Jim Cosgrove: No Mother Could Give More

via NPR
“This is egg laying season, if you're a bird. If you're an octopus, particularly a giant Pacific octopus, you've been there, done that. In fact, you died doing it, in what is the saddest mommy story I've heard in a long while. It comes from biologist Jim Cosgrove who describes it all in a lecture he calls, “No Mother Could Give More.’ ”
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The Art Of Reproduction: 17 Ladies with Ermines

Lady With Ermine by Leonardo Da Vinci

via Visual Hint: Color of Data
“The web can seem like the perfect museum, holding all the world’s art. Type ‘Danae Klimt’ into your favorite search engine, and you conjure up a high-resolution image of Gustav Klimt’s Danaë: tan limbs, a shower of gold, red hair. Or did you find pink limbs? Or were they gray or even green? There’s the rub: the seemingly perfect museum holds dozens of Danaës—with dozens of different palettes. Even the shape changes as reproductions are subtly cropped.

Curious just how far reproductions stray from each other, we began an investigation. For a set of famous artworks, we downloaded all the plausible copies we could find. Then we wrote software to reconstruct each artwork as a mosaic, a patchwork quilt where each patch comes from an individual copy.

The discontinuities of color, texture and frame tell the story of the inaccuracies in reproduction, forming a tapestry of beautiful half-truths...”
Read the rest here, and visit the site here.