Beating Gunpowder into Beauty

Cai Guo-Qiang, the New York-based contemporary artist who grew up in China and has earned global acclaim for his gunpowder art, won’t be watching for fireworks this Fourth of July. The holiday displays “aren’t really his thing,” his studio assistant says.

Curators like Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, aren’t surprised: “Fireworks are fabulous and patriotic, but to him it’s an art form.”

Art lovers have until Sept. 20 to catch the final leg of Mr. Cai’s retrospective, “Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe,” at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, a show that drew over 341,000 people during its initial run at the Guggenheim in New York, the second-highest attendance in the museum’s history, Ms. Munroe says. (Only a 2001 Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit drew more.)

link: Chinese Artist Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao - WSJ.com

Time to Notice that Time is Not Time

Try this exercise: Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you're looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here's the kicker: you never see your eyes move. What is happening to the time gaps during which your eyes are moving? Why do you feel as though there is no break in time while you're changing your eye position? (Remember that it's easy to detect someone else's eyes moving, so the answer cannot be that eye movements are too fast to see.)

All these illusions and distortions are consequences of the way your brain builds a representation of time. When we examine the problem closely, we find that "time" is not the unitary phenomenon we may have supposed it to be. This can be illustrated with some simple experiments: for example, when a stream of images is shown over and over in succession, an oddball image thrown into the series appears to last for a longer period, although presented for the same physical duration. In the neuroscientific literature, this effect was originally termed a subjective "expansion of time," but that description begs an important question of time representation: when durations dilate or contract, does time in general slow down or speed up during that moment? If a friend, say, spoke to you during the oddball presentation, would her voice seem lower in pitch, like a slowed- down record?

link: Edge: BRAIN TIME By David M. Eagleman

Revolutionary Guards the Real Engine of the Regime in Iran?

Gary Slick writes:

Iran’s supreme leader may have the most exalted title, but Gary Sick says the Islamic republic’s real engine is the Revolutionary Guard. They run the economy, own major industries, and brutalize their foes—and Khamenei almost never contradicts them.

There are many different ways to look at the developments in Iran. One perspective that seems to have been ignored is what I regard as the cardinal role of the Revolutionary Guards.

Over the 20 years that Ayatollah Khamenei has been the rahbar, or leader, he has allied himself ever more closely with the Revolutionary Guards—to such an extent that it is no longer apparent to me who is leading and who is following. The Revolutionary Guards have been granted extraordinary influence over all functions of the Islamic republic—military, political, economic, and even Islamic. Technically, they take their orders from the leader, but has he ever dared to contradict them? On the contrary, he seems always to court them by granting them ever-greater influence and responsibilities.

link: The Thugs Who Lead Iran's Supreme Leader - Page 1 - The Daily Beast

Israel Notes Virtue of Not Having Bombed Someone

Israeli Press – “Good we didn’t bomb Iran”

[E]verything happening at Tehran’s Azadi Square – the amazing coming together of young people, Internet culture, social ferment, and woman power – would not have happened had we listened to the regular bunch of hysterical screamers around here and attempted to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites

What would have happened then? Exactly what happens around here during times of war: The Iranian public would have rallied around the leadership, a wave of patriotic fury would have swept through the whole of Iran, and Ahmadinejad would not have needed to resort to any fraud in order to defeat the reformists.

link: niacINsight

Iran: Rafsanjani Issues Statement

Rafsanjani breaks silence, calls for fair and thorough examination of election complaints:

In Sunday’s statement, Rafsanjani praised a decision by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last week to extend by five days a deadline for Iran’s top legislative body to receive and look into complaints by the three defeated candidates.

“This valuable move by the Supreme Leader in order to attract the people’s trust towards the election process was very effective,” Rafsanjani told a meeting of families of victims of a 1981 bombing in Tehran that killed many senior officials.

“I hope those who are involved in this issue thoroughly and fairly review and study the legal complaints,” he said.

link: niacINsight

I Left My Heart On Twitter

Paul Miller writes:

What's creepier than automatically informing Twitter every time your unborn child kicks his mother's womb? Giving all your Twitter followers a live feed of your heartbeat, including canned messages to announce your death in case you cease pumping Cheeto-infused blood through your goth-nerdy veins. This Japanese DIY project has open source schematics and is designed to bypass a PC and send the news of your heart hiccups directly the the internet.

link: Device judges your pulse and Tweets its findings to your parents and Ashton Kutcher

Politics v. Wonder: Dead Sea Eliminated

The Dead Sea will be eliminated next week from a contest to choose the seven natural wonders of the world, because of a Palestinian boycott over the participation of an Israeli settler council.

link: Politics bars Dead Sea from World Wonders contest | Lifestyle | Reuters

Oldest Known Image of St. Paul Found

Vatican archaeologists using laser technology have discovered what they believe is the oldest image in existence of St Paul the Apostle, dating from the late 4th century, on the walls of catacomb beneath Rome.

Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano, revealing the find on Sunday, published a picture of a frescoed image of the face of a man with a pointed black beard on a red background, inside a bright yellow halo. The high forehead is furrowed.

Experts of the Ponitifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology made the discovery on June 19 in the Catacomb of Santa Tecla in Rome and describe it as the "oldest icon in history dedicated to the cult of the Apostle," according to the Vatican newspaper.

link: Rome catacomb reveals oldest image of St Paul | Science | Reuters