Eyeborg

From here - http://www.gizmag.com/eyeborg-camera-eye/19653/

Cally Festival / Postcard Project

For the Cally Festival we had postcards printed of Caledonian road for people to take home with them. The were kindly printed by Dodd's on King's Cross Road.

We also asked people to give their feedback on the festival on the back of the postcards which were then displayed for everyone to see in the window of the Cally Festival shop / HQ.

See also - http://aminanazari.blogspot.com/2011/08/news-cally-festival.html

The Cally Festival

I helped to organise this. A community festival. 3rd July 2011, Caledonian Road, London. Such an amazing day!

Entrance to the festival. Mario came with 100's of plants!

Street buskers and a juggling granny!

Music stage

Beginnings of the mural on the side of RSPCA shop

This disused shop became a pop-up gallery.

Miles and miles of bunting and flags outside the Cally Festival HQ shop.

www.thecallyfestival.com

Loads more, much better, photos HERE by Steph Wood.

(making something out of nothing)

Reading -

Started reading all these books. I'm not sure I'll ever finish any of them though.

Colour

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14421303

"In an experiment testing the relationship between emotions and colour we discovered that nearly every adult assigned yellow to happiness, blue to sadness and red to anger (surprise and fear, which are the other two universal emotions, had no obvious colour). While children showed the same trend, their choices were far more mixed and variable.

On the other hand nearly everyone (young and old) showed a similar relationship between colour and sound, where lower notes are thought to be best represented as dark blue and higher notes as bright yellow.

In other words people seem to have internal mental maps between colour and other perceptual qualities, such as sound and form. Amazing when these relationships do not exist in nature.

.........

"In another experiment we asked people to put 49 coloured blocks on a surface area of 49 spaces. They had no other instruction.

The number of possible images that could have been created was 10 raised to the power of 62 - a huge number.

What's remarkable is that people made patterns that were largely predictable, because everyone grouped colours together according to similarity. Why?

Because we have an inherent need for structure, and in particular structures that are familiar, in this case structures that are similar to the mathematics of the images of nature.

In yet another experiment that really looked at the fundamentals of colour vision, we asked whether there might be individual differences in simply detecting light.

What we discovered is that not only are women more sensitive than men, but also women who feel they have a stronger sense of control are significantly better than those women who feel powerless.

Remarkable really when one remembers that we're just talking about light detection.

We also examined whether colour can actually alter our sense of a minute.

Our initial observations suggested that a minute takes longer for men than for women… about 11 seconds longer on average.

But a minute took longer for men and women when surrounded by red light, as compared to blue light.

This effect is likely to be linked to arousal since it is well-known that red and blue create different states of arousal in men and women alike."

Getting old

"

As Leon Trotsky put it: "Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man." Behavioural thinkers believe that most people are incapable of imagining themselves getting old, one reason why people fail to invest sufficiently in a pension.

.....

Living longer is one thing, but the quality of the extra years is what counts, he believes. And no-one knows if these extra years will be spent working for longer and being mentally and physically active, or finding oneself frail and bed-ridden.

"We may not be able to expect people to work much longer than they already are," Read warns. "If the productive years remain about the same but the lifespan expands that becomes a major issue for society."

The novelist Martin Amis argued last year that the answer might be "euthanasia booths on every street corner". As he explained at a public Q&A session the swelling ranks of the elderly would not only be a drain on resources for younger generations, but lead to an undignified end to one's life.

......

"The progress has been astonishing," he notes. For the last 50 or so years life expectancy has been increasing at a rate of six hours a day."

"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14412025