So I just found out about Alfred Russel Wallace's co-discovery of natural selection today, which I thought was pretty damn cool (and crazy, that I hadn't heard of him before!) After some subsequent wikipedia searching, I came across his book "The Malay Archipelago" which has some really stunning illustration:
(Just, you know, a little dramatised...)
More here if you want to lose yourself in an orgy of scientific illustration (you know you want to).
And a picture of the man himself, looking stern and sassy~
I stumbled across this today. I’m not usually one for silent films (call it a feat of a short attention span on my part) but this one was interesting. “The Kiss” (1896). Probably purely for the controversy— if it wasn’t for the apparent critical outrage (“The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting.”) I probably wouldn’t have looked twice at it. But it kind of adds to it, in a way. Nothing like some good old fashioned haters to make your work look that little bit more badass:
I also have some sort of growing fascination with Laika, the Russian space dog and one of the first animals ever sent to space, partly because of the excitement of it all (I love me some 50's space program enthusiasm) but also some kind of appreciation of the kitschy weirdness that can only come about by sending a domestic animal into space. The stamps are particularly delightful:
After reading this article recently, I've been kind of swept up in a mass of NASA fangirling, which is admittedly very easy to find yourself falling into after watching videos like this:
It kind of makes me pissed that Australia doesn't have much of a space program (I suppose there isn't really as much done as there could be, world-wide), but looking at Vintage NASA pictures makes for a nice distraction.
