Slashdot Mirror
DNA Sculpture Constructed with Shopping Carts
Roland Piquepaille writes "The U.K. supermarket chain Somerfield decided last year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA in an original way. It commissioned British artist Abigail Fallis to create a sculpture of a DNA double helix made of shopping carts and to display it during the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign of 2004. The sculpture, named DNA DL90, is 31 feet high and weighs more than three tons. It is on display since April 2004 at "Sculpture at Goodwood," the 21st century British sculpture park in Surrey. This photo gallery contains several pictures of this original artwork."
That would be awesome!
"Never tell me the odds"
Yes, obviously they built their webserver out of shopping carts too.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
I believe this might be an all time low.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
And who said modern art isn't worth a dime!
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Man, the safeway down the road must be really pissed...
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
Is this guy the new JonKatz? Two of his stories on the front page pimping links to his weblogs where he has his own advertising. And he submitted them himself!
John.
There's this big ravine near where I live that the kiddies like to push shopping carts into. Looks a lot like this "sculpture" except ours is a longer sequence...
This is truly amazing. Maybe I should submit my project to Slashdot - a giant diagram of the Linux filesystem... made out of old mayonaise bottles and ketchup packets.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I believe it's a default theme on the software (geeklog?) that's used for both sites.
That reminds me of the scene following an incident in which I was involved. The police report identified that particular factors contributing to the accident included too much coffee, a trolley with a wonky wheel, and a special offer on pork pies at the far end of a crowded aisle..
Gonzo on an old Muppet show banging on a brick with a hammer.
About sums it up.
Does this piece challenge our materialistic preconceptions of the world of science and commerce and force us to re-evaluate our relationship with that which forms the core of our self-determined being?
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Because shopping is programmed into core biology...
What's next, a giant buckminsterfullerene of laundry baskets?
If you post it, they will read.
The chemis spent his teen years in this house; the sculpture is located right outside his bedroom window where he had his first lab.
And pardon me if you think that comments about submissions are off-topic, but once again, there are way too many hyperlinks in the submission. I do not need to know the web address of the supermarket chain's corporate headquarters, or the charity's corporate headquarters, or the event campaign's home page, or the sponsoring gallery's home page, or even the artist's home page. I just want to see the damned shopping cart helix. Pardon me for sounding like a curmudgeon, but nine times out of ten, I am only interested in one link: the link to the subject of the submission, not every related entity (which I can ferret out from the aricle if I really want to). Am I the only one who thinks so?
Homeless Erectus makes me think of waking up on a sewer grate with a boner.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Wow, I thought... DNA sculpture & shopping trolleys, this might be interesting. Then I get to the sculpture images and it's about the most unimaginative uncreative version of such a sculpture I could possibly imagine. A total waste of time and metal.
Red-Red-Red codes to only a single protein, as does Blue-Blue-Blue. Worse, I'm not sure Blue is the valid opposite base-pair to Red. This renders the whole structure genetically useless!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
WEST Sussex, actually - and I live about 5 miles away too!
AT&ROFLMAO
I mean seriously, she was given an interesting project (DNA representation) and certainly an original and interesting medium, and all we get is shopping carts welded to a stick-figure style double helix frame. It's boring and unimaginative as hell.
On the whole, yes it came out nice and it is engaging visually, but I feel like there could have been a lot more interesting variations on this. Perhaps build the helix itself out of carts, rather than just stick them on a prebuilt frame. Maybe use cables to create a self-supporting tension structure. Actually cut up some of the carts with a plasma torch and use the pieces to create individual molecules (G T C A) on the helix, there's lots of interesting structures to be built with the steel grids and wheels and legs, etc.
To me it seems like the end-result of this project was something that could have been built by any welder given the task "make a DNA helix from shopping carts." It was interpretted 100% literally by the artist and doesn't seem to convey any sense of insight, elaboration, or conceptual development.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
That is meant, of course, to represent the protein alpha-helix structure (which Pauling discovered), and not an artistic impression of the DNA double-helix.
I can generally appreciate art, especially sculpture. It genearlly takes quite a bit of skill to produce a large outdoor installation like this even if I don't like it.
But this? This is shit. It's not so much that it's made of shopping carts, but it's more that it looks like a jungle gym and the baskets are just going to fill up with leaves and trash. I can hardly believe that such a work was actually *commissioned* without seomeone thinking of this.
It's kind of like how the city I live in has recently taken to painting all of the new highway overpasses an earthy red color. I can appreciate that lots of people think that it looks nicer than bare concrete, but for what it costs, the only thing it really buys you is the need to repaint it again in 5-10 years at an equivalent (or greater) cost. If they really wanted red overpasses, they should have done it properly and dyed the concrete red to begin with.
Its not "his site"
Its Radio Userland's site AKA radio.weblogs.com AKA the company that Dave Winer founded. Winer is the RSS / OPML / XML guy who is now at Harvard.
Piquepaille == spammer. Instead of using email to spam, he spams sites like Slashdot (and many others) using his blog.
Piquepaille == scammer
Here is a direct quote from Piquepaille's Blogads advertising entry:
Why doesn't he just say "So if you want to associate yourself with a spammer, give me your money."?
Ignore the fact that he has no "stories" of his own, offers no original content and zero insight.
Like most spammers, he has no incentive to stop because it's profitable for him to spam Slashdot and other sites.
Make it unprofitable. Stop visiting his weblog. Express your displeasure to the editors. Express your displeasure to Radio Userland (they are a quiet participant in his spamming since Userland has a small ad on the blog). Express your displeasure to the advertisers. Let them know you won't buy products they advertise there. Last of all, express your displeasure about his spam to Piquepaille himself.
You make Piquepaille's continued spamming possible with your traffic.
(As for all the spam references in this post, some might call it poetic justice. Maybe Google will pick it up and let everyone know.)
"Sculpture of DNA using shopping carts" is an interesting idea, but this is about as boring an implementation of it as I could imagine. In particular, the shopping carts aren't doing anything - it could have equally well been a scuplture of DNA using rocking chairs, old tires, washing machines, small bushes, whatever.
Shopping carts slide into each other, so they have a natural way of connecting. Add some extra twiddles so you have four types, such that only some pairs can slide into each other and you can use the shopping carts as the nucleotides.
This sculpture is supported by a single central column (absent in DNA) but is missing the two helical backbones. It isn't so much that this is less accuate, but it is also less interesting (but undoubtedly cheaper and structurally simpler.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
by the number of posts I see here by you bitching and moaning about the "quality" of the "news" here
Well, call me old fashioned, but as a paying subscriber I think I have the right to complain about the quality of the product I'm paying for.
Casual Games/Downloads