Regruntled.com

From the Artist’s Statement:

Over the years I’ve jawed most of what the world has to offer, I believe gum is a smile waiting to be given away, and I’ve created 30 works totaling more than 35,000 pieces of gum. I’ve now come to the realization that the gum justifies the art. The fun is in the chewing and the art is an expression of the fun. Just remember, gum is not chewed for health or sustenance. People chew gum for pleasure. It is in that spirit that GumArt exists, and I am a spreader of gum.

Chew by Numbers has possibilities, though. What is a sudoku, after all, but a template for gum art? All I need are 9 different colors of gum.

See:

• Gum Art
• Chew by Numbers

According to the inventor:

The tube is filled with nothing but quantum sudoku, distilled from the finest papermills in Japan. When squeezed, a material approximately the consistency of toothpaste will emerge with a partially completed Sudoku. Spread over a wide enough area and the entire puzzle will become visible, and the product will instantly harden to allow drawing on it. Pens are not provided.

Ask your doctor if Sarcasma is right for you.

Well, OK, but before and after what? Before and after 50 Gs in a centrifuge? Before and after sitting on the dashboard all afternoon? Before and after the lettuce spontaneously mutates from Greenleaf to Iceberg? No. Before and after purchase. The image on the left is what the fast-food place advertises. The image on the right is what you actually get.

Weight Watchers Diets and Recipes has a whole series of before and after fast-food pictures. Not for the squeamish.

Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized notes a correlation between libertarianism and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, of all things. Many-worlds says that Schroedinger’s Cat, instead of somehow being alive and dead at the same time in this world, is actually alive in one world and dead in another. This is an over-simplification, of course. Since cats have nine lives, a complete many-worlds explanation of Schroedinger’s Cat requires at least ten alternate universes.

Aaronson says the connection is a tendency to follow logical reasoning to extreme conclusions:

The entire world should follow the line of reasoning to precisely this extreme, and this is the conclusion, and if a ‘consensus of educated opinion’ finds it disagreeable or absurd, then so much the worse for educated opinion! Those who accept this are intellectual heroes; those who don’t are cowards.

He also mentions computer nerds and science fiction, and the connection between computer programmers and libertarians is well-known. Eliezer Yudkowski at Overcoming Bias draws a connection between libertarianism and science.

I think the common thread is something closer to “alienation plus logic”, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Science fiction is pure escapism. The online world is a substitute for the real world. An imagined ideal libertarian world is a substitute for a messy real world. Logical alternate universes are a substitute for a single paradoxical world.

See also:

• Schroedinger’s lolcat

This is amazing stuff, but I can’t help thinking that the artist has gone to a lot more effort than necessary. The animation itself is accessible only via the video. People on the street will only see a brief instant in the making of the work, not the work itself. The work is the video, and there are much easier ways to do stop motion video than with chalk on buildings. Can you say “dry-erase board”? I knew you could.