Leora the Sane

Oh. My. God!!!!

I need one. For really-real. Gotta have it. ‘Cause I’ve always loved trilobytes. And clockwork just makes everything better!

Trilo Temporalis, the clockwork trilobyte - found via Boing Boing Gadgets.

January 30, 2009 at 7:39 pm | Category: Temporary Sanity | Leave a comment

Link dump for January 24th, 2009 through January 28th, 2009:

• The Triumph of Blue Patriotism - "This patriotism’s founding document is the Declaration of the Independence. Abraham Lincoln, not George Washington, is the father of the nation, and Martin Luther King, not Ronald Reagan, is its greatest recent leader. This patriotism is not red, not white, but blue."
• Growing Food on the White House Lawn - "1918: President Woodrow Wilson and First Lady Edith Wilson use sheep to mow and fertilize the First Lawn at a time when the country is trying to conserve resources for the war effort."
  Somehow I doubt that my wife would let me keep sheep to keep from having to mow the lawn.
• A Low-Tech Treatment for Bee Plague - I've been thinking about bees a lot lately, in preparation for camp. And then pieces like this pop up and I think about them even more. Good, short opinion piece about possible solutions to colony collapse.
  "Those remnant wild bees, feral and native alike, might just be the seeds of a solution. And to sow those seeds and foster their growth, we must not till the earth, but do just the opposite: we must take patches of agricultural land out of production, and restore them to natural habitat."
• Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy - "Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth."
• Al Dente - An adorable and slightly trippy short film (found via the Tor.com's blog's Saturday Morning Cartoon series). Note: requires Quicktime to view on site, but you can download mp4 versions further down the page.

January 28, 2009 at 10:00 pm | Tags: animation, bees, gardening, humor, nytimes, obama, politics, science | Category: Link dump | Comments (1)

Try your hand at redecorating the Oval Office, with IKEA!

Here’s my version. There’s only so much you can with IKEA furniture to make a room look suitably presidential. But it’s still a fun little time-waster.

January 28, 2009 at 9:21 pm | Category: Temporary Sanity | Leave a comment

Found this ages ago via Colourlovers (OK, maybe only a month ago,but it’s been sitting in my tabs ever since). It’s a gorgeous short film made entirely of a series of paintings (the film description begins “What if you watch a film and whenever you pause it, you face a painting?”).

I am so impressed I can barely stand it.

Khoda from Reza Dolatabadi on Vimeo.

You can also watch the HD version on the Vimeo site (but the creator of the film has, understandably, disabled the HDversion for embedding).

January 28, 2009 at 9:07 pm | Category: Inspiration, Temporary Sanity | Leave a comment