Jerboa. // Sculpted pencil tips. // How to pet your porcupine. // Robot butterfly. // The Rex exoskeleton. // MRI scans of oranges, mushrooms and other foodstuffs. // Beef lolly. // Abandoned couches. // A brief history of computer icons. // “Communist authorities suspected that Wittenburg’s photos amounted to a critique of the regime.” // Penn & Teller on the hijacking of environmentalism. // Simulated physics. // Pondering Inception. // Ode to Newport. // Tesseract 101. // Turntable kitsch. // Floating Point. // Bioluminescent algae. // Niagara Street, 1908. Spot the window cleaner. // Zoom trees. // A must for Elvis fans.

Most of her face was gone. There was just this gaping hole where her eyes and nose and most of her mouth had been. I thought she was dead. I just figured this was going to be another homicide scene. Then I saw her fingers start to move – ever so slightly. And it looked like she was trying to breathe through the wound in her face.

The story of Chrissy Steltz, whose face is held on by magnets. Via Metafilter.

A Guardian reader asks,

Do some women really suffer angst over such mind numbing trivia, or were you just pressured to write a piece on this subject?

The piece in question, by the chronically unhappy Laurie Penny, concerns the socio-political ramifications of ladies’ swimsuits. Specifically, the bikini. Ms Penny’s approach to this crushing social issue is a tad presumptuous and long on assertion. Among its gems is this:

The bikini itself has a sinister semiotic history.

See, you just don’t get that kind of thing in the Times.

Those with a stake in the mythology of the garment now focus on its namesake island as a tropical paradise, but bikini ideology is poisoned with the cultural fallout of the mid-20th century in more ways than one.

Bikini “mythology” is something of a stretch and the word “marketing” might have been less grandiose. But bikini ideology? A whole ideology? Such a thing exists? Alas, Ms Penny is much too rushed to elaborate, beyond stating her belief that,

Wearing a bikini is no longer associated with pleasure and daring, but with anxiety, dieting rituals and joyless physical performance… The bikini body is not supposed to be naturally occurring: it is a quasi-religious state of myth and artifice to which only the truly virtuous can aspire.

Curse those Special K adverts. Is there nothing they can’t ruin? Thankfully, there’s time for plenty of earnest disapproval:

This summer, women of all ages are once more being exhorted to get the perfect “bikini body” by every tabloid, gossip circular and glossy magazine. Singer Katy Perry and heiresses the Kardashian sisters are among this week’s “best bikini body” celebrities, and ordinary women everywhere are trying to emulate their fairytale lifestyles by purchasing a particular cellulite-busting body scrub or embarking on a bizarre starvation diet.

I somehow doubt that Guardian readers spend too much time following the exhortations and “cultural edicts” of Grazia or Heat magazine, as if they could hold the secret to eternal contentedness. Nor, I should think, does Ms Penny or her elevated colleagues. Perhaps the effect is limited to those ordinary women, who, one might suppose, have no minds of their own to make choices of their own, and who exist as mere flotsam on a sea of social pressures. 

No corkscrew? No problem. Use a shoe. // What astronauts see. // Curtains made of slides. // Ant megalopolis. // Pulsate, a diversion. // Petri dish paintings. // Portraits by Tom Hoops. // Awkward family pet photos. // Wigs of note. // Crowd scene, Chicago 2010. // Critters of the deep. // David Horowitz on the one-party classroom. // The crushing tedium of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. // Escher in Lego. // 8-bit Gary. // Exploitation tat. // Bugatti Veyron Super Sport. // Bacterial fashion. // Bowerbird nests. // Attention Xbox users. // Tonight you’ll dream of cow spiders.

During New York’s twelve-day heat wave, August and September 1953.

Note the combination of ice lolly and gloves. That’s classy, that is.