. . . to get one of these, now that I am soon to be a published Sci-Fi author and all:
Jim Downey
Via BB.
Filed under: Art, Health, Humor, Music, Pharyngula, PZ Myers, Rube Goldberg, YouTube
Sorry, been sick with the latest viral lung thing going around *and* trying to get a lot of spring cleaning and minor home repair stuff in prep for this Open House tomorrow night, so I haven’t had much in the way of energy to do any writing. But just found this over on PZ’s site, and for the two or three people who check out my blog and haven’t seen it, had to share:
Inspired madness. Discussion of it, how many takes it took, et cetera to be found here (and probably elsewhere).
Jim Downey
I’d had some glitches with my site stats software the last few days, but just found out that the BBTI site broke 2 million hits sometime over the weekend. The official tally is 2,017,978 hits as of 3/1/10.
Wow.
Well, at least I was right.
Two million hits.
Huh.
That’s more than twice the hits I had with the Paint The Moon project. (And yes, I do need to get that entry updated . . . ) Meaning I am twice as famous as I was before. Or something like that.
Who woulda thunk it.
More in a day or two. Fighting some kind of nasty lung virus that’s going around, and I have a thing on Friday to prepare for. *sigh*
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Astronomy, Carl Sagan, NASA, NPR, Science, Science Fiction, Space, Titan
I’m not big on Valentine’s Day. No, I’m not some kind of cold, unloving bastard. Quite the contrary – I resent the cynical manipulation by the greeting card and floral industries creating the expectation that men can only show their love on one special day each year. I love my wife and try to show it to her in many honest ways throughout the year.
But February 14th is memorable for me for another reason.
20 years ago on this day we received a picture – a perspective, if you will – which we had never seen before. That of Earth from the vantage of the Voyager 1 spacecraft – an image which has come to be known as the Pale Blue Dot. The book of the same name helped inspire and inform my writing of Communion of Dreams – a fact which can be seen in several passages, but which most readily comes to mind for me as this dream sequence:
The bridge was perhaps three meters wide, and arched slowly up in front of him, so that he couldn’t see the other end. It had walls of stone about a meter high, and periodically along those walls he could see small sculpted stone vases in which grew roses. Blue roses. He went over and peered into one of the buds, a clean blue light almost like a gas flame. The petals spread, until the flower was completely open.
Turning, he started to walk toward the rise in the center of the bridge. After a few dozen paces, he was almost halfway across the bridge, but he couldn’t see the other side. The fog seemed to rise up from the surface of the river, the bridge stretched off into a muzziness of grey. Then he noticed that the roses in a nearby vase were smaller, the light somehow more distant.
Another couple dozen paces and the end of the bridge where he had begun was almost out of sight. The roses had continued to shrink in size, and the light of each receded. It had grown darker, too, the sun had begun to shrink in size, as though retreating from him. He walked on. There was still no end in sight, just the bridge continuing into a growing dimness. The sun was smaller still, and had lost enough intensity that he could look straight at it without discomfort. The roses here were so small as to be hard to make out, the blue dot of light in each flower becoming pale. And he noticed that the walkway beneath his feet now felt spongy, like it was becoming insubstantial.
Tentatively taking a few more steps, at last he felt his foot sink into the bridge, and he started falling forward.
That’s from the end of Chapter Five, as the protagonist and his team of scientists are en route to Titan and are metaphorically crossing from the known to the unknown. Just as Voyager continues to do.
Happy Pale Blue Dot Day.
Jim Downey
All Things Considered had a nice piece about this photograph and what led to it last Friday, which includes this nice bit from Carl Sagan:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Filed under: Art, Cosmic Variance, Science, Scientific American, YouTube
Nice – here’s another show for “The Explosions Channel“:
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi. *Apologies to Sean Carroll.)
