Nature's artforms, with alpha channels, free for the remixing
Spot Draves has released a bunch of Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature) as Creative-Commons-licensed, high-resolution scans in PNG format, with painstaking alpha transparency channels that allow you to easily composite them onto other images. Haeckel was the naturist who stated that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" -- that foetuses step through their evolutionary history in the womb. It turned out that he was kind of making that up and faking his evidence, but he sure drew pretty pictures, and the meme's got legs. Well, first it had a tail, then it had legs.
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Cory Doctorow
Upcoming appearances
* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference
Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)
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