Flowers by Katinka Matson

Manhattan-based artist Katinka Matson is featured in this short CBS news feature, FLOWERS by Katinka Matson. The article briefly touches on the development of the flatbed scanner, (I didn’t realize Ray Kurzweil was involved), before turning to Katinka’s scanner based art. The images created using this technique are very richly textured and exhibit nicely saturated colors:

Katinka has 3 main galleries online, and as the aforementioned article’s navigation is somewhat confusing, I’ve provided links to each(click on the image to see the full set in that series; from there you may view full size copies):

5 Flowers

12 Flowers

40 Flowers

Ingredients

2 1/2 C flour
1/2 tsp Baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

1/2 Lb butter (2 sticks), salted
1 C firmly packed dark brown sugar
1 C granulated sugar
1 C extra-crunchy peanut butter, preferably Jif
2 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup roasted salted peanuts, ground to consistency of breadcrumbs

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350

Sift flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt in medium bowl.

Beat butter until creamy. Add sugars and beat until fluffy. (~3 min, w/elec. mixer)
Beat in peanut butter until fully incorporated (don’t overbeat), then eggs, one at a time, then vanilla.

Gently stir dry ingredients into peanutbutter mixture. Add ground peanuts, and stir gently until just incorporated.

Baking

Roll a bit less than 2Tbs of dough into a ball, and place on parchment covered cookie sheet. Using a dinner fork dipped in cold water, make the traditional criss-cross pattern in each cookie.

Bake until cookies are puffed and slightly brown along the edges (but not on top–they will look slightly underbaked) about 10-12 minutes.

Makes approximately 4 Dozen Cookies

Also listed on our original recipe site.

(recipe adaptation courtesy of: Cook’s Illustrated, March/April 1998)

With only one glitch (must use existing mt.cfg and mt-db-pass.cgi files) the upgrade of this blog to the latest version of the Movable Type software, 2.64, completed without further incident, as this post demonstrates.

Here’s a fascinating photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope that shows many thousands of galaxies, including two that are apparently close to colliding, and many others that are almost as old as the known age of the universe.

You can click on the image for more details and a link to an even larger image.

According to this BBC article, we’re actually quite lucky to be here.

Based on the results of analyzing human DNA, some scientists are starting to believe the human race had dwindled down to a worldwide population of around 2000 people sometime within the past 100,000 years. Though the date when the population reached its lowest point cannot be specified with complete certainty, it appears the low population level was reached about 70,000 years ago. The BBC article discusses some of the factors that may have lead to this brush with extinction.

Speaking of threats to humanity, it seems Yellowstone’s underlying pressurized magma, also known as a volcano, may be overdue for an eruption; this could potentially impact almost half of the United States.