Casino carpets, posters, neurons and a chair whose back rest doubles as a coat hanger in this edition of Quipsologies.
Some interesting products being created at details:
From my friend Gillian Muir, who keeps me up on science things:
“Well they’ve finally done it. For a long time, neuroscientists have had a sort of facetious joke about the “grandmother neuron”—the hypothetical cell in everyone’s brain that responds to the image of their grandmother. The idea behind it is that other human’s faces are so important to us, and we recognize faces so quickly, that there must be some very solid encoding of this information in the brain and the joke was that there was one cell dedicated to each face. So this week’s Nature has an article about neuronal activity recorded from human brains (they were people with epilepsy who were undergoing some electrode placements to control their seizures—the people are awake while this is happening and consent to taking part in these kind of experiments). They found a neuron that only fired when the people were shown different pictures of Jennifer Aniston (but not to pictures of her with Brad Pitt!—whatever that means) There was also a Halle Berry neuron (the experiment was at UCLA). Other experiments by the same researchers found a Bill Clinton neuron, a Beatles neuron and Michael Jordan neuron.
Cool, huh?”
Cool, indeed.
A small tragedy of watching the Tour de France is seeing the state of the Outdoor Life Network’s logo. For a couple years, it was pretty good — a flat leaf in a circle — and a world of improvement over an earlier version. Sadly this year’s update reminds me of the STP logo and makes me wonder if they are now more NASCAR than Nature.
Television writer John Rogers, author of the consistently great and entertaining Kung Fu Monkey, discusses the political bias of Hollywood — a position probably applicable to much of American media.
Sixty-four nights of Leno, Conan and Letterman are compressed in Jason Salavon’s The Late Night Triad.
The story of George D. Watt’s Deseret Alphabet.
First item on the checklist: make sure the logo isn’t backwards.
A current exhibition in Los Angeles which is worth a visit — Margaret Kilgallen: In The Sweet Bye & Bye, in the Gallery at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater; until August 21, 2005. Kilgallen had a wonderful sense of old-timey Tuscan typography and color. She passed away in 2001 at the age of 33.
Step and repeat: A comprehensive survey of American casino carpeting.
I'm not in love w/ OLN's new logo either, but their last version always made me think they were associated with the CBC b/c of the maple leaf.
It can also be said that the old logo was more fishing and hunting, while the new one is definitely sports-driven. Less bass fishing, and more snowboarding/kayaking.
That's not so bad, is it?
On Jul.18.2005 at 02:30 PM