Author: Shaunacy Ferro

Artists have a way of encapsulating the essential truths of life the way those of us without creative genius cannot. Phaidon’s latest book, Art is the Highest Form of Hope, brings the wisdom of visual artists to the public, collecting some of the best quotes from the art world.

You don’t have to be an artist to appreciate the sage advice offered by icons like Jackson Pollock or Frida Kahlo. Nor do they all apply just to making art. They’re arranged in categories—more than 40 in all—like “Advice,” “Childhood,” “Art School,” “Failure,” and “Money.” The pithy quotes were thoroughly researched by the Phaidon team and came from diaries, letters, notebooks, interviews, books, and even Twitter, ensuring a little more accuracy than the random inspirational posts that circulate the internet.

Besides the title quotation from German painter Gerhard Richter, other artists whose wisdom is collected in the relatively small volume include everyone from Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne to more modern artists like Ai Weiwei, Jenny Holzer, and Theaster Gates.

Here are a few inspirational adages from the book.

1. BE ORGANIZED // EUGÈNE DELACROIX

In 1823, the French Romantic artist wrote in his journal: “Cultivate a well-ordered mind, it’s your only road to happiness; and to reach it, be orderly in everything, even in the smallest details.”

2. USE YOUR PAIN // YOKO ONO

You don’t need to go out of your way to hear Yoko Ono’s wisdom. In March 2016, she tweeted, “Don’t get rid of negative emotion, but just use it … like the salt in your food.”

3. STAND BEHIND YOUR WORK // APRIL GORNIK

American landscape painter April Gornik has some advice for the meek and self-effacing: “Don’t pretend that you’re not proud of your work.”

4. EMBRACE A LITTLE CHAOS // FRANCIS BACON

The British painter Francis Bacon, who died in 1992, was one to embrace the randomness of the world around him. New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman’s 1998 book Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre, and Elsewhere quoted Bacon as saying, “I believe in a deeply ordered chaos and in the rules of chance.”

5. ENJOY THE RIDE // ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

The Modern artist Robert Rauschenberg, winner of the 1993 National Medal of Arts, among other honors, advised trusting the journey. “I don’t know where I’m going but I’ll get there on time,” he told The New Yorker in 2005. He died in 2008.

6. JUST KEEP GOING // VINCENT VAN GOGH

Vincent van Gogh had similar guidance to Rauschenberg’s: “One must go on working silently, trusting the result to the future,” he advised.

7. GET A DAY JOB YOU DON’T HATE // JANE HAMMOND

The contemporary New York City artist has some decent advice for anyone who’s chafing at a soulless day job. “Find something to do that will make you some money, that can support your art, and that you can become good at so you can make a decent wage and that you don’t actually hate,” she said.

8. HAVE FAITH // GERHARD RICHTER

If you’re going to trust in the process, though, you’d better do it with a heavy dose of faith, according to Gerhard Richter. “I believe that you always have to believe,” he said in a 2011 interview.

9. BEWARE OF YOUR OWN SUCCESS // PABLO PICASSO

“Success is dangerous,” the incredibly influential Cubist Pablo Picasso said in a 1956 interview with Vogue. “One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others.”

10. LEARN FROM FAILURE // AI WEIWEI

Most successful artists have experienced some degree of failure, whether it’s years spent trying to achieve a moderate degree of fame or a flop of a project after they do become well-known. “The only thing we can do is honestly learn from our falls,” the world-famous Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei says.

11. LOOK FOR THE UPSIDE // SALVADOR DALÍ

Ai Weiwei isn’t the only artist who has preached embracing failure. “Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature,” according to remarks from Salvador Dalí’s diary.

12. BE BOLD // ANDREA ZITTEL

Californian artist Andrea Zittel, who specializes in installations and sculpture, also cautions against being too fearful of future stumbles. “You have to learn to feel confident about the prospect of failing because it’s so inevitable,” she said in a 2001 interview with Bomb.

13. FIND YOUR INSPIRATION // AGNES MARTIN

“Inspiration is the beginning the middle and the end,” according to abstract expressionist Agnes Martin, who died in 2004 in New Mexico.

