Prime minister's decree comes after series of amateurish sculptures sprang up across country to be met with anger and scorn
In response to a series of questionable statues that have sprung up in Egypt, the prime minister has banned all public artworks not approved by the ministry of culture.
Sherif Ismail issued the decree after a controversial statue was unveiled in the eastern city of Sohag.
Related: Egypt: sculpture honouring military criticised for portraying sexual harassment
#نفرتيتي لأصحاب قوة الملاحظة ما هو الفرق بين الصورتين ؟؟ pic.twitter.com/XhvfWHbstQ
Continue reading...designboom attended the preview of the exhibition to ask leibovitz how the project has evolved in the last ten years, and what changes she has noticed in regards to how women are represented now.
The post annie leibovitz's women: new portraits exhibition opens at fabrica orobia in milan appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.
the pink, X-shaped outdoor loungers custom-built for the area accommodate up to four people each.
The post j. mayer h. sets ‘XXX' street furniture in new york's times square appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.
A National Museum of Australia exhibition tells the history of the world in 100 objects mostly sourced from the British Museum, ranging from a counterfeit Chelsea shirt to a stone tool that reaches back to the dawn of humanity
• Ritual sacrifice, ancient insults and sacred fire: 2 million years of history in pictures
The exhibition is billed as “two million years of history in one room”, but Mathew Trinca, director of the National Museum of Australia, describes it simply as “the story of us”.
Sourced from the British Museum with some Antipodean additions, A History of the World in 100 Objects is the National Museum's spring/summer blockbuster exhibition: a collection of objects that show the span of human history, from early stone tools to Javanese shadow puppets to an HSBC sharia-compliant, no-interest credit card.
Related: Ritual sacrifice, ancient insults and sacred fire: 2 million years of history in pictures
Continue reading...Too often, the product design, product management, and engineering teams are thought of as three separate entities. This divide, according to Cap Watkins, the VP of Design at Buzzfeed, can lead designers to feel undervalued or even defensive when the product managers or engineers attempt to make suggestions to their work. Having realized this battle at Buzzfeed, Watkins proposed the question: “How do we create a culture of empowerment for design?”
In this talk, Watkins provides a step-by-step process to blur the lines between the different product building teams in an effort to get feedback on not only the work being done, but also the process on how that work gets done. Change is complicated and creating the internal partnerships will adjust the way people work, ultimately for the better. “We have to realize that working together doesn't mean we're trying to take each others job,” says Watkins. “We're just trying to be better collaborators.”
Watkins is a product designer living and working in Brooklyn. He is currently the VP of Design at BuzzFeed, as well as a blogger, podcast guest, conference speaker, and lover of start-ups and technology. He believes in thoughtful, holistic design solutions that get out of the way and empower people to accomplish more. His past work includes Etsy, Zoosk, Formspring, and hush-hush stuff at Amazon.
China is ready to put on the "ear phones" and flip the "ON" switch for the world's largest, most powerful radio telescope, that is nearing completion in a vast, bowl-shaped valley in the mountainous southwestern province of Guizhou by the end of September, accompanied by regulations to protect the facility. Its unrivaled precision will allow astronomers to survey the Milky Way and other galaxies and detect faint pulsars, and work as a powerful ground station for future space missions.
"A radio telescope is like a sensitive ear, listening to tell meaningful radio messages from white noise in the universe," said Nan Rendong, chief scientist of the FAST project. He told Xinhua that the huge dish will enable much more accurate detection. "It is like identifying the sound of cicadas in a thunderstorm."
"Having a more sensitive telescope, we can receive weaker and more distant radio messages," Wu Xiangping, director-general of the Chinese Astronomical Society, "It will help us to search for intelligent life outside of the galaxy and explore the origins of the universe," he added underscoring the China's race to be the first nation to discover the existence of an advanced alien civilization.
The construction of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, has entered its final phase. With a dish the size of 30 football fields, FAST, which measures 500 meters in diameter, dwarfs Puerto Rico's 300-meter Arecibo Observatory. Under the regulation, FAST requires radio silence within a 10-kilometer radius.
