Bad Astronomy

Bad Astronomer Phil Plaitt wrote an interesting post explaining why the Moon tends to look notably bigger when it is on the horizon:

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/13/why-does-the-moon-look-so-huge-on-the-horizon/

 

He includes this photographic illustration of a Ponzo illusion.  I think this is really amazing.  Look at the two vertical red lines in the photo.  How much longer does the one on the right look than the one on the left?

 

 

 

(Note: I'm sending this post in via email, and when I do that, I don't know where the photo is going to end up in the post.  Sorry if it's placed confusingly.)

 

Another item from the Bad Astronomy blog:  This is a really cool photo from a guy to takes lots of really cool photos.

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/18/iss-shuttle-transit-the-sun/

 

 

Painting and stuff

For a blogger that is supposed to be at least partially blogging about art, I sure haven't put up many photos in a long time.  I've been painting pretty consistently on the car, though, and I'm close to being finished with it.  I painted for another hour-and-a-half last night.  I need to let the whole painting sit for a few days so that it's dry to the touch, then I can put what might be the lat layer of glazing on it.

 

This has been an educational process; I have done relatively little work in oil glazes before, and I've never before done a single painting that depended so heavily on glazing.  Thank goodness for the Internet; I've relied on articles and discussions to help me work out the bugs in the process.  Once again, Wetcanvas.com was a reliable, entertaining resource.

 

One problem that I have had is with some of my thin layers of glazed paint beading up on the preceding layer.  I learned that rubbing the lower dried layer with a cut onion or garlic will prevent this from occurring.  I haven't tried it yet, but I will.

 

I am also working on another walnut ink house drawing commission.
 

 

You smell delicious!

I think I'll invent a line of fragrances called Grill Scents.  They'd probably work equally well for men or women.  The flagship fragrance would be Tangy Barbecued Chicken, but Jamaican Jerk and Sizzling Steak would be on the shelves with it.  For those who adore subtlety and love anticipation as much as they love payoff, I'll include Freshly Fired Briquette.

 

 

Considering the others

 

Kim and I have failed to locate our Sony digital camera.  It has been missing for more than a week.  We've lost cameras before, but never in such a seemingly confined amount of space and time.  We had it in my parents' van on Wednesday night, and that's the last time we saw it.  After we got out of the van, we got in our vehicles, and drove home.  When Kim looked for the camera the next day, she couldn't find it.

  

There just aren't many places it can be.  We looked everywhere we could think of, and in most cases we looked there three to five times.  I still think there is a good chance it will turn back up.  Maybe it fell behind something at a weird angle, or…that's about all that's left I can think of.

 

We decided we still need a camera while we wait for ourselves to find the missing one.  So Kim bought a little Canon camera.  It's tiny and very pink ("I'm sorry," said Kim, "it's the only color they had left.")

 

I read the small owner's booklet a couple of nights ago, and came across this sentence: "CAUTION:  Do not point the camera at very bright objects (the sun, etc.) Doing so may damage the sensors."

 

I'm intrigued by the "etc."  "et cetera" is Latin for "and the others," and the general modern meaning is that there are others things of the same sort that, for the sake of brevity, aren't listed.

 

So, in other words, it is inadvisable to point the camera at the Sun or other things of that sort.  That made my mind race. What are those other things?

 

First I thought of lit candles.  They are hot, and they are bright.  However, I've never seen a candle as bright as the Sun.  It seems unlikely that anyone would market a $160 camera that would break if it were used to photograph a child blowing out birthday candles.

 

What else is like the Sun?  The Moon?  It's not nearly as bright; it hardly ranks as a celestial birthday candle.  Did you know that the Earth's moon has one of the lowest albedos (abilities to reflect light) in the solar system?  If you lined up all the planets and moons and shined light on them, our moon would be way down at the bottom of the scale.  It's a very dark object, and just looks bright to us because it is so big and close.

 

So, I don't think that the Moon is one of the things meant by "etc."

 

Obviously, stars would have to fall into the category of things similar to the Sun.  Upon careful consideration, though, this doesn't seem to work very well in the context of the owner's manual.  Humans as a rule are only allowed to photograph stars from a great distance.  They are fainter in appearance than the Moon.  I feel that it could not possibly have been the intention of the technical writer of the owner's manual that you should not point your camera at the night sky and snap a photo.

 

This "etc." could serve to warn off lawsuits from NASA several hundred or several thousand years from now.  If scientists prepared an interstellar probe and decided that the philosophy of "faster, smaller, cheaper" meant that a small Canon digital hand-held would be the best choice for imaging technology, then it could spell trouble.  The probe would spend centuries crossing the gulf between us and Proxima Centauri (not a particularly bright star, by the way), point itself at the star, and fry itself.  Another NASA fiasco to frustrate the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren of the same engineers who forgot to convert their English measurements to metric on that Mars probe that crashed a few years ago.

 

All this strikes me as unlikely to have been in the mind of the writer of the owner's manual.

