Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

Unusual (and perhaps unusable) words, poetry, portrait mash-ups, a marvelous biology resource, and artistic renderings of neuroscientific findings are among this week's finds.

✦ Do you suffer from aimonomia? Or, perhaps, apomakrysmenophobia? Maybe you just prefer sluffing. If, like me, you enjoy learning about new words, even those you may never use, you'll find The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows your go-to place. It promises a few laughs as well. (My thanks to The New Yorker's The Book Bench blog, where I spied this link.)

✦ One of my favorite Websites is UbuWeb. This summer it added a section, Visual Poetry, which expands on and deepens its curated collection of visual and concrete poetry that spans a half-century and includes the work of hundreds of writers, including Dom Sylvester Houedard, Cia Rinne, Jaap Blonk, and scores of poets associated with Scottish writer and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay's visual poetry magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. The section includes anthologies, ephemera, criticism, and journals.

Here's an example of Jaap Blonk's work:

Ponder Nothing (fragment) from Jaap Blonk on Vimeo.

Karl Kempton, "Visual Poetry: A Brief History of Ancestral Roots and Modern Traditions"

✦ I recently discovered the fascinating "Genetic Portraits" project by Quebec-based photographer and graphic designer Ulric Collette. You'll find the video embedded below and some of the project's mash-ups here, including side-by-side comparisons in which portraits of a mother and daughter, sisters, two brothers or cousins, and family and friends are manipulated into a single image without regard for age or any genetically defined  characteristics.  Collette used Photoshop clay to achieve the all-too-natural looking effects. Take a moment to view Collette's photo essay at Bcreative blog, which includes other equally eye-catching work.

Portrait génétique from Ulric Collette on Vimeo.

✦ Launched two years under the sponsorship of publisher W.W. Norton & Company,  Poems Out Loud features columns on poetry (including, for example, interviews and reviews) and audio and video recordings by or about well-known and award-winning poets, plus general poetry news and ephemera. An e-mail newsletter is available.

Poems Out Loud on Twitter and iTunes (free audio podcasts)

✦ An online project of The Biomimicry Institute, Ask Nature is a free, open source site intended to bring  together the communities of biology and design to create and promote "conditions conducive to life." It functions as a kind of "home habitat" for culturing ideas shared by biologists, naturalists, designers, architects, engineers, chemists, and anyone interested in seeking and implementing sustainable solutions to challenging, multi-dimensional global problems. Its database of biological information is organized into a Biomimicry Taxonomy, defined as a list of challenges that organisms face and strategies that contain their prospective solutions. For example, understanding how nests of fungus-growing ants avoid flood damage has possible applications for underground home design, mushroom farming, and maintenance of a uniform microclimate. Visit the site tutorial to learn more about using or contributing to this outstanding resource.

Innovation For Conservation

The BioMimicry Institute's Ask Nature on Twitter

✦ The Brain-Art Competition sponsored by The Neuro Bureau, a forum and collaborative initiative to support "open neuroscience", produces beautiful and informative visualizations of neuroscientific findings. This year's competition, held this past June, invited individual and team submissions for four categories: Best 3-D Brain Rendering, Best Representation of the Human Connectome, Best Abstract Brain Illustration, and Best Humorous Brain Illustration. As part of its award ceremony, the competition included a Best Hand-Drawing of the Brain event for which a doorprize was awarded. The gallery and slideshow for each category is worth your viewing time. Competition winners are listed here.

The Neuro Bureau on FaceBook

✦ Pressed for time and looking for your favorite writer? Try Author Links, organized alphabetically.