a reddish hue over Lake Pend Oreille during a lunar eclipse as it begins to set behind the Selkirk Mountain Range near Sandpoint, Idaho, 10 December 2011.
• A picture of North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung decorates a building in the capital, Pyongyang, early in the morning 5 October 2011.  Taken from the window of a hotel in Pyongyang just before the sunrise.

• How close are we to truly photorealistic, real-time games?  The necessary bounds for true photorealism are set by the physical limits of the human eye, which can only process the equivalent of a 30 megapixel image at about 70 frames per second.  Given current trends, monitor display technology should be able to handle that level of detail for a small area in just a few more generations.  Projecting that level of detail across a larger, 90° field of vision would take an 8,000×6,000 pixel display, which is still quite far off but “within sight.”  This level of detail sets an upper limit on the amount of memory and raw processing power we need to depict a “good enough” photorealistic scene.  That limit is about 50 times greater than the polygon-processing capabilities of today’s top-end hardware, meaning it’s at least two generations away.  5,000 teraflops are needed to process a fully realistic 3D scene in real time.  And even then, that would only handle the visual effects we currently understand how to model realistically like shadows, skin tones, smoke, and water.  Plenty of the intangible elements of a scene, like realistic human movements, speech, and even personality, are beyond our ability to model realistically just yet.  We need innovation in state-of-the art algorithms.
• Speaking of incredibly realistic modelling, this wool sweater was done by German artist Thomas Rudat.  The sweater was modelled in ZBrush.
• As an interesting contrast, this elderly gentleman was created with watercolour on board, also by Thomas Rudat.  I am impressed by his varied skill.

• Sculpture by the Sea is an annual sculpture exhibit held on the clifftop walk between Bondi and Tamarama beaches in New South Wales.  This is “Provenance (A Gilt Frame)” by Jane Gillings.  This is my 3rd favourite frame of these 9 because I like the level of detail the artist achieved.
• Bronze sculpture of an ornate frame entitled “Peace Frame” by Alabama artist Fred Nall Hollis.  Not unlike Christo’s wrappings, which draw attention to a subject by concealing it, Nall’s “Peace Frame” puts value into the subject framed.  The public can stand in the frame for souvenir photos.  In Monaco, this frame is reported to be been one of the most highly photographed subjects in the Principality.  This particular photo doesn’t reveal much of the frame’s fine detail.  This is my second favourite frame of these 9.  (Unfortunately, a palm tree sits squarely in the middle of the view if you look at it directly.)
• “Non-sign II” is an installation by seattle-based art collective Lead Pencil Studio (artists Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han).  The non-sign is located at the canada-US border near vancouver.  The sculpture is made from small stainless steel rods that together create a negative billboard — most billboards draw attention away from the landscape, while this one frames the landscape, focusing attention back onto it.  I would like this frame better (as it is quite artistic) if the view were lower down, but all that’s visible through the frame is sky.

• Ernst Hesse’s sculpture, “Global Frame … for Friendship” (2001) stands on the road leading to the stadium in Fukuroi, Japan.  It is made of weathering steel and offers views of the landscape beyond from both sides of the frame.  I’d like this better if the outer edge of the frame were also oval.  I don’t find the huge, heavy expanse of rust all that appealing.
• Picture frame sculpture by Stephen Broadbent in the West End Gardens on Morecambe Promenade, Lancashire, England.  The view here is a bit bland.
• Bronze sculpture in Shoreline Park, Weihai, Shandong Province, China.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the name of the artist and, sadly, this isn’t a very good photo, because this is my favourite of the 9 frames.  It exhibits a lot of artistry and is impressively sized.

• Tarapaca River Walk (Tarapaca Malecon) 386 in Iquitos, Peru (the “Timbuktu of the Western Amazon”).  The river is a tributary of the nearby Amazon River; it’s located a few kilometres from the city.  This frame is nice enough, but it’s rather small (almost a tabletop version), lacking flair.
• “Fifteen Minutes of Frame”, Zena cornfield, Woodstock, New York, USA.  The sculptor is New Yorker Ze’ev Willy Neumann.  The title has much more imagination than this rather uninspired work does (however, the view is rather nice).
• By artist Richard Caink, this is located on the Irwell Sculpture Trail in Rossendale.  The carvings are artefacts that relate to the industry in the valley and the loom-wreckers rebellion of 1826 at Chatterton Mill.  The visitor can step into the picture as both viewer and subject matter.  The Irwell Sculpture Trail is the largest public art scheme in England, commissioning regional, national and international artists.  It includes 28 art pieces and follows a well-established 30-mile (48 kilometre) footpath stretching from Salford Quays through Bury into Rossendale and up to the Pennines above Bacup.  Unfortunately, this frame has not weathered well (this photo was taken shortly after its installation), nor is it very strategically sited.

Responsive websites dynamically change their layouts according to the resolution of the device that is rendering the page.  The website for Thaumaturgy Studios has a new landing page, which is an example of a responsive design.  The image on the left is the one you will likely see from a tablet, the image on the top right is likely the one you’ll see from a desktop PC, and the image on the bottom right is the one you’ll likely see if you use your smartphone.  Please feel free to check it out — resize your browser window and see what happens.  If you notice problems, please let me know, along with your screen size and browser version.