 

Another theoretical way to get close to a star is to be abducted by aliens and brought back to their home solar system.  People are always trying to get good photos of UFOs, after all, and a well-documented close encounter of the third kind would be worth a good amount of fame and money.  I don't think this kind of event really ever occurs, but maybe the technical writer is a believer, and he doesn't want someone burning out their camera's optics before snapping some great shots of the Grays, spacecraft interiors, and alien cloning operations.

 

After these considerations, it struck me: The most likely item to fall under "etc." is a nuclear blast.  That has the brightness of the Sun; it can and does occur here on Earth; there are probably lots of people who would try to photograph one if it occurred near enough to see and they had their cameras in their hands.  The warning would be wise to heed for those people who want their cameras to be intact to record the effects of post-Armageddon firestorms, nuclear winter, and rampant hair loss.

 

After thinking of this, it occurred to me that similar energies can be released on a smaller scale and in more tightly controlled conditions during particle physics experiments.  The newly started Large Hadron Collider in Europe might do this.  Grad students, make sure you read your tiny hot pink camera's manual before hooking it up to your research project.

 

That's all I can think of.  Therefore, the camera's manual could read, "Do not point this camera at the Sun, at alien suns around which you may orbit, or at nuclear explosions.  Do not attempt to use this camera to record data for high-energy particle physics experiments."

 

This would certainly make the manual more interesting to most people (not to me; I fill in all those boring blanks myself, obviously.)  There is, however, value in just leaving it as "etc."

 

lunch time detecting

I metal detected very briefly at lunch today—about 20 minutes.  This time I stopped at a park on the way back from getting my allergy shots.  I found a quarter, two dimes, two nickels, and four or five pennies.

 

 

lunchtime detecting

 

 

I detected for a little while at lunch again today.  I was headed for a spot I'd found that had produced a few little interesting things before, but it was being mowed by groundskeepers, so I headed to a quiet spot, way out of the way.

 

I hoped it might be an interesting place, because it is just across the fence from that old military academy.  I looked along that fence line for a while, expecting to find nothing, and finding exactly that in spades.  I found a Coke can, an old tiny bit of iron fence, and a metal disk that isn't a coin (I'll wash it off, but it looks featureless and aluminum).

 

Despite the lack of anything remotely resembling treasure, I had fun, as it was a beautiful day to be out.  I was under some sort of trees that bore fragrant white flowers, and the ground was full of violets, and it was neither too not nor too cold.

Friday at the Oaks

Thanks to our generous friends Candy and Will, who are giving us some tickets they can't use, Kim and I are going to the Oaks on Friday with Jenny and Spencer.  We still have to figure out some logistics (What will we wear? Who will baby sit?), but we're looking forward to a fun day.

 

I am currently taking bets on the success of my bets.

 

 

Book Report

 

A couple of nights ago I finished reading Watchmen, by Alan Moore and David Gibbons. I'd had a number of friends recommend it, but not being a graphic novel type of guy, generally, I'd never got around to reading it.

 

Last year I saw the movie, and though it wasn't great, it was interesting and enjoyable. Then last week when I was at the library I happened across the book, so I checked it out.

 

It really is a good book, and very interesting.  More than anything else, I was captured by the cleverness of it; the layering of words and pictures, the creative juxtaposition of images, and the thoughtful development of parallels within the story telling allowed for a lot of fun, involving reading.

 

Curing

Here's a painting tip I recently picked up: Don't keep your painting in the dark if you want it to dry.

 

I already knew that oil paint dries by oxidation, so that exposure to circulating air speeded drying time.  I also knew that keeping the painting in a relatively warm place increased the hardening of the paint.

 

What I just learned, though, is that exposure to light (especially to ultraviolet light) speeded the process, too.

 

UV light is harmful to paintings overall, but a little sunlight won't hurt it when it's curing.

 

I had been keeping my car painting in the dark garage between painting sessions, but today I decided to take it out and put it in the back of the car for the day.  Maybe it will be dry enough for me to work on some more tonight.
 

 

Bearing the Aesthetic Candle of Truth

 

I spent a long time thinking that artists shouldn't be allowed to title their own artwork, but now I have to file that notion under "misguided" along with the idea that poets shouldn't be allowed to read aloud their poems.  The truth is, in my opinion, that most people shouldn't be allowed to title any artwork, and most people shouldn't read poems out loud in public.

 

The poem thing came from the handful of people in my creative writing classes years ago who tried to read their works for class but it all just came out sounding wrong.  It was too formal and halting, with unnecessary pauses at the end of lines in poems, and a deadly montone.  Bleh.

 

My belief regarding artwork comes from cornball titles such as (and I'm just making these up to give you the idea) "The Lone Sentinel" for a painting of a lighthouse, or "Old Faithful" for a drawing of a rusty old wrench, or "A Little Slice of Heaven" for a painting of a flower garden.  I usually want the painting to speak for itself.  If the title is going to be evocative, I want it to avoid cliché and tell me something I didn't expect.  Otherwise, I just want it for identification purposes.