14. LOOK AT THINGS YOU LOVE // DIANE ARBUS

All artists have different ways of sparking inspiration, but 20th century photographer Diane Arbus had this practice: “I like to put things around my bed all the time,” she explained at a lecture in New York City in 1970. “Pictures of mine I like and other things, and I change it every month or so. There’s some funny subliminal thing that happens. It isn’t just looking at it. It’s looking at it when you’re not looking at it. It really begins to act on you in a funny way.”

15. KEEP YOUR PRIORITIES STRAIGHT // ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

While the creative life might be vital, it’s important to have priorities that include the world at large, according to 20th century Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti. “In a burning building, I would save a cat before a Rembrandt,” he once remarked. And no, he wasn’t saying he hated the Dutch master.

The book is $25 on Amazon.

Once you become accustomed to an expertly pulled shot of espresso or a pour-over cup of joe, it can be hard to go back to the stuff Starbucks has on hand. The Upcycle Coffee Travel Kit promises to make on-the-go coffee more delicious.

It comes with an Aeropress coffee maker—beloved among coffee experts—a mini hand grinder, an insulated to-go mug, a bamboo spoon, a bag of coffee beans, a table cloth (for those morning picnics), and a leather travel bag that you can attach to your bike’s handlebars, if you’re so inclined.

It’s made by Looptworks, a Portland-based company devoted to making sure that excess materials from other products don’t end up in landfills. Instead, the company uses them to make elegant, eco-friendly offerings. The recycled materials don’t come at a low price point, though. The kit costs $185.

However, if you’re going to use it often, it might be worth the investment. All of Looptworks’s designs also come with a lifetime guarantee, ensuring you don’t need to throw them in the trash a few years down the line.

Dental care wasn’t quite the same in the 1600s, but if you were lucky, you could still get some decent dentures, as archaeologists recently discovered. Italian researchers found a dental prosthesis during a dig at a monastery in Tuscany, as The Telegraph reports. Made with real teeth, it was found in the tomb of a powerful aristocratic family.

Researchers from the University of Pisa detail their discovery in a paper in the journal Clinical Implant Dentistry and Related Research. The prosthesis can’t be dated precisely, but they estimate that it may be from the beginning of the 17th century.

The dentures had five teeth, including central incisors (front teeth) and canines. The teeth were secured to an internal gold band by small gold pins, two in the root of each tooth. The dentures were probably attached to the wearer’s mouth using string.

“This dental prosthesis provides a unique finding of technologically advanced dentistry in this period,” the researchers write. “In fact, during the Early Modern Age, some authors described gold band technology for the replacement of missing teeth; nevertheless, no direct evidences of these devices have been brought to light up so far.”

[h/t The Telegraph]

All images courtesy Minozzi et al., Clinical Implant Dentistry and Related Research (2016)

If you’re not intimately familiar with England’s geography, you may not be entirely sure of where your favorite British shows are set—unless they happen to be set in London. But a print from Chicago-based graphic designer Tim Ritz, spotted by CityLab, will show you exactly where shows like Downton Abbey, Peaky Blinders, and The Office take place.

The poster even zooms in to map London-specific shows on the city level, and tells you not only where shows are set, but where they’re actually shot and which channel they air on. The Great British Bake Off’s latest series was filmed in Welford Park, just west of London. The UK version of The Office is set in the same county, in Slough, about 20 miles from London. The teen drama Skins is set in Bristol, another one of those towns many Americans have heard of but may have no idea how to find on a map. (It’s in South West England.)

In addition to series shot in England, the UK map features shows set in Scotland (like Outlander), Northern Ireland (like The Fall), and Wales (there’s one: Doctor Who), as well as Ireland.

Click to enlarge. Image Credit: Tim Ritz

Whether or not you’ve ever wondered exactly where Downton Abbey is located, the map can give TV fans greater context about the shows they watch, especially period pieces like Outlander or Pride and Prejudice, in which characters travel across the UK without the luxury of 21st-century transportation systems.

It’s $34.

[h/t CityLab]

Aloe vera can be the harbinger of relief for sunburn, but the latest news about the gel you buy at the drug store should make you burn even more. In lab tests, several generic store-brand aloe vera gels don’t appear to contain any aloe at all, Bloomberg reports.

