Bush elephants

False awakenings

I'm interested in the various tricks our brain plays on us while we sleep. Actually, "tricks" is not the best description -- I think a better description for such things as sleep paralysis and night terrors would be "bugs", as in software bugs.

I've never experienced either of those, but I have -- once -- experienced false awakening. I awoke in my bed early one morning. Although my bedroom seemed completely normal, exactly the way it should, there was something wrong: a subtle, uncanny, terrifying sense of wrongness. Nothing that I could see, or hear, but I knew, I just knew with every fibre of my being, that there was something dreadfully wrong and terrifying. The feeling grew and grew until I felt that my heart would explode, and then I woke up, in my bed again.

Except, there was something wrong, and again I was flooded by an overwhelming sense of dread -- until I woke again, in my bed.

This happened no less than six times, and each time I was lucid enough to realise that the previous time must have been a dream, but never enough to realise I was still dreaming. Only after I woke for the sixth time did I actually wake and realise the entire experience was a dream.


The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781. See also here and here.

Stencil graffiti

The Doctors

Following up from the Doctor's girls and the Doctor's boys, mimi-na has given us all ten Doctors in one long image. Please visit her page to see the original, or go direct to the picture.

Or enjoy this remixed animated GIF:

Well, that bites. Blogger, it seems, deletes all the layers in animated GIFs except for the first. Boo hiss to them. Looks like I'll be looking for a image-or-file hosting service...

Update, 15/07/2007: And here's the animated GIF, thanks to free hosting by File Den. (Their Account Registration page sucks, but so far the rest of the service seems reasonable.)


Click for larger version; if the picture isn't animated, you'll need to tell your browser to allow animated images.



Update, 2007-11-12: oops, had a broken link there. Now fixed.

The Doctor's night out with the boys

mimi-na from Deviantart, the artist responsible for the Doctor's Girls, has now got the Doctor and the boys down at the pub enjoying a few drinks:

(Click image for full view.)

From left to right:

• Adric


• Dr Harry Sullivan, Doctor 10 and Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart


• Jamie McCrimmon, Captain Jack Harkness and Vislor Turlough


• Ben Jackson, Ian Chesterton and Steven Taylor


• The two tin dogs: K9 and Mickey Smith

Go to mimi-na's page to see the original in context, or straight to the full sized image.

By popular request, mimi-na has put up LJ icons of unobscured Ben, and what a young Doctor (before "borrowing" the TARDIS and running off to Earth) might have looked like.

The girls of Doctor Who

mimi-na from Deviantart has drawn Doctor Who's female companions:

(Click image for larger view.)

From left to right, the companions shown are:

• Susan Foreman; Vicki; Dodo Chaplet; Polly; Victoria Waterfield; Zoe Harriot


• Dr Liz Shaw; Jo Grant; Sarah Jane Smith; Leela of the Sevateem; Romana (twice!); Nyssa; Tegan Jovanka; Peri Brown; Mel Bush; Ace; Dr Grace Holloway


• The Doctor; Rose Tyler; K9

The original, full-sized image can be found here, or go direct to the image.

Callgirl of Cthulhu

Safe for work, unless you work for Christian Taliban or Feminist Nazis. (Although the rest of the artist's website isn't necessarily SFW.)



Link.

One of the really impressive things about this statue is that it isn't some dinky 9" statuette, it is lifesize:

Art, vandalism or public service?

Paul Curtis, aka Moose, isn't your average graffiti artist. Instead of cans of spray paint, his tools are water, a shoe brush and elbow grease. Curtis creates his art/graffiti by selectively cleaning the urban grime off public spaces.


(Click for larger image.)

Is he an artist or just a vandal? Critics say that by carelessly cleaning the patina off old buildings, he is damaging them more than the pollution and grime does; others point out that, regardless of whether the "art" is drawn in paint or by removing dirt, owners are still forced to clean the building to remove the unwanted graffiti. The Leeds City Council is investigating, unsure whether he is committing a crime or not.

Thanks to Echidne and Neatorama.

Escher's logarithmic transform

In 1956, M.C. Escher completed his drawing "Print Gallery" in 1956. It shows a young man looking at a print in a gallery that is strongly deformed, but with an underlying sense of order to the deformation. It took until 2003 for mathematicians to discover the structure of the mathematical transformation which Escher came up with intuitively.

Incredible carved pencils

These amazing Japanese artists carve intricate shapes and little wooden chains out of pencils.