The Chinese government hopes that a more subtle benefit of the behemoth eye on the cosmos will entice some of the some of the brightest minds in science or astronomy studying abroad to return home to China. China is the leading nation in the world in the number of students it sends students abroad, especially for majors such as science or engineering.
FAST is the world's largest single-aperture telescope, overtaking the Arecibo Observatory in the US territory of Puerto Rico, which is 305 meters (1000 feet) in diameter. The dish will have a perimeter of about 1.6 kilometers, Xinhua said, and there are no towns within five kilometers, giving it ideal surroundings to listen for signals from space.
According to chief scientist from China's National Astronomical Observations, Li Di, FAST will be able to scan up to twice more areas of the sky than Arecibo shown above, and it will have between three to five times the sensitivity. It's in their hopes that if there is indeed alien life, this gargantuan will find it.
The region's karst topography -- a landscape of porous rock fissured with deep crevasses and underground caves and streams -- is ideal for draining rainwater and protecting the reflector. Unfortuately, citizens actually living in the area where the radio telescope will be built are being relocated. Some 2,000 families residing near the Pingtang and Luodian counties will be given $1,800 per individual for the forced relocation.
For years Chinese scientists have relied on "second hand" data collected by others in their research and the new telescope is expected to "greatly enhance" the country's capacity to observe outer space, Xinhua said. Beijing is accelerating its military-run multi-billion-dollar space exploration program, which it sees as a symbol of the country's progress. It has plans for a permanent orbiting station by 2020 and eventually to send a human to the moon.
Construction on the telescope started in March 2011.
The Daily Galaxy via AFP/Beijing
On July 17, 2016, a huge stream of ice and rock tumbled down a narrow valley in the Aru Range of Tibet. When the ice stopped moving, it had spread a pile of debris that was up to 30 meters (98 feet) thick across 10 square kilometers (4 square miles). The massive debris field makes this one of the largest ice avalanches ever recorded. The only event of a comparable size was a 2002 avalanche from Kolka Glacier in in the Caucasus , explained Andreas Kääb, a glaciologist at the University of Oslo.
The cause of the avalanche is unclear. "This is new territory scientifically," said Kääb. "It is unknown why an entire glacier tongue would shear off like this. We would not have thought this was even possible before Kolka happened." Nine people, 350 sheep, and 110 yaks in the remote village of Dungru were killed during the avalanche.
Kääb's preliminary analysis of satellite imagery indicates that the glacier showed signs of change weeks before the avalanche happened. Normally, such signs would be clues the glacier might be in the process of surging, but surging glaciers typically flow at a fairly slow rate rather than collapsing violently in an avalanche.
After inspecting the satellite imagery, University of Arizona glaciologist Jeffrey Kargel agreed that a surging glacier could not be the cause. "The form is completely wrong," he said. "It must be a high-energy mass flow. Maybe liquid water lubrication at the base played some role," he said.
Tian Lide, a glaciologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, visited the site in August and described the avalanche as "baffling" because the area where the ice collapse began is rather flat. "We failed to reach the upper part of the glacier for safety reasons," he said in an email, "but we will go the upper part [later] to see if we can find some more hints about what caused the glacier disaster."
The Daily Galaxy via NASA
New research by the University of Surrey published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has shone light on a globular cluster of stars that could host several hundred black holes, a phenomenon that until recently was thought impossible.
Globular clusters are spherical collections of stars which orbit around a galactic centre such as our Milky-way galaxy. Using advanced computer simulations, the team at the University of Surrey were able to see the un-see-able by mapping a globular cluster known as NGC 6101, from which the existence of black holes within the system was deduced.
These black holes are a few times larger than the Sun, and form in the gravitational collapse of massive stars at the end of their lives. It was previously thought that these black holes would almost all be expelled from their parent cluster due to the effects of supernova explosion, during the death of a star.
"Due to their nature, black holes are impossible to see with a telescope, because no photons can escape", explained lead author Miklos Peuten of the University of Surrey. "In order to find them we look for their gravitational effect on their surroundings. Using observations and simulations we are able to spot the distinctive clues to their whereabouts and therefore effectively 'see' the un-seeable".
