Marc Steinmetz has a gallery of improvised escape tools used by prison inmates. From the classic bed sheet and tea towel rope, as used in a 1998 bid to escape Hamburg’s ‘Santa Fu’ jail, to more adventurous construction projects, such as radio transmitters, pistols and this shotgun made from bedposts.

The collection also features tools for the making of moonshine and toast. 

Here’s an update to the ‘seizure-as-art’ evening discussed here recently. The Telegraph & Argus reports, 

Rita Marcalo’s controversial attempt to have an epileptic fit on stage at Bradford Playhouse ended in failure. The Portuguese dancer, who has epilepsy, was attempting to induce a seizure during a 24-hour arts performance. By the 1pm finish she had not managed to do so – despite exposing herself to strobe lights and depriving herself of sleep and food. Playhouse director Eleanor Barrett described the performance as “emotionally demanding” to watch.

Readers saddened to have missed Ms Marcalo’s adventure in self-preoccupation should, however, take comfort. Clearly determined to justify the £14,000 of Arts Council funding, Marcalo promises a second, no less challenging, instalment.

The second part, featuring footage of Miss Marcalo trying to induce a seizure, will be at Bradford’s Theatre in the Mill in January.

One for the diary, definitely. 

Cuban television sets photographed by Simone Lueck.  

Waiting for Armageddon. // Galactic chromoscope. // Egypt’s garbage city. // A boneyard of neon. // Defaced Iranian banknotes. // Art made with paper. // When hamsters make sweet music. // Synth Britannia. // A history of the boombox. (h/t, Coudal) // LSD blotter art. // The microscopic Bible. // Marilyn Monroe, pleasantly stoned. // Medical scaffolding. // Manhattan street corners. // A microwave that plays YouTube videos. // Star Trek gets abstract. “You and me in Japan. Watch me dance.” (nsfw) // And trust me, you’ll want a marshmallow blaster. 

Readers will most likely be aware that the Guardian has quite a lot to say about the evils of high pay and rewarding failure. Demands for a “maximum wage” are aired at regular intervals, usually in articles denouncing executive “pigs” and “private sector kleptocracy.” For instance, Polly “two villas” Toynbee can be counted on to gasp in well-rehearsed horror at “fat cats” and the “danger of stratospheric pay.” Scarcely a week passes without our favourite bejewelled socialist railing against “the unjust rewards of the rich,” by which she means, “the 1.5% who earn over £100,000.” These are the “extravagant earners” who “feel profoundly entitled to take what they like in salaries” and “monster bonuses,” all while being “unashamed” and “untouched by public disgust or a sense of propriety in the face of so many losing their livelihoods.”

Despite the protestations of umbrage and disgust, this well-heeled descendant of the Earl of Carlisle somehow finds the strength to cope with being quite rich herself. Toynbee’s Guardian salary, for years a subject of speculation, was eventually revealed as £106,000 – excluding royalties, advances, media fees, etc. Presumably Polly feels her own financial rewards are not at all “extravagant” or “unjust,” or a likely cause of public outrage. It seems, then, that Ms Toynbee only dislikes the wrong kind of rich people, which is to say rich people whose politics and backgrounds may differ from her own.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph reports that 180 journalists and advertising staff will soon be made redundant at the Guardian: 

The newspapers have been in financial turmoil since the Guardian’s editor in chief, Alan Rusbridger, decided to move the papers from broadsheet to the current medium-sized Berliner format in 2005. The move involved spending £80m on new presses, but in the four years since then, the Guardian has lost almost a fifth of its readers, with sales slumping from 380,000 to 311,000. In August GMG reported that it had lost £89.8m… The company’s financial position has become so precarious that it went to the very brink of closing down the 200-year-old Observer earlier this year.

Despite the losses, Mr Rusbridger received an 11% pay rise last year to £445,000.

That would be the same Mr Rusbridger whose egalitarian credentials are affirmed by owning only two houses and just the one £30,000 grand piano. And the same Mr Rusbridger who, when asked if he was embarrassed by his 2007 salary of £350,000 and the previous year’s bonus of £170,000, said, 

I didn’t ask for the money.

Which of course makes all the difference.

Speaking of things festive, here’s the world’s smallest snowman. At just 0.01 mm across, he’s slimmer than a human hair. Strictly speaking, he’s also made of tin.

The eyes and smile were milled using a focused ion beam, and the nose, which is under 1 µm wide (or 0.001 mm), is ion beam deposited platinum.

The object was built by Dr David Cox of the National Physical Laboratory’s Quantum Detection Group. The video below should give you some idea of just how small the snowman is.

Faithful in sentiment, if not materials or size.

With the season of good cheer fast approaching, I feel it’s time for some of these.

I began my work at a time when invisibility was not fashionable at all.

Physicist Ulf Leonhardt, quoted here, in a piece noting how research into cloaking technologies has become popular and very nearly respectable. Needless to say, there are still one or two problems.

It’s difficult to find anybody in the know who expects there will ever be a device that hides itself and its contents at all wavelengths – if you can’t see it in visible light, then perhaps radar, infrared, ultraviolet or X-rays would reveal it. But optimism for practical uses is growing.

And there’s an issue I don’t recall being acknowledged in Star Trek. 

If a cloak were to make an object fully invisible to the outside world, then the outside world would be invisible to the object within the cloak. A thing (or person) inside a perfect cloak is not only invisible. It is blind.

Underwater time-lapse. // Vespa rocking horse. // Roller coasters and chess. It’s a thing, apparently. // TV series intros. // “Teachers of the future, this is what you will think.” // Science fiction blueprints. // Magnetic heat shield test. // Atmosphere. // Smoking booths. // Smoking may void your computer warranty. (h/t, The Thin Man) // Marijuana harvest. // Hunting albinos for body parts. // Vodka pills. // Pork grown in the lab. “So far scientists haven’t tasted it.” // When playhouses go too far. // A valley of tyres. // The Veritas RS III. // The trendiest of dentists. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Wilfred Josephs. 

The video below is by Robert Hodgin, whose digital animations I’ve mentioned briefly here and over at Eye. Hodgin is one of the artists featured in the V&A Museum showcase Decode: Digital Design Sensations. The soundtrack is from WNYC’s Radiolab broadcast Touch at a Distance. A real-time audio responsive version will appear at Decode, which opens on December 8th.

 Via Pixelsumo.