A good motto is hard to find. Just ask the University of Idaho. Last year it dropped its motto “From Here You Can Go Anywhere” for a new marketing theme dubbed “No Fences,” with the accompanying tag line “Open Space. Open Minds.” The words were intended to evoke both the romantic landscape of Idaho and the boundless intellectual opportunities at the university. It was perfect.

Except no one really liked it. So recently both slogans were scrapped in favor of “A Legacy of Leading,” which has tested better with alumni and parents. A spokeswoman says the new campaign, expected to cost $900,000 a year, will be “more impactful” with the institution’s various audiences.

Impactful or not, does a college really need a motto? Quick: What’s the slogan of your alma mater? An extremely informal and decidedly unscientific survey indicates that many people don’t know.

But mottos do matter, at least according to the branding experts who get paid to think them up. The problem, these experts say, is with slogans that try to say everything and end up saying nothing.

{ The Chronicle of Higher Education | Continue reading }

related { Welcome to Scotland }

Finally, coming to New York, a fashion show devoid of skinny models and serious faces — in fact the models don’t even exist.

U.S. discount retailer Target Corp, known for its innovative marketing, is staging a “model-less” fashion show in Manhattan next week that will feature holograms strutting down a runway in its merchandise instead of size-zero models.

The images, which will appear to be three-dimensional, will show clothes by designers like Isaac Mizrahi and Liz Lange sashaying across a virtual runway.

“This is the first time a fashion show will be completely produced with hologram technology, without models, without a runway and easily accessible to all fashion fans,” Target senior vice president Trish Adams said in a statement.

The show will take place November 6 and November 7, in Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Terminal. It will show clothes and accessories from Target’s men’s, women’s, bridal and maternity collections.

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

photo { 3D “Lenticular” Postcard }

Bananadine is a fictional psychoactive substance which is allegedly extracted from banana peels. A recipe for its extraction from banana peel was originally published as a hoax in the Berkeley Barb in March 1967.

It became more widely known when William Powell, believing it to be true, reproduced the method in The Anarchist Cookbook in 1970 under the name “Musa Sapientum Bananadine” (referring to the banana’s binomial nomenclature).

Researchers at New York University have found that banana peel contains no intoxicating chemicals, and that smoking it produces only a placebo effect. Over the years, bananadine has become a popular urban legend.

Banana peels, however, do contain the nonpsychoactive neurotransmitters tyramine and dopamine in significant amounts that if ingested are enough to affect people taking MAOIs. These chemicals are present in many foods at higher concentrations, and users of MAOIs are counseled to avoid them. The most characteristic effect of the interaction is a massive increase in blood pressure, leading to a hypertensive crisis, and possibly arrhythmia and death.

Bananas contain tryptophan which, when ingested, increases levels of serotonin in the body. This can lead to various mood-altering effects including a reduction in depression. As well, Xiao et al. (1998) found that eating just two bananas a day for three days increased levels of serotonin in the blood by 16%.

However, there is no mention in the literature of tryptophan having any hallucinogenic effects; it has, in fact, been used to reduce hallucinations in patients with mental disorders. It is also debatable whether smoking tryptophan would be successful as a method of administration.

{ wikipedia | Continue reading }

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A giant hole in the Universe is devoid of galaxies, stars and even lacks dark matter, astronomers said on Thursday.

The team at the University of Minnesota said the void is nearly a billion light-years across and they have no idea why it is there.

“Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size,” said astronomy professor Lawrence Rudnick.

“What we’ve found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the Universe,” Williams said in a statement.

The astronomers said the region even appeared to lack dark matter, which cannot be seen directly but is usually detected by measuring gravitational forces. The void is in a region of sky in the constellation Eridanus, southwest of Orion.

{ Reuters | photos }

Bubbles add fizz to champagne and spring to foam mattresses, but the details about how they form have been murky.

A new computer simulation now challenges a theory about bubble formation that has been around since the 1920s and suggests they might form more simply, and faster, than was previously thought.

The finding, detailed online in the journal Physical Review Letters, could lead to a more precise understanding of the “phase transition” that takes place when bubbles form and could have implications for industries that rely on bubbles to make their products.

Scientists had thought bubbles form when jostling liquid molecules create pockets of low density in the liquid containing relatively fewer molecules than surrounding regions. Most of the time, other molecules will just rush in to fill in these air pockets. However, an exodus of molecules can also occur, causing the pockets, or bubbles, to grow.