It is only as recently as 2013 that astrophysicists found individual black holes in globular clusters via rare phenomena in which a companion star donates material to the black hole. This work, which was supported by the European Research Council (ERC), has shown that in NGC 6101 there could be several hundred black holes, overturning old theories as to how black holes form.
Co-author Professor Mark Gieles, University of Surrey continued, "Our work is intended to help answer fundamental questions related to dynamics of stars and black holes, and the recently observed gravitational waves. These are emitted when two black holes merge, and if our interpretation is right, the cores of some globular clusters may be where black hole mergers take place."
The researchers chose to map this particular ancient globular cluster due to its recently found distinctive makeup, which suggested that it could be different to other clusters. Compared to other globular clusters NGC 6101 appears dynamically young in contrast to the ages of the individual stars. Also the cluster appears inflated, with the core being under-populated by observable stars.
Using computer simulation, the team recreated every individual star and black hole in the cluster and their behavior. Over the whole lifetime of thirteen billion years the simulation demonstrated how NGC 6101 has evolved. It was possible to see the effects of large numbers of black holes on the visible stars, and to reproduce what was observed for NGC6101. From this, the researchers showed that the unexplainable dynamical apparent youth is an effect of the large black hole population.
"This research is exciting as we were able to theoretically observe the spectacle of an entire population of black holes using computer simulations. The results show that globular clusters like NGC 6101, which were always considered boring are in fact the most interesting ones, possibly each harboring hundreds of black holes. This will help us to find more black holes in other globular clusters in the Universe. " concluded Peuten.
The Daily Galaxy via University of Surrey
The translucent marble and glass cube-shaped Ronald O Perelman Performing Arts Center will open in 2020
A design of translucent marble and glass was unveiled yesterday for a long-stalled performing arts venue at the World Trade Center.
Singer Barbra Streisand is to serve as the chair of the board of the Ronald O Perelman Performing Arts Center, which will be dedicated to new works. The cube-shaped building would aim to commemorate the 9/11 tragedy and reflect the vitality of the city, board members said.
Related: New York's Oculus transit hub soars, but it's a phoenix with a price tag
Continue reading...The Palace of Westminster is an expensive ruin. The case for shifting at least some of our key institutions out of the capital could not be clearer
Anyone in their right mind would want to move out. Among other problems, the property has leaking roofs, hidden pockets of asbestos, clear fire risks, vulnerability to flooding, and mice. The annual repair bill runs to around £50m. It is also routinely overheated, chintzily furnished and home to an aroma that often suggests last week's school dinners. Small wonder that, since 2012, some of the Palace of Westminster's occupants have been loudly fretting about the place's upkeep.
Related: Cost of moving MPs out of parliament for repairs could exceed £4bn
I know: sketching this out in a political culture as cautious as ours threatens to take one close to La-La land
Related: PMQs verdict: has Theresa May got a new gag writer?
Continue reading...Artist David Shrigley has released a series of 30 designs for Danish retail chain, Flying Tiger Copenhagen.
Formerly known as Tiger, the brand commissioned Shrigley to design a number of products based on the theme of Strong Messages, featuring his trademark humorous drawings and messages.
The collection includes a set of drawing pencils covered in messages scrawled in Shrigley's own handwriting; including “words are boring”, “make art not friends” and “I'm illiterate”.
The words “Coloured pencils for making nice drawings of cats, flowers, etc.” feature on a specially designed pencil case that is also adorned with a drawing of a cat.
Phone and tablet cases include the instruction “kill the computer”, and other products such as shower curtains, trays, socks and bags are all adorned with artworks by Shrigley.
The artist has also released a miniature version of his Really Good statue, which is set to be unveiled at The Fourth Plinth in London later this month.
Concept developer at Flying Tiger Copenhagen, Mai Due Brinch, says: “We want to make art more accessible by making it a part of people's everyday life. Shrigley's works are humorous, dark, delightfully absurd and bizarre, and the emphasis is on the message rather than on technique.”
The post Tiger releases stationery range designed by David Shrigley appeared first on Design Week.
Michael Goldrei (microsketch) posted a photo:
Read more: Donald Trump, Elections 2016, Hillary Clinton, Climate Change, Environment, Yale Environment 360, Politics News