New Hair Style: The Lizard

Richter painting breaks record for living artist

A 1968 oil painting by German artist Gerhard Richter has set a new record in New York for the highest auction price achieved by a work by a living artist.

Richter’s photo-painting Domplatz, Mailand (Cathedral Square, Milan) sold for $37.1 million (£24.4 million) at Tuesday’s sale.

Tobias Meyer of Sotheby’s called the price “a major accomplishment”.

Richter, 81, also held the previous record for the top price fetched at auction by a living artist.

His abstract painting, Abstraktes Bild, sold for £21.3m in 2012. Sotheby’s described Domplatz, Mailand, which depicts a cityscape painted in a style that suggests a blurred photograph, as a “masterpiece of 20th Century art” and the “epitome” of the artist’s 1960s photo-painting canon.

The price achieved was more than 10 times as much as the then-record $3.5m (£2.3m) it commanded at Sotheby’s in London 15 years ago. Don Bryant, founder of Napa Valley’s Bryant Family Vineyard and the painting’s new owner, said the work “just knocks me over”.

Onement VI, a 1953 work by abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman’s Onement VI, set a new record for the US artist after selling for $43.8m (£28.7m).

A Francis Bacon work that had been estimated to sell for as much as $40m (£26.2m) failed to attract a buyer.

via BBC News – Richter painting breaks record for living artist.

Miyoko Shida Demonstrates the Power of Mental Focus

The Incredible Power Of Concentration – Miyoko Shida – YouTube.

Ant meets helicopter

How many people are in this frog?

Man Gets A Refund Over Missing Explosion In ‘Jack Reacher’

The action film “Jack Reacher” hit theaters in December, and it got some favorable reviews. But one New Zealand moviegoer didn’t think it was action-packed enough. That’s because the trailer featured an explosion that wasn’t in the movie.

Disappointed, the man complained to the Advertising Standards Authority. He said the explosion was one of the main reasons he went to see the flick in the first place. Paramount Pictures has now offered to refund the money for his ticket.
… Read more

They should make a two hour movie of just explosions. Start small and work up to the entire planet exploding.

I’ve added the trailer above. It looks like a landfill blows up at one point, but that was not used in the final movie. Good observation.

Film studios request removal of takedown notices + 20 free legal download sites

Two film studios have asked Google to take down links to messages sent by them requesting the removal of links connected to film piracy.

Google receives 20 million “takedown” requests, officially known as DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices, a month. They are all published online.

Recent submissions by Fox and Universal Studios include requests for the removal of previous takedown notices.

Google declined to comment.

The notices are requests for individual web addresses to be removed from Google’s search engine results because they contain material uploaded without the permission of the copyright holders.

By making the notices available, Google is unintentionally highlighting the location of allegedly pirated material, say some experts.

“It would only take one skilled coder to index the URLs from the DMCA notices in order to create one of the largest pirate search engines available,” wrote Torrent Freak editor Ernesto Van Der Sar on the site.

Similar notices have been received by the Lionsgate studio, makers of the Twilight movies and The Hunger Games, and tech giant Microsoft, according to Torrent Freak.

Mr Van Der Sar added, however, that the requests may well have been a “by-product of the automated tools that are used to find infringing URLs” and not deliberately included.

According to its transparency report, Google complied with 97% of the requests it received for links to material published outside copyright to be removed from its search engine between June and December 2011.

The website Chilling Effects, a collaboration between a number of US law schools and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, publishes the notices, and is still visible via Google Search.

David Petrarca, who directed a couple of episodes of HBO drama Game of Thrones, the most pirated TV series of 2012, was reported to have said at a literary festival in Australia that piracy gave the series a “cultural buzz” but has since denied that he is in favour of the activity.

“I am 100 per cent, completely and utterly against people illegally downloading anything,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

“I think most people would be willing to pay for a show they love.”

via BBC News – Film studios request removal of takedown notices.

