Links for 15 January 2021

Some items around the web I found intriguing

Like most people, I like roaming around the web looking for cool things, and sometimes get the feeling that I’ve run across something worth bookmarking, something I want to mull over in the future. Some of them are worth saying a few words about, and I was thinking I would put these up on the blog in hopes that someone might find them fascinating too.

• This is the kind of video I think people are looking for in the middle of a frightening epidemic while there is talk of unrest liable to break out at any moment.
  Woodturning — The Pencil Globe !!
• There was one of these blooming in the Conservatory of Flowers just across the bay from me, but I missed seeing (and smelling) it for the usual 2020 reasons.
  Breathing Life Into the Corpse Flower
• Here is an impressive image gallery showing how nearly alien the many faces of our own sky can appear.
  Capture the night
• Here are some clips from a video game under development. I don’t know how the story is turning out, but I think these vignettes show lots of promise.
  section9interactive game clip
• How many names for colors do I think about? I don’t work in the visual arts or creative realms but I’m always eager to find out about the specialized vocabulary that that people use in those fields. Here it’s just the gradations of hue, across the spectrum and ranging from dark to light, given names that English-speaking people have a chance to remember. When I used to be an active stamp collector, I remember puzzling over listings of one old stamp described as crimson vs. scarlet or maybe carmine lake. This was long before the Internet existed to give some kind of easily shared meaning.
  Tertiary color
• We really don’t need more reasons to preserve the creatures we share the planet with. But sometimes we find out how our self-interest is aligned with their welfare.
  Neuroscientists isolate promising mini antibodies against COVID-19 from a llama: Preliminary results suggest anti-COVID19 nanobodies may be effective at preventing and diagnosing infections — ScienceDaily

Originally published at https://zeroatthebone.us.