Even though store-brand aloe vera from Wal-Mart, Target, and CVS lists the leaf juice of the aloe barbadensis plant—as the No. 1 or No. 2 ingredient, no less—lab tests commissioned by Bloomberg News showed no traces of such an ingredient. The nuclear magnetic resonance tests showed the presence of additives used to imitate aloe, like maltodextrin, but did not detect any of the three chemical markers contained in true aloe, such as acemannan, malic acid, and glucose.

Naturally, the companies that make the aloe vera sold by Wal-Mart, Target, and Walgreens as their store brands denied the accuracy of the findings. However, several law firms have already filed class-action lawsuits against companies like CVS and Fruit of the Earth, the makers of the “100 percent Aloe Vera Gel” sold by major retailers.

When shopping for aloe vera gel, don’t go for the cheap stuff, since that low price may reflect that the company hasn’t spent the money on aloe vera powder, substituting cheap ingredients like maltodextrin. Better yet, buy the plant itself, giving you the peace of mind of always knowing it’s truly aloe.

[h/t Bloomberg]

Inexpensive paper microscopes may be headed for a classroom near you—and you can buy one too. Several years ago, Stanford University researchers unveiled a microscope that can be built from a single piece of paper with an LED and a lens, allowing aspiring scientists to explore the micro world for less than a dollar. Now, a Kickstarter campaign is making Foldoscope’s technology available to consumers ahead of the product’s wider commercial release, as Popular Science reports.

The origami microscope comes with a glass lens that boasts a high enough magnification to see red blood cells and watch live bacteria, at 140 times magnification and a two-micron resolution. The Kickstarter kit comes with associated lab tools like microscope slides and tweezers. The Foldoscope is also compatible with a smartphone, so you can take videos and photos of the amazing stuff you see on those microscope slides, and the kit comes with a cellphone clip to make that process even easier.

Your kit won’t cost as little as $1, though. At the classroom scale, the company can sell the packs cheaply, but for individual consumers, the Kickstarter kits start around $18, reflecting the cost of the extra tools. However, teachers can currently buy 20 packs of microscopes for just $25, or you can donate the classroom kit to a school (scheduled for August 2017 delivery). The makers of Foldoscope hope to sell 1 million microscopes next year.

If you’re stingy, you can always use your own paper at home create a Foldoscope for free, but for most people, it’s easier to just shell out for the pre-folded kit. Regardless, see how the devices are made in the video below:
 

 
[h/t Popular Science]

Many of us have at least one loved one who never can stay in one place for too long. For that frequent traveler in your life, heavy books or gift cards to local restaurants probably aren’t going to cut it. This holiday season, get them one of these products that are made to complement their adventures.

1. ZENDURE PORTABLE CHARGER; $30

Long-haul flyers can take solace in always having a little extra juice for their phones and e-books. Zendure’s portable charger raised more than $216,000 on Kickstarter, for good reason. It’s crush-proof, so no need to worry about it getting squished in suitcases or overhead bins. It turns on automatically when you plug your device in, and it can hold 95 percent of its charge on stand-by for up to six months between trips. It comes in silver or black, and for a few more dollars, you can upgrade to more battery power.

Find It: Amazon

2. THE NEW YORK TIMES: 36 HOURS EUROPE; $40

The wanderlust-prone are sure to find a city they’ve never been to in The New York Times’ book-length collection of their popular “36 Hours” travel series. The newly updated European edition features 130 cities across the continent, with itineraries that highlight the best that each destination has to offer—and shares a game plan for visiting each of them in just one weekend. For those whose travel horizons extend beyond Europe, there are also U.S. and Latin American versions.

Find It: Amazon

3. POLAROID CUBE +; $150

This tiny HD camera will fit in any suitcase, no matter how full. It’s just 1 cubic inch, but can shoot video in full HD or capture 8-megapixel images. It’s waterproof and shockproof, so it’s perfect for rugged adventures and city travels alike. Plus, with a 128° angle lens, it can capture more of the scene than a regular camera.