Here’s Google’s page with information on web sites Google has been requested to remove.  And here is a link to web sites that are reported to be infringing on content of others. The current top offenders are filestube.com,  torrentz.eu, mrtzcmp3.net, weblagu.com, filetram.com, bitsnoop.com, 4shared.com, rapidgator.net, sumotorrent.com, downloads.nl, beemp3.com, bayproxy.org, kat.ph, 360percents.com, tpb.me, tpbproxy.info, pirateby.info, 4bytes.co.uk, undo.it and rootmob.org.

Just a bunch of torrent search engines. There are many legal free music sites, so don’t waste your time stealing music on line.

Here are twenty sites with free legal music you can download. If I’ve just saved you from jail and introduced you to a new awesome world of music, feel free to leave a tip. ( I don’t need the money, but I offer the tipping option because I like to tip when I get a good meal at a restaurant and I’m also getting in the habit of tipping web sites I like. It would be cool if it could be done with bitcoins….) There’s the free music:

http://hangout.altsounds.com/

http://bt.etree.org/

http://stereogum.com/

http://www.unsignedbandweb.com/

http://www.soundclick.com/music.cfm

http://www.honc.biz/

http://www.indierockcafe.com/

http://www.dmusic.com/

http://fuzz.com/

http://www.icompositions.com/

http://archive.org/details/audio

http://www.jamendo.com/en/

http://www.epitonic.com/

http://www.stereokiller.com/index.cfm

http://3hive.com/

http://www.itsfreedownloads.com/

http://mp3.com/top-downloads/

http://www.purevolume.com/

http://www.last.fm/music/+free-music-downloads

http://www.classiccat.net/

http://www.spinner.com/category/mp3-of-the-day/

You want free movies too? Yes, there are some great free independent films available.

http://www.indiemoviesonline.com/ (Try the sci-fi section http://www.indiemoviesonline.com/free-movies/sci-fi )

http://www.filmnet.com/films/

http://www.snagfilms.com/films/browse/?sort=alpha

http://www.youtube.com/ytscreeningroom

Realign your mind to love free non-commercial stuff. There’s great art to discover.

Virginia woman fights for ownership of Renoir painting she allegedly purchased for $7 at flea market

A federal judge will seek to unravel an art mystery and determine the rightful owner of a napkin-sized painting by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir that a Virginia woman says she bought at a flea market for $7.

The ownership is in dispute after documents were uncovered showing a Baltimore museum reported the painting stolen more than 60 years ago.

The painting has been seized by the FBI, and the federal government filed an action last month in U.S. District Court in Alexandria asking a judge to determine who should keep the painting.

Among the contenders is a Lovettsville woman, Marcia “Martha” Fuqua, who has told the FBI that she bought the painting at a West Virginia flea market in late 2009 for $7 and stored it in a plastic trash bag for two years before having it authenticated as a genuine Renoir.

Last year, Fuqua planned to have the painting sold at auction, where it was expected to fetch at least $75,000. But the auction was postponed after it was learned that the Baltimore Museum of Art reported the painting stolen in 1951. Records show an insurer, the Fireman’s Fund, paid a $2,500 claim on the theft.

The insurer says it is now the rightful owner, based on payment of that claim.

According to an appraisal commissioned by the FBI, Renoir painted “Paysage bords de Seine,” or On the Shore of the Seine, on a linen napkin in 1879 on the spot at a riverside restaurant for his mistress.

The appraiser says the Renoir’s value is about $22,000, much less than the auction house estimated, because Renoir’s paintings have fallen out of favor with some art collectors who consider them old fashioned and because questions about the painting’s ownership and possible theft diminish its value to collectors. …

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/04/07/virginia-woman-for-ownership-renoir-painting-allegedly-purchased-for-7-at-flea/

Doesn’t seem like she has a chance since it was stolen… Unless there is some statute of limitations.

A Freaky Birth-Death Doughnut of Human Arms

Original source: emiliogomariz.net

I use it to check my graphics processor speed.

What is the shape of space?

How do we know that space is not actually warped like this?