One of my favorite design sources, as you know, is the Holon Museum in Israel. It continues to produce ideas and products that stand out from the crowd. This article discusses the design of a new kind of eye glasses and the research that went into it. I gained a new respect for the housing that I see through, and I suspect you may too. While you are at their site, look at the article on new materials as well - another gem.

The Detroit Institute of Arts has mounted a provocative exhibition titled "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus". The New York Times commented of this show: "Jesus was, of course, Jewish. But few artists emphasized his ethnicity, or his humanity, as frankly and directly as Rembrandt did".

Scientists at the University of California at Irvine have invented a material that is so light it can sit on top of a dendelion without stressing the little seeds. The material is made of 99.99% air in a latticed arrangement and is claimed to be the lightest material on earth. For more details on its structure, go to Science Magazine in its issue of November 18, 2011.

Susan Kaprov generously explains step by step how she creates her stunning video installation "Going the Distance". Learn and enjoy as she takes us through her process.

If your travel plans don't include a trip to the ends of the earth, be sure to watch this time-lapse video taken with a special camera by the International Space Station between August and October of 2011. It is profoundly moving.

In San Francisco, the deYoung Museum is presenting an exhibition called "Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna" with fifty paintings from such luminaries as Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Their exhibition preview online gives you an opportunity to view details of the works up close, probably better than you could at the Museum. This is the Internet at its very best.

The Financial Times has a well-researched article on the early influence of the camera upon painters of the time. Comparisons of early snapshots with the paintings that relied upon them are especially interesting.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has reopened its Islamic Art Galleries,closed since 2003 for renovation. Now known as the "Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia", the exhibition presents some works that the public has never seen in a wide variety of mediums. According to Peter Schejeldahl in the New Yorker magazine, the exhibition is so extensive that it is difficult to absorb in one visit.