Find It: Amazon

4. BOSE QUIETCOMFORT 25 ACOUSTIC NOISE CANCELLING HEADPHONES; $300

Every traveler needs a way to block out some of the less glamorous aspects of jet-setting. Bose’s headphones come with a high recommendation from The Wirecutter, whose reviewers spent 30 hours testing 20 different noise-cancelling headphone models. The lightweight, comfy QC25 model has great noise-cancellation, and collapses down to a smaller size for storage.

Find It: Amazon

5. RIFLE PAPER CO. PASSPORT POCKET NOTEBOOKS; $11

Rifle’s passport-themed notebooks are a stylish reminder of the joys of travel. The miniature booklets are the perfect size to carry around in a back pocket or small bag, with 64 unlined sheets and natural vellum pages. They come in packs with two different designs, so if you really like them, you can even keep one for yourself!

Find It: Amazon

6. LOGITECH KEYS-TO-GO ULTRA-PORTABLE BLUETOOTH KEYBOARD; $45

It’s easier to write those emails home on a standard keyboard rather than tapping away at a touchscreen. For those who don’t bring a full laptop on their trips and opt for a tablet or iPad instead, Logitech’s Bluetooth keyboard—available in black, teal, or red—has full-size keys. It’s also still light, easy to carry in a bag or even a large coat pocket, spill-resistant, and can be used for up to three months on a single charge.

Find It: Amazon

7. ESPRO STAINLESS STEEL 12 OUNCE TRAVEL PRESS WITH COFFEE FILTER; $35

Road-trip lovers can enjoy great coffee no matter what pit-stops they counter with Espro’s travel brewer, essentially a fancy French press in an insulated cup. It has a two-filter brewing process that eliminates the grit that accompanies French presses, and halts the extraction process once the plunger is pushed down all the way, so your coffee doesn’t continue to brew. No need to strain it out of the cup. The insulation keeps it warm for four to six hours. The cup comes in a few different colors as well as a version made for brewing tea.

Find It: Amazon

8. NATIONAL PARKS EXPLORER MAP; $55

For the roving outdoor explorer in your life, consider this map of some of the best wilderness destinations in the U.S. It comes with tree stickers so they can mark off the national parks they have checked off their bucket list. With 59 parks in total, the vintage-style design shows off the many places that could serve as their next vacation plan.

Find It: Uncommon Goods

9. CITY MAP GLASS; $14

Let your favorite cross-country explorer celebrate their favorite city with tumblers depicting the street grids of some of the biggest metros in the U.S. Designed by the Boston-based Brian Johnson, there are currently 17 different city glasses to choose from, each etched with part of the urban street grid, neighborhood names, and the city’s geographical coordinates. Whether you’re looking to honor someone’s hometown pride or future travel plans, these cups make it easy to toast to some of America’s most exciting destinations.

Find It: Uncommon Goods

10. TRUNKSTER CARRY-ON; $345

The price tag on this one may seem high for a suitcase, but this isn’t just a bag. You can track its location via a smartphone app, and it has a built-in scale to ensure you never go over your maximum weight. There’s a removable power bank with USB ports to charge your devices located on the top of the suitcase. Plus, it’s exactly the size of most airlines’ maximum carry-on luggage allowance.

Find It: Trunkster

11. MEN’S ORGANIZING TRAVEL 4-PACK & WOMEN’S ORGANIZING TRAVEL 4-PACK; $46

Keeping organized on the road can be tough, but these cloth bags make it easy to keep essentials separate and handy. They’re printed with images of what should go inside, whether it’s underwear, a hair dryer, or dirty clothes. There are two sets—labeled as men’s and women’s—with different images, in case your favorite traveler needs a bag for earbuds more than one for a hairdryer.

Find It: Uncommon Goods

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Rule No.1 of owning a credit card: Pay off your full balance every month. But that can be easier said than done. Some people stick to debit cards, which don’t let you spend more than is in your account, solely because they make it impossible to mire yourself in debt. But it would be a mistake to refuse the very real benefits of having a credit card because you’re worried about inadvertently spending money you haven’t yet earned.

For anyone who’s really worried about keeping their credit card spending in check, there are services like Debitize, a website that will use money from your checking account to pay off your credit card bill throughout the month. So if you spend $100 on your credit card, that $100 disappears from your checking account balance immediately.