Most geeks already know about Charles Babbage‘s Difference Engine, but there was a nice piece on NPR this morning about it:
Charles Babbage, the man whom many consider to be the father of modern computing, never got to complete any of his life’s work. The Victorian gentleman was a brilliant mathematician, but he wasn’t very good at politics and fundraising, so he never got the financial backing to finish any of his elaborate machine designs. For decades, even his fans weren’t certain whether his computing machines would have worked.
But Doron Swade, a former curator at the Science Museum in London, has proven that Babbage wasn’t just an eccentric dreamer. Using nothing but materials that would have been available to Babbage in the 1840s, Swade and a group of engineers successfully built Babbage’s Difference Engine — and a version is now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
Having just watched “Longitude” about the construction and restoration of the first functional marine chronometers (and having seen reproduction of same at Greenwich), this seems, er, timely.
Jim Downey
Age brings not just experience, but depth. That was a lesson I learned as a young man, from a book which was written long before I was born.
* * * * * * *
This morning a friend sent me a link to a blog post nearly a year old. It contained these images:
And this wonderful sentiment:
Stain is a unique tea cup created by Bethan Laura Wood, a designer from the UK. At first, the cup looks like any other cup, but the natural staining that comes from using the cup reveals a hidden pattern.
* * *
Bethan writes: “This project examines the assumption that use is damaging to a product (For example, scratches on an iPod).”
* * * * * * *
A month or so ago, I got a call from a student at the local university. He had a class project he was working on, and was hoping that I would be able to help him out with some basic bookbinding questions.
Hey, we all have to start somewhere. And he asked nicely. I invited him over.
He came in, introductions were made. A non-traditional student, he was an already accomplished artist/artisan in his own right, and we spent a bit of time sorting out who we knew in common and the local art scene.
Then we went back into my bindery. Discussed his project, and options for how to execute it. I showed him some models of similar projects, introduced him to some basic techniques he’d need to do what he wanted, loaned him some tools. He quickly understood my instruction, and grasped the essentials of what he needed. It’s nice to work with another person who respects craftsmanship.
* * * * * * *
A good friend dropped me a note, said that he and his family had decided to honor his father with a headstone made of bronze rather than stone. Potential vandalism was an issue, so they wanted something which would hold up better. It would cost more than the traditional stone, though.
My response: “I would guess. But bronze does develop a nice patina naturally.”
* * * * * * *
The student called a week ago. His project was done, and he wanted to drop by and show me what he had done, and return my loaned items.
He came over, we went back into my shop. He took out his model, and his finished project. Explained the different problems which he had encountered, how he had resolved them. It was all very well done.
I could tell he’d had a taste of the craft, one which might linger. We discussed his project, and then I explained how one aspect of it was well done, but wouldn’t translate to an adhesive binding due to one materials effect he didn’t have to consider with a non-adhesive binding (paper grain, if you must know). It hit him as a revelation, a glimpse into a much larger world of technique that he didn’t even know existed. And like a true craftsman, he was both intrigued, and respectful of his ignorance of this particular set of knowledge.
But it was time to leave. He returned the model I had loaned him, and pulled out the little bone folder I had given him.
“This thing is great! I’ll have to get one.”
“Keep it.”
“Sorry? No, seriously, . . . ”
“Keep it. I have several extras. They’re worth about three bucks. That one I’ve used, so it’ll have some of that additional history.”
“Wow . . .”
* * * * * * *
Age brings not just experience, but depth. That was a lesson I learned as a young man, from a book which was written long before I was born.
About fifteen years ago, I touched on this:
This isn’t a respect borne of fear for their sharpness. It is something more . . . something that is almost spiritual. When you use a tool, it tends to take on the shaping of the use, and of the user. It will conform to your hand, wear in such a way that it actually becomes more suited to the task, until in some ways it is easier to use the tool correctly than to use it incorrectly.
I think that this is why old tools, well made and well loved tools, are so valuable. When you take them to hand, you can feel the right way to use them. Some of the time that went into shaping that tool, training it for use, can be shared from one craftsman to the next. So long as the tool is loved, cared for, and properly used, it continues to accumulate knowledge