 

That's what I use titles for, identification.  Uh-oh, I just realized that my block print of garlic is titled "Garlic Lovers."  Well, heck, sometimes it's hard to resist being cute.  But at least it's not a chronic affliction for me.  At least I was shooting for a double meaning.

 

Don't give me a hard time about this.  I know some who read this will want to do so.  I don't favor taking away people's rights to title their own artworks.  I'm just brandishing my right to say a huge percentage of titles are aesthetic poison.  I find "The Lone Sentinel" much less interesting than "Montauk Point Lighthouse, March."

 

By the way, I just Googled "Montauk Point Lighthouse" to see if there was one, and there is.  I figured there had to be.  It's very pretty.

 

Modified Hauck's

This is the same drawing I put up a while back, but I modified the borders. I made them all even because I thought it would really look better. In order to do that, I had to repair the ink drop that fell into the sky; this I did with a little white acrylic paint.

MGA Roadster oil painting work in progress

I wanted to wait until I was done before I started putting up pictures on my blog, but I haven't had any art to post in a long time, so I thought I'd put up what I've done so far. Here are four stages of the painting. The last one was taken this afternoon. I worked a little more on it this evening, mostly on the pavement. The biggest remaining challenge is going to be evening out the reflections in the body of the car. I need to make it a little more uniform, and downplay a lot of the contrasts. I'm pleased with how it is progressing.

Avalanche on Mars

This is from NASA's orbiting HiRISE camera. I saw it mentioned on The Bad Astronomer's blog. Such cool stuff!

I edit this to add: This photo is of a 2,000 foot cliff, seen from almost directly above. The white at the top of the cliff, at left, is ice--frozen carbon dioxide. The camera took the picture just as there was a rock slide down the cliff, stirring up a big plume of dust. This camera has captured other slides as they happened or shortly after. I think it's really neat to see such clear photos of geological processes happening on other planets.

Coughing, painting, sky watching

It's sort of a yucky day.  I've had a cold, and the night before last I was up half the night coughing. Then last night I was up until 1:45 painting, but I probably wouldn't have been able to sleep had I gone to bed earlier because I was still coughing. I finally went to bed, and couldn't get to sleep for an hour because of the coughing, and because my mind was preoccupied (I think sometimes cold medicine does that to me).  Then I woke up again around 3:45 because the smoke detector battery was going dead, making the detector beep.  I was awake for a while after that.  Then I got up when my alarm went off at 5:45.  And I still have my cough.

 

On the good side, though, I feel that I'm making great progress with the car painting.

 

At 6:08 this morning I went out back to watch the International Space Station go over. It's a fairly regular thing, but I thought it would be nice to go out and wave.  It was very bright.

 

 

Garden

 

I finally managed to get a lot of seeds in the ground last night- fennel, spinach, peas, and green onions.  I still need to plant the mustard spinach that Judy shared with us, and I suppose I could go ahead and plant some corn; there's still a danger of a freeze, but the current extended forecast looks pretty good.

 

Topics

 

Art:

 

I was up late painting a picture of a car. It is coming along well, I think. This is a commission. I normally would not do a painting of a car.

 

I have way more ideas than I have time to work on. I'm sure this is a problem that lots a people would like to have. However, it makes it hard to decide what to do next. That is sort of being decided for me, though, as I have one more commission in the wings and a prospective landmark-drawing business opportunity coming up.

 

Last night I had a great idea for a series of lino block prints. It would be fun to do five or six images of Adam and Eve. I have images in my head of Adam and Eve playing poker with a unicorn and a monkey; Adam chasing the snake with a hoe; that sort of thing. Eh, maybe not.

 

I have lots of very old oil paints that are artist-grade, and which came from a yard sale or something fifteen years ago. Some of the tubes of paint are obviously much older than that.  The paint seems to be in decent shape, but the tubes are terrible. They are falling apart, the caps are stuck on, the labels are unreadable and crumbling, and sticky linseed oil coats them. I need to find some containers to put them in, I think. Baby food jars seem too big. I might have some small plastic containers, but I don't know how suitable the plastic is for storing oils. I doubt there would be a problem, but I'd have to mull it over a bit longer.

 

 

Garden:

 

The girls have planted flower seeds. Some of this is supposed to be a secret kept from their mother, so if you are Kim, forget you read this (that's a joke. Kim already knows, and just pretends she doesn't).

 

Today I bought some more seeds: fennel, green onions, spinach, peas, and two types of sweet corn.

 

Helga gave us some bee balm and two other types of perennial, the names of which I forgot. I also can't remember what she said they look like, so there'll be all kinds of garden surprises.

 

 

Coins:

 

No news to report for months and months.

 

lunctime detecting, Wednesday

I metal detected a little at lunch today. I found a dime and a few aluminum cans.

 

The best thing, though, was when I pulled up a can from under the weeds with the intention of recycling it. I could feel that it was full of mud, so I cut it apart with my garden knife to shake the dirt out of it.

 

I saw something brown and orange, and it moved. I realized I was looking at a little tail. There was little muddy salamander living in the can.

 

I took a picture with my cell phone camera, but I don't know if it will come out. I'll have to check that later.

 

After releasing the salamander, I found another can, and when I picked it up there was another salamander under it.

 

I turned over a cut piece of tree trunk and saw two more salamanders. All of them were 3 or 4 inches long. They were pretty cute.

 

 

Lunchtime detecting

 

I metal detected during lunch today at an extremely overgrown former house site. Finds: three rifle casings, a very old rusty nail, and a mysterious but uninteresting rectangle of metal. Still, it was a pretty day to be out.  There won't be many more chances to look around that particular spot before the leaves (and bugs) are in. I noticed, however, that the front end of the wooded and overgrown area I hunted has recently been remodeled to make way for a public sidewalk, allowing easier access to the front end of the site. It's close enough to work that I might go back to check it out.

 

Something lacking

 

I've been thinking and reading about oil painting, and over the past few days I've come to a tentative conclusion about my palette: it is missing a color.

 

For twenty years I have felt something amiss in my paintings. It has been nagging me inconsistently. I think I picked up some form of faulty advice or slightly skewed mindset sometime when I was in college, and this has negatively affected my painting.

 

I need to add black to my palette.  I have mixed my own blacks when I felt it necessary, sure, but I have never used tubed black for anything in oil painting.  Now, though, I think it would help me explore more color subtlety.

 

This from Wikipedia's entry on Myopia:

Chromatic aberration of strong eyeglasses

Close-up of color shifting through corner of eyeglasses. The light and dark borders visible between color swatches do not exist.
For people with a high degree of myopia, very strong eyeglass prescriptions are needed to correct the focus error. However, strong eyeglass prescriptions have a negative side effect in that off-axis viewing of objects away from the center of the lens results in prismatic movement and separation of colors, known as chromatic aberration. This prismatic distortion is visible to the wearer as color fringes around strongly contrasting colors. The fringes move around as the wearer's gaze through the lenses changes, and the prismatic shifting reverses on either side, above, and below the exact center of the lenses. Color fringing can make accurate drawing and painting difficult for users of strong eyeglass prescriptions.
Strongly nearsighted wearers of contact lenses do not experience chromatic aberration because the lens moves with the cornea and always stays centered in the middle of the wearer's gaze.


I experience this. I think it also has a lot to do with the "floating colors" effect I often see when looking at side-by-side complimentary color fields, or bright colors against dark.

Myopia in war

I think I'd be interested in reading a history of myopia in warfare. Would an ancient Greek go off to battle even if he couldn't tell a Spartan from a Persian from more than 20 feet away? Or would a guy like that (which is to say, a guy like me) just be left at home to tan hides or something? Maybe he'd be used as an advanced scout, in the hopes he'd just get caught and killed off. Maybe he'd just be likely to get run over by a chariot before he even left home.

 

Soldiers wore spectacles in the Civil War. Was this eyewear expensive? What if it broke? Did they tell those guys not to shoot, because it was a waste of ammunition?

 

In Afghanistan and Iraq, how quickly do broken glasses get replaced? Pretty quickly, I bet.

 

This year's brackets.

I'm a little late, but I feel that improved my odds. It must be the pressure. Anyway, this year I tried to find a balance between rationality and wishful thinking, which seems to work about as well for me as either strict pragmatism or pure idealism by themselves.

I don't have any money riding on this (in fact, I have it being obliterated in the second round) but I'll feel very proud if it works out.

Go big fat red star!

Ide Tidings

A couple of days ago at work we received some certified mail that was returned to us unclaimed. The office secretary stamped it with the date we received it, and then when I saw it I just had to go around showing it to everyone. I photocopied it, scribbled out identifying info like addressee's last name and his city, and put the picture here for you to admire. For your benefit, I highlited the amusing parts.

Spring Gardening

 

 

We recently bought and ate a spaghetti squash, and I thought it was great. It's so much like pasta, yet a little more interesting. I saved the seeds because I thought it would be great to grow some this year.

 

Now I'm having second thoughts. They're members of the cucurbita family, like pumpkins, watermelons, and zucchini. I've grown all of those before, but had mixed results. None of it was a total failure, but the continuing fight against diseases and insect pests, combined with the huge amount of garden space, means that the effort-to-payoff ratio has been pretty slim.

 

I don't want to give up on those things altogether (I especially like the idea of growing huge jack-o-lantern pumpkins), but I think if I avoid that family of vegetable for a year or two, it might make my garden a little more free of the pests that also prefer them when I eventually get back to them. Might. Probably not, but maybe.

 

Anyway, we had conferences at school a few days ago, and one of the teachers had set out some leftover seeds from the school garden he was working on. The seeds were free for the taking. I picked up a few packets: parsnips, thyme, parsley, fennel, and dill.

 

I also have some bulbs for purple gladioli that I need to get in the ground.

 

The gardening bug is biting me, and I really want to get out and work. There it lots of digging, trimming, hoeing, and raking to be done!

I know I'm among the last 5% of the world's population to watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w

After several viewings, I realized that the thing that probably impresses me most is the camera work. How did they do that in a single take?

How Lux Cargo Met Kim

 

Bananas.

 

Bananas, you say? Yes, I could use one right about now, too.

 

That reminds me of back when I used the alias "Lux Cargo." How I miss those silvery days, tracing the circumference of the Ring of Fire in my yacht, The Lux Cargo Jr. (I named it after myself).  Most pleasurable were my excursions to Fiji and Tonga, where, if one drops anchor in the green-crystal shallows, beautiful women in skirts woven of kelp will wade out with fruit platters.  These women are uniformly tourists from the Midwest who pay good money to do this, and they are slathered in sunscreen, but dang they look fine in their shell necklaces.  They will place macaws on your head and give you pineapple slices soaked in rum. "You are welcome in our huts any time, Lux Cargo!" they would exclaim to me.

 

Fiji and Tonga are much pleasanter than the Aleutians, where the women paddle out in kayaks and offer you platters of sliced whale blubber. Some people really go for that, though.

 

Those were the best five years of my life, if you don't count any of the last ten. How would I ever forget my long conversations over games of go with the 110-year-old Okinawans? Losing money like mad betting on the kickboxing matches in Singapore's back alleys? Being brought to tears as whale calves gently nudged the hull of The Lux Cargo Jr. off the coast of Kamchatka?

 

I never saw those jagged rocks until it was too late. I was distracted by a macaw that was trying to land on my head. Have you seen those birds? Having one land on you is like being slugged by a fifty pound bag of Skittles. I don't blame the bird, though, as the weather conditions were deteriorating and The Lux Cargo Jr. was very inviting place to land, even after the Patagonions had rubbed off all the gold plating on the fixtures to use in their own blasphemous ceremonies.

 

I finally washed ashore, barely held afloat by three mostly empty Windex bottles, in the coastal banana swamps of Talara. After resting, I jiggered up a catamaran from coconuts and bananas (Peruvian bananas are friggin' huge!)  Unfortunately, the coconut banana catamaran was as unseaworthy was it was delicious. After I finished that off, I assembled a giant banana outrigger.

 

You wouldn't believe the looks and guffaws I got from the engineers of the locks on the Panama Canal, nor the hoots and hollers from those on the Mississippi River as I sailed home.  I can assure you, though, that there are Polaroid photos of me and my mega-banana outrigger tacked up in every deckhouse, tackle shop, and fluorescent-light-lit Army Corps of Engineers office between New Orleans and Memphis, where my craft was nibbled into oblivion by grass carp.

 

I hitched the rest of the way home with an awesomely hot trucker named Kim.  That's how we met.  After she dropped off her freight at Target, I took her to dinner.

 

Finds with no metal detector

I found a wheat penny (1958) in the change box at work last week. Today I cashed a ten dollar check that I've had in my wallet for a month, and asked for half dollars, if the teller had any. She gave me five dollars worth, and one of them was a (silver clad) 1968.

(oops, I forgot to attach the drawing to the last post)
 

 

Hauck's on Goss Avenue

I think I'm done. This is a project I started on my own. I liked the view and decided to do a drawing of it in between commissions. I don't remember the exact size, and the drawing is not with me for me to measure right now. I think it about 8 x 10 inches.
 

 

I'm verrrrry interested to see where this goes

 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124199042

 

"Last Train" controversy

 

More for the Misc. category

Kim bought some soy cheese to try. Our picky youngest daughter is actually willing to eat it, or at least she has eaten it two or three times now. I tried a little of it, and it wasn't bad.

 

Ways in which is resembles cheese:

- It is orange and comes in a block

- It is possible to chew it and swallow it

 

Beyond that, calling it "cheese" is really a stretch. In both taste and texture it reminded me of olives from a jar, though milder and tenderer. That's not necessarily bad, although if you're expecting something cheese-like it can be a little jarring. I think I would like it best on a burger.

 

***

 

Another question from a 4-year-old, as we drove in the van yesterday: What makes the earth stay floating in the air?

 

I found that one almost as tough as describing how a TV works. The TV one was hard because I only have a very vague understanding, and that understanding probably is even poorer now that the technology is dominated by modern flat-screen TVs and similar displays.  However, even though I don't *really* know what gravity is, I at least have a basic grasp of how it functions.  Trying to relate this to the experiences of a little girls was the hard part; I came up with three or four attempts at answering, but Kim kept buzzing me and saying, "Try again."  It just occurred to me that if I were somehow able to describe my understanding of how it all worked in terms that she was actually able to immediately grasp and understand, she would laugh at the absurdity of it and tell me I was making up stories.

 

 

Mark's sports column

I had a(nother) great idea this morning as I drove to work. I heard sports writer Frank Deford discussing the Olympics, and mentioning that it was kind of needlessly squashed together in one venue in the tradition of the ancient Greeks; he said that they might as well, in this age of television, hold the different events in different places.  He may have been mentioning it tongue-in-cheek, but it's an opinion I've heard before.

 

Deford also mentioned that Sochi, Russia, which is the site of the 2014 games, had temperatures in the 70s last week—even warmer that it was in Vancouver.

 

This got me thinking about how we should revamp the Olympics.

 

For one thing, I think we could digitize the athletes. If we took all the athletes and ran them through thorough biometric-recording drills, we could get accurate measurements of their strength, stamina, and dexterity and enter the numbers into a sophisticated database. We could also do the same thing with results of psychological profiling. While doing all this, we can hook them up to Hollywood's motion-capture technology to get fully digital avatars for computer generation.

 

You can see where I'm going with this. Yes! A fully digital Virtual Olympics. Once we have all the data, Virtual Olympics organizers can run the digital athletes through events in any order and combination they want.  Courses, slopes, and half-pipes can be programmed into the computer in an infinite number of combinations. You could actually make the luge run as lethal as you want, with a pit of flaming crocodile-hyenas over which the sledders must jump.  Hell, you could even program the snowcross athletes to carry swords and hack at each other as they race.  The International Virtual Olympic Committee would verify that the physical stats for each virtual athlete accurately portray those of a real athlete.

 

Then this could be turned into a weekly show, and the different nations would buy each individual show and create the parameters under which they think their athletes have the best chance. If Russia wants it mandatory that all figure skaters must perform a quadruple super shin fling during their routines, then that's what will be on the show for May 4.

 

Another great idea: A Wiilympics! Hook every single Wii in the world up to a single display.  The athletes for each event are an average of all actions performed by all the game players using their Wii consoles in their living rooms (the American skier, for instance, is a mass hybrid of all Americans who are standing on their special Wii pads at that moment, playing the game.) That's very democratic, and the little Wii guy who appears on the screen would truly be a representative of the nation.

 

If you think that wipes out athletic excellence in favor athletic averages (which it would), and you think that's a problem (an understandable sentiment), then we could still hook the Wii controllers up to real, talented athletes. We could also just randomly pick people from across the country.

 

Go ahead and laugh! But I'm telling you, it's just a matter of a few Olympiads before the virtual cybernetic descendants of today's video games are on the Olympic agenda. Cyborgs might require their own Olympics in the same vein as the Special Olympics and the Paralympics, but that won't last long. In 40 years, the Quaint Olympics for the Unenhanced Humans will seem as old-timey and anachronistic as the original Olympics (bring back the chariot races!) would to us now.

 

 

Cold rabbit

 

 The rabbit ears were my idea; creating hair by jamming sticks into the rabbit's head was not.

 

(By the way, the forehead jewelry on the less-icy individual is a sticker bindi from the India booth at the Girl Scouts' Thinking Day.)

Recent questions from my youngest

I think I'm getting a dozen of these per day:
 

What makes seasons change?

How can you tell by looking at them who are boys and who are girls?

What do our insides look like?

Why does it get dark at night?

What comes out of volcanoes?

How do they make Cheerios?

Why do they call it [the meat] turkey?

Why are they so many kinds of food?

How does the picture on the TV walk and move?

 

This afternoon we all went for a walk in the sunshine.

slouching

Hannah, our snow woman, is looking a little bedraggled. This is what snow people look like when they spend several days exposed to an unfathomably huge nuclear furnace at a range of 93,000,000 miles.

Hanging on through winter

I noticed yesterday, as the snow melted away near the house, that my late-season cilantro is still alive. I know it was a cool-weather plant, but I didn't realize it could survive a winter like the one we have had. The stem base seems very thick, and there is a tight pack of fresh greenery forming in the center. I suppose that as soon as the temperatures are regularly above freezing, it will grow into a big healthy cilantro bush.

More digital horsing around.

 I'm impressed with how much it looks like paint, and this is just a basic came-with-the-computer program.

 

Forecast

This picture is my weather forecast for next week. It will start with a sniff of spring, then BAM! boney old winter will try to kill us and destroy our houses. Those who survive will have to fight crows and rats for what little food and warmth is available until mosquitoe season begins.

 

(I drew this with my new computer art program, which is fun to play with.)
 

 

 We didn't stay out too long yesterday. The wind was strong and blew snow right into our faces. You can see the drifts against the house and around the garden plants in the photos.

 

Ice formation (see post below)

 

 

 

A few days ago Kim and I went by Target, where we were mystified by an ice formation on the pharmacy sign outside. There was a long icicle—more than three feet, we estimated, and perhaps close to four—curving out from the middle of the sign. It was more or less perpendicular to the wall.   There were some smaller icicles attached to it, pointing in the same direction.

 

Viewed from the front, one could see that the ice was also very thin (a few inches across at its base, but only an inch thick in its other dimension, forming a very flat oval "footprint.")

 

We tried to get a photo, but it was dark and all we had was Kim's Blackberry, so the picture was poor.

 

I was back again the next day and took better photos, although the ice was broken and didn't protrude as far.

 

This presented several mysteries, all tied to how such a formation could be created.  Most obviously, how could the pointed icicle be sticking out from the wall?  It was slightly curved downward, like it had bent or formed with a polite nod to gravity, but it was convincingly horizontal.

 

Another mystery was how that much water got there in the first place. There would have to be a lot of snow on top of that sign to create that ice formation, it seemed to me; and why would it all go right to the middle of the sign?

 

I was there again yesterday, after more snow, and solved at least part of the mystery.  It turns out that the wind really whips the snow off of the store's roof, and it all collects atop the pharmacy sign.

 

As for how the icicle became perpendicular to the wall, I have three theories:

 

1) There is an air vent inside the sign to cool the lights, and it blows melted snow outward where it reforms into a jutting icicle; or,

 

2) The icicles form against the sides of the letters (in this case, the M) and then break loose and are twisted outward by the weight of the snow slowly melting, flowing, compacting, and refreezing close to the wall.

 

The second explanation seems most likely, even though I have a hard time visualizing the mechanics involved.

 

Kim and I both thought it was really bizarre, but I told her it was just as bizarre that I was spending so much time puzzling over it.

 

batcrafts

 

 

Book Review

I just finished reading The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back, by Charles Pellegrino, and even though it was horrifying and heartbreaking on almost every single page, it was also thoroughly fascinating and very hard to put down. The book has been weighing on my mind since I started it. It's equal parts enthralling thriller and apalling glimpse at the end of the world.

I don't think it was perfectly written. It might actually be a little bit too broad in scope, although the inclusiveness of experiences is one thing that makes it so fascinating. The huge cast of characters sometimes gets a little disorienting. There may have been a few times the author stretched a little too far and a little needlessly to describe connections between events. However, these are minor faults.

This book is full of things I feel like I should have heard about, or should have been taught; yet I can understand why I never did, because so many of the stories and details are so dreadful that relating them could be an ordeal in itelf. Countering this, however delicately, are the people who exited the physical and metaphorical fires of the nuclear attacks (and their aftermaths) and used their stories to teach peace. Communicating these stories seems to me to be the most fitting memorial possible to the victims, the best means of honoring the people who have worked hard for peace, and important means of ensuring that the nuclear attacks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the last. Pellegino's book serves those ends well, I think.

Art Stores

 

I've been twice to Clifton Art Supply, the new place on Frankfort Avenue, and now I can review it as a pretty good store. I'm glad that there is a decent, locally-owned art store closer to my side of town. They have a respectable selection of art supplies; not quite as broad as Artist & Craftsman Supply or Preston Art Center, but still a hundred times better than a place like Michael's.  It's nearer my home, the sales clerks have been helpful, and the prices seem to be on par with the other art stores, so this will now be my preferred local spot for art supplies.

 

The other two stores are really good, too:

 

I went to Preston Art a few months ago after not having been there in a long time. They are locally owned, too, with one store on Bardstown Road and one store in New Albany. They have a broad selection of materials and a helpful staff.

 

Artist and Crafsman Supply is a national chain with a store located conveniently close to my parents' house, on Barret Ave.  Although I prefer to "shop local," I've been impressed with the store.  Their selection is fantastic, with their store space crammed full of a great range of supplies in various brands. Their paper selection is about the best I've ever seen, with many papers stacked in the walkways, tempting me to flip through and inspect and drool over them. They also have a very impressive range of…well, pretty much everything I normally use: acrylics, oils, pens, brushes…everything except relief printing ink.

 

Relief printing ink is sort of a problem in all the stores. Everyone carries the Speedball brand inks, which (in my experience) is nearly unanimously regarded as inferior to other brands by printmakers. Yet Speedball is the only brand that any of the stores carry.

 

 

Punxutawney Phil be darned; spring is closing in, it's a fact. January, the worst month of the year, is past, and we're on the steep downhill counter-clockwise slide into vernal rain and sunshine.

 

Yes, it is still cold. Snow is still in the forecast. But now, the bitter sting of winter air when I walk out the door in the morning feels less like a persistent fact of life to be born with gritted teeth, and more like a spiteful last slap from a defeated foe. We won! There will be miserable weather between now and the first of May, but it's much easier to laugh off now that we're done with January.

 

Sunshine, when we can get it, feels different now. It's not as watered-down and chilly feeling.

 

I'm not yet excited about the garden this year. I think I was at this time last year, but right now I feel like scaling back from what I've done previously.  We mostly want corn and tomatoes this year.  In about a month, maybe less, I can probably plant some cool-weather vegetables like peas, spinach, and broccoli. I still really want to grow some big pumpkins, but by the time I get to the point where I can plant them I usually don't have room.  The few I had did very poorly last year.

 

I noticed a few weeks ago that my mint has escaped the submerged plastic pot I buried it in.  There are little mint sprouts (I suppose they came from seeds, although I guess some roots might have made it out) coming up out in the yard a few feet away from the parent. Once they're out, they're out, or at least that's what I've heard. I'll have mint invaders coming up everywhere now.

 

9

...Just in case you were wondering, that's how many garlic prints I ended up with. Seven numbered prints, plus two good artist proofs. That's not many, but it could be worse.

 

Here's another number: 150.  That's how many minutes it took me to get to work this morning. Usually it takes 15. However, a little snow and no salt on the roads leads to some pretty slow driving. This was the worst driving I've seen in a long time. Cars on Hurstbourne were at a standstill (I suppose because of an accident farther ahead) so I ended up creeping slowly in a more circuitous path to work. Thank goodness I now have a car stereo system.
 

 

Here I am, awake way too late again. I'll post this and get to bed ASAP.

I was up late last night working on a drawing of a street in Snitzelburg and watching the movie "Encounters at the End of the World." The movie was pretty good. It's a Werner Herzog documentary about Antartica and some of the people who end up working there. More than anything else, it's a meditation on eccentricities, extremes, and human limitations.

I also started reading a book that Kim surprised me with: Last Train from Hiroshima, by Charles Pelligrino. It's an in-depth account of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mostly told from the survivors' points-of-view, but also mixing in lots of science. I'm not very far into it, but I'm finding it riveting.

The author mentions that one of his reasons for writing is the faint hope that such books will decrease the chance of a nuclear weapon ever being used again. I was struck by the pessimism, but I guess there's a lot of truth in that; one of the only thing that keeps humanity's future from seeming practically infinite is our ability and possible willingness to destroy ourselves, but with this hypothetically huge expanse of time before us, it seems likely that at some point there will be another nuke in another city.

Eh, I wrote more but I just deleted it. I don't think it made sense or really had a point.

Mystery Photo

Ten points to the first person who can correctly state what this is a photo of.

 

Or have I already put this photo on my blog?

 

 

 

Polymer clay cane

For a few years now I've been wanting to get out our small stockpile of polymer clay and mess around with it. Kim really got interested in it seven or eight years ago and bought some good supplies, but neither of us has done anything with it in about five years.

There had been a few things holding me back. One was its lack of importance on my list of artistic priorities. At times that I could get out the clay I instead decided to paint or draw.

A second was its inanity--I very rarely see anthing done with polymer clay that doesn't look like a cheap little decoration. Things I've seen that don't look like cheap little decorations have been jewelry. I've seen some really cool stuff, beautifully done and finely crafted. However, I don't have much interest in jewelry. Therefore, I really didn't have any good ideas for what I would try to create with the clay. I really like the finely detailed millefiore patters and other designs, and I like the manner in which they are created. But I had no goal.

I still don't, but last week I got out the clay just to horse around with it anyway. I decided to make a cane, a process in which one creates a 2D design but makes it looooong- imagine a loaf of bread that has a pattern on the "heel" which runs all the way through to the "heel" on the opposite side. Then the loaf is stretched out, making it long and thin. Then it's sliced, giving one discs with the design.

Here are the results. The red clay in the eyes was harder, so it didn't stretch as well, resulting in the skulls at the ends of the ropes lacking red.

This was mostly an experiment, using clay scraps. I was anxious to see the end results so I didn't build up the outside as well as I should have. There's also not as much contrast in the design as I'd like. However, I think it came out pretty well for a first try.

Now, what to do with these? string them into a necklace? Use them for checkers? I suppose they'd make fun game counters or chips. They'll probably just sit around.

 

My hair seems to have reached some kind of social situation commentary critical mass. It grows and grows at the same rate for a few months, then suddenly it's long enough that people I work with start commenting on it (about eight comments this week).  For example: "Your hair's getting pretty long, there," and "Looks like it's about time for a haircut, Mark," and "Your hair's really growing out—it looks good, I like it that length."

 

"Garlic Lovers" again

I bought some oil based black ink for finishing these prints, and I'm finding it much easier to work with than the water based ink. I'm still having problems, but I'm getting a little better at finessing the printmaking. So far, with the oil, I've finished five good ones and ruined another four or five. That's bad, but I'm learning and I strive to take it all with equanimity. The ones that came out all right, I like.

Winter fun

We spent a little time ice skating today. This was the girls' first time. I don't have much skill on skates, barely able to stay on my feet, but I went out to try to help them around. I didn't know what to expect from them, but I didn't want to take one out and leave one behind, so I took them both. Fortunately, Dad hurried off to get some skates and he soon joined us. (Thanks, Dad!)

Here we are yesterday enjoying the snow:

Acrylic painting

My first painting of 2010! This is also my first painting in acrylics in a loooong time. With the exception of the mural/paintings in my daughter’s bedrooms, this is the first real acrylic painting in perhaps 20 years.

I started this in early November, I think. I wanted to mess around with acrylics because I wanted to have a medium that I could use on my lunch breaks with a relatively short (compared to oil paint) set-up/take down time, and no messy solvents, on days that I wanted to work outside.

This painting is 13 x 19 inches on primed paper. I think it’s moderately successful. I like the colors and the paint application; I’m not as happy with the composition. It would be better if it were a scene with more dark areas or contrasts. As it is, there is a certain “busy-ness” that runs top to bottom that doesn’t allow the eye to rest, and the values are monotonous (there are darks and lights, but they’re all sort of stippled together.) However, I like the shapes and the colors.

Happy *hic* New Year!

We spent New Year's Eve with some friends; it was a great visit and we all had a good time. Perhaps some more than others...