Many budgeting apps will show you both your checking account and your credit card balance, allowing you to see if the latter has ballooned to twice what you’ve got socked away—but seeing the problem isn’t the same as tackling it. It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking, “Well, I’ll have enough money when I get paid in a week” or subject yourself to some creative budget math.

When activated, Debitize can automatically siphon off money to cover your credit card purchases, or you can choose to do it manually. You can also set it so that it only transfers money if your checking account has more than a certain minimum balance. That way, you don’t have to worry about accidentally overdrafting in your quest for good credit.

By default, Debitize holds onto the funds it takes from your checking account until your credit card bill comes due at the end of the month. But if you want, you can also use Debitize to optimize your credit score by paying off your bill whenever your balance threatens to exceed the recommended “credit utilization ratio” of less than 30 percent of your credit limit.

Either way, the company does keep your funds in sort of a credit-limbo situation; though according to the site’s FAQs, the funds are held with a regulated bank. Using the service, you can pay off credit card bills from big-name banks like Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citibank. Unfortunately, some credit card providers (like Discover, for example) aren’t supported, so while you can see that account’s balance on Debitize, you can’t set up automatic payments through the service.

Another downside to the service is that there isn’t a mobile app. The site is easy to use on a phone’s web browser, but it doesn’t have quite the convenience of a standalone app. According to a company representative, the first iPhone app is due out sometime in early 2017, with an Android version to follow.

Regardless, the convenience of never having to wonder if you’ve paid your credit card bill or if you have enough in your checking account to cover your automatic payments is well worth it.

California seems to hold a particular fascination in songwriters’ hearts—the state and its cities are name-dropped in an incredibly diverse range of songs from across the decades, like “California Dreamin’,” “Californication,” “California Girls” (and Katy Perry’s nod, “California Gurls”), and “L.A. Woman,” to name just a few. But there are plenty of other geographical locations that have made it onto the musical map, too.

Luckily, as WIRED reports, the UK-based designers at Dorothy have created a map to remind you of those oft-forgotten world jams, be it “24 Hours From Tulsa,” “Back in the USSR,” or “Goodnight Saigon.”

The poster (priced at about $31 plus shipping) assigns at least a few songs to every country, spreading more that 1000 songs across the globe. An index at the bottom lists every song featured with the corresponding artist.

Not all of the selections are songs that directly reference the region in question, though. Some are cheeky references to a region’s reputation, history, or politics. “American Idiot” goes to Florida and “Welcome to the Jungle” to Brazil, while “Another Brick in the Wall” travels to China. (You can zoom in on the full version here to see them all).

[h/t WIRED]

All images courtesy Dorothy.

A new artificial intelligence system can now lip read better than humans, according to New Scientist. Though films and pop culture usually show lip reading as some incredible tool that allows you to decode what anyone says, in practice, it’s fairly spotty: Even for experienced lip readers, one estimate puts the amount of speech you can interpret from someone’s lip movements at a mere 30 percent.

But artificial intelligence researchers from Google’s DeepMind and the University of Oxford’s engineering department have been working on a network that transcribes natural sentences just from visuals of people talking with no audio. It can also transcribe audio with no video. Their pre-publication paper is posted on arXIV [PDF].

The system recognizes syllables and short phrases, and has learned on a far-reaching database called “Lip Reading Sentences,” drawn from a half-dozen BBC programs and containing more than 100,000 sentences and 17,500 words. It works independently with both audio and video, helping it decode speech even if the audio stream is noisy or if the audio and video aren’t perfectly aligned.

This model was significantly more accurate than professional lip readers in a comparative test. The experimenters commissioned professional lip readers from a company that provides transcription services, each with around 10 years of experience lip reading in situations as diverse as videos for court use and national events like the British royal wedding. These lip readers could correctly decipher just 12 percent of the words they saw, while the computer model could decipher almost half of the words accurately. Aside from providing more accurate transcription services, “it is possible that research of this type could discern important discriminative cues that are beneficial for teaching lip reading to the hearing impaired,” the researchers write.

Try out your lip-reading skills with the video below:

[h/t New Scientist]