Art
drorzel | July 20, 2016It's been a month since the last links dump of posts from Forbes, though, really, I took a couple of weeks off there, so it's been less than that in terms of active blogging time. But I've put up a bunch of stuff in July, so here are some links:
-- The Physics Of Ancient Roman Architecture: First of a couple posts inspired by our trip to Rome, this one looking at the basic mechanics of the key structural element of Roman building, the arch.
-- What Ancient Roman Buildings Teach Us About Science And Engineering: Second post about Roman construction, in which looking into the question of how…
drorzel | June 29, 2016When I was going through the huge collection of photos I have from the Forum in Rome, I kept running across pictures containing two young Asian women (neither of them Kate). This isn't because I was stalking them, but because they were everywhere, stopping for long periods in front of virtually every significant ruin and striking exaggerated poses for each other to take photos of. I had to carefully frame a few of my own photos to avoid them, but I did also take a few that deliberately included their posing, because it was so amusingly over the top.
Tourists taking photos of each other in…
drorzel | May 8, 2016The week leading up to our cruise was crazy busy for me, with a bunch of travel for work. Which means you get a collection of cell-phone snapshots from that week, since I didn't bring the good camera with me on all those trips.
229/366: Man the Barricades
SteelyKid and the Pip behind a wall of sticks.
There are some paths running into the woods near the kids' day care, and the older kids decided to wall one of these off by wedging sticks between trees on either side. Because kids. It's an impressive bit of work, until somebody huffs and puffs and blows it all down.
230/366: Quad
The…
drorzel | February 27, 2015Yesterday was Founders Day at Union, celebrating the 220th anniversary of the granting of a charter for the college. The name of the event always carries a sort of British-boarding-school air for me, and never fails to earworm me with a very particular rugby song, but really it's just one of those formal-procession-and-big-speaker events that provide local color for academia.
This year's event started, as always, with a classical music performance-- a song by Aaron Copeland, this time, so we've at least caught up to the 20th Century. (I'm not sure I want to live long enough to see a Bob Dylan…
drorzel | October 28, 2014As mentioned last week, I was the on-hand expert for the Secret Science Club's foray into Massachusetts, a screening of the movie Particle Fever held at MASS MoCA. This worked out nicely in a lot of respects-- it gave me an excuse to visit the newly renovated Clark Art Institute in Williamstown and check out the spiffy new library at Williams (where they have my second book on the shelves, but not my first; I may need to send them an author copy in lieu of a check this year...). I also did some random nostalgia things like grabbing dinner at Colonial Pizza (now in a strip mall halfway to…
drorzel | October 18, 2013Yes, that's another TED@NYC picture as the "featured image," but don't run away! It's a post about science, I swear!
The photo up above is from the Flickr set (which, by the way, has been edited significantly since yesterday...), and I like it a good deal. Mostly because, as the joking caption suggests, that photo of Max Planck looming over my head has a kind of serial killer vibe to it. But here's the thing: this is the original phtoo that's on the slide:
Max Planck around the time he solved the black-body radiation problem. From wikimedia.
It's a black-and-white photo from 1901, and in…
drorzel | October 14, 2013The TED@NYC trip took me to Manhattan on Monday for the run-through of my talk that night, but then I was left in The City all day Tuesday with time to kill. My original plan was to go to the Guggenheim Museum, as I've never been there and it's an iconic building, but there was a note on their web page that the ramps were closed in preparation for some exhibit, and I figured that would sort of ruin the point, so I went to the Museum of Modern Art instead.
If you know me at all, those might seem odd choices, as modern art really isn't my thing. The MOMA is heavy on pieces that "Call into…
drorzel | February 13, 2012So, the big How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Photoshop contest concluded on Friday. We got five really good entries, and the judges (me and Kate) had a hard time reaching a decision. After long deliberation, though, we've come up with a solution.
But first, the entries:
Jane Di Giuseppe has Emmy as the dog pulling Einstein's strings:
John Pearce has Emmy playing with Einstein as well:
And Joseph Roith tells Maxwell's Demon to respect Emmy's authoritah!:
But in the end, it came down to two pictures: Tristan Croll's take on the famous chalkboard photo:
It's a little-known fact that not…
drorzel | December 6, 2011It's hard to go more than a couple of days without seeing another "imminent death of publishing" article somewhere, predicting the ultimate triumph of ebooks, There's one category of books that I expect to remain safe for the foreseeable future, though, namely books that are specifically constructed to be aesthetically pleasing. In other words, coffee-table books.
Clifford Pickover's new Physics Book is one of these. It's a very attractive and well-made book, pairing some 250 full-page images representing milestones in physics, paired with one-page descriptions of the underlying scientific…
drorzel | February 5, 2011One of the books in SteelyKid's regular rotation of books to read at naptime and bedtime is this book about a girl visiting characters from fairy tales to ask them what makes somebody happy ever after. It's not the greatest, but she enjoys it.
It occurs to me, though, that while the book references a couple of classic fairy tales-- the girl in the story visits the princess from "The Princess and the Pea" and the frog prince, and also a fairy godmother-- SteelyKid has never heard any of the original stories, and thus is unlikely to appreciate the references (even accounting for the fact that…
drorzel | September 5, 2010The 2010 Hugo Award Winners were announced on Sunday night. Of course, this being a science fiction award, it's only appropriate that they be announced from THE FUTURE, so the results were available early this morning, US time.
It turns out that I voted for 1.5 of the fiction award winners: China Mieville's The City and The City shared the Best Novel award with Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, and I also voted for the Charlie Stross novella. The other two categories, I'm basically OK with-- I "NO AWARD"-ed "Bridsicle," but that whole category was pretty weak, and it wasn't as awful as "…
drorzel | August 21, 2010Nobody who likes both SF and the graphing of odd things as much as I do could possibly fail to link to Orbit's charts of fantasy art. These include the frequency plot of various elements seen at right, a comparison of fashion trends for urban fantasy heroines, color trends in cover dragons, and a study of word and font frequencies in titles. If you're planning a fantasy series, Bloody Death Dragon of the Magic Shadow God would apparently be a good title choice.
drorzel | June 14, 2010At last weekend's Hidden Dimensions event, Brian Greene had a graphic of a Calabi-Yau object (it wasn't this one, but it's the same idea). He put this up several times, but never actually explained what the hell it was supposed to show. It just looked kind of cool.
Last week's Through the Wormhole program segment on Garrett Lisi kept showing an animation of some sort of graphical representation of the E8 group, shifting between some collection of circles and that giant mandala-looking thing they use to illustrate every story about the guy. Again, there was no explanation of what the hell this…
drorzel | June 5, 2010Since I was going to be down here anyway to sign books at the World Science Festival Street Fair, Kate and I decided to catch one of the Saturday events at the Festival. It was hard to choose, but we opted for the program on Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace (Live coverage was here, but the video is off), because it was a physics-based topic, and because I wrote a guest-blog post on the topic for them.
(No, we didn't go to the controversial "Science and Faith" panel, opting instead to have a very nice Caribbean dinner at Negril Village, just around the corner. I'll take excellent…
drorzel | March 10, 2010Several items in the general category of charitable activity:
Kate is running the Con or Bust auction again this year, with proceeds going to support people of color interested in attending SFF cons, principally Wiscon. Bidding is open through Saturday at 11:59pm ET, and items up for bid include many things that may be of interest to readers of this blog, including a certain book, plus a bunch of other stuff I will put below the fold.
I got email from the Nobel Prize committee the other day. Well, OK, the webmaster for Nobelprize.org. They have an "Ask a Nobel laureate" feature going on…
drorzel | November 18, 2009Kate has a court appearance in New York tomorrow, and we're making a long weekend of it. I'm typing this from my parents' house, where I'm dropping SteelyKid off for some quality time with Grandma and Grandpa, and tomorrow, I'm heading down to The City. I've got some meetings scheduled tomorrow afternoon, and Friday at lunch, and then we're going to kick back and enjoy New York.
Of course, one of the paralyzing things about NYC is the sheer variety of cultural options. There's the AMNH, with lots of geeky exhibits, the Met, where you can spend days and not see everything, and MOMA, for a…
drorzel | November 8, 2009Via somebody on a mailing list, Eric Whiteacre's virtual choir:
The post I got this from doesn't contain any details, nor does it contain useful links to the making of this particular video, but looking around the top level of the blog it's fairly clear that this was put together from a large number of individual videos of people singing just one part of the song. He's got another piece underway, and you can see some of the individual parts.
This is one of those really cool and impossible-to-predict things you get with the modern Internet. And I think this stuff is ultimately a lot cooler…
drorzel | August 22, 2009Via Bora on FriendFeed, a cute little art project from MIT that takes a name, scans the Web for mentions of that name, and produces a color-coded bar categorizing the various mentions of that name. Here's what you get if you put my name in:
You can click on it for a bigger image, that makes the labels easier to read (these are screencaps edited in GIMP, because in true MIT Media Lab fashion, the whol site is a Flash thing with no way to link directly to anything). It's nice, and all, but there's something a little bit funny about it. Something... missing. Let's see if we can't illuminate the…
drorzel | July 22, 2009Worldcon is less than two weeks off, which means that it's time once again for the SF part of blogdom to explode with complaints about the quality of the nominees. There are some reasonable reactions, but it's mostly slightly over-the-top broadsides.
It's worth emphasizing again that the source of the problem is also the solution to the problem: the Hugo Awards are voted on by fans. This means that they tend to skew to the middlebrow, true, but it also means that they can be fixed, in a way that, say, the Oscars really can't.
If you don't like the stuff that gets nominated for the Hugos, buy…
drorzel | July 3, 2009After a long baby-induced delay, we are finally ready to announce the winners of the How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Caption Contest and Poetry Contest. I've obtained a few more copies of the bound galleys from the publisher, so we'll be giving two awards in each contest
category: one for each photo, one for Cuttlefish poetry, and one for non-Cuttlefish poetry.
And the winners are:
Photo 1: The award goes to Nick at #25:
Photo 2: The award goes to Eric Goebelbecer at #8:
Honorable Mention: Dave W. at #11 and Konrad at #30.
Let's ask the judges what they thought:
Chad: All three of the…