{ Live Science | Continue reading }

photo { Ann Margret in Tommy photos | Hemdale Studios }

Invisibility (lower visibility) for radar is called stealth technology. Stealth technology covers a range of techniques used with aircraft, ships and missiles, in order to make them less visible (ideally invisible) to radar, infrared and other detection methods. Stealth technology is not a single technology but is a combination of technologies that attempt to greatly reduce the distances at which a vehicle can be detected; in particular radar cross section reductions, but also acoustic, thermal… { Wikipedia | continue reading }

{ F-117 Nighthawk, the world’s first operational aircraft completely designed around stealth technology }

{ canopy of F-117 Nighthawk shot down on March 27, 1999, in Serbia/Yugoslavia }

{ Robert Sollis, Good News!, 2004 | In this newspaper all the negative news articles have been carefully cut out. While in theory this should leave only positive news for us to enjoy, it in fact leaves little more than a wealth of advertising. }

Thursday, on the summer solstice, the Sun will celebrate the year’s lazy months by resting on the horizon. The word solstice derives from the Latin “sol” (sun) and “sistere” (to stand still). The day marks the sun’s highest point in the sky, the moment when our shadows shrink to their shortest length of the year. How strange to think that these mundane friends, our ever-present familiars, can actually go faster than the sun’s rays.

I remarked on this recently to my husband as we sat on the porch with our shadows pooling by our chairs. Nothing can go faster than light, he insisted, expressing what is surely the most widely known law of physics, ingrained into us by a thousand “Nova” programs.

That is the point, I explained: Nothing can go faster than light. A shadow isn’t a thing. It’s a non-thing. It’s the absence of light.

Special relativity dictates that we cannot move anything more quickly than the particles of light known as photons, but no law says you can’t do nothing faster than light. Physicists have known this for a long time, even if they generally do not mention it on PBS documentaries. { NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Helmut Newton }

Andy Warhol made one of his most famous and controversial films, Empire, on July 25-26, 1964. Aiming his camera out of a window of the Time-Life Building [44th Floor], he recorded the Empire State Building for six hours, from the twilight of 8:00 p.m., through the darkness, and until 2:30 a.m. The film contained only one image and extended, rather than condensed, real time. Not only did he use, unedited, all of the footage he shot, but, when the new work premiered the following March, he projected the film in slow motion [at 16 frames per second, instead of 24], bringing the final running time to slightly over eight hours. { Coskun }

Empire is a moment of time captured, more of an experience than a film, like watching a living portrait. { comment on imdb }

“An 8 hour hard-on.” — Andy Warhol

Conversation notated by Gerard Malanga during the filming of Empire
John Palmer: Why is nothing happening? I don’t understand.
Henry Romney: What would you like to happen?
John Palmer: I don’t know. Is the Foundation going to know that you did this?
Henry Romney: I have a feeling that all we’re filming is the red light. (…)

John Palmer: The lack of action in the last three 1200-foot rolls is alarming.
Henry Romney: You have to mark these rolls very carefully so as not to get them mixed up. (…)

Andy Warhol: The Empire State Building is a star!
John Palmer: Has anything happened at all?
Marie Menken: No.
John Palmer: Good. { Continue reading }

During the filming [of Empire], the lights in the office from which they were shooting were temporarily left on. In the beginning of three reels, images of the film crew can be seen reflected in the window, next to the Empire State Building. Warhol’s reflection appears at the beginning of Reel 7. { Warhol Stars }

Roughly 74 percent of the universe is “nothing,” or what physicists call dark energy; 22 percent is dark matter, particles we cannot see. Only 4 percent is baryonic matter, the stuff we call something.

Atoms overwhelmingly consist of empty space. Matter’s solidity is an illusion caused by the electric fields created by subatomic particles.

In space, no one can hear you scream: Sound, a mechanical wave, cannot travel through a vacuum. Without matter to vibrate through, there is only silence.

“Zero” was first seen in cuneiform tablets written around 300 B.C. by Babylonians who used it as a placeholder (to distinguish 36 from 306 or 360, for example). The concept of zero in its mathematical sense was developed in India in the fifth century.

{ 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Nothing | Discover Magazine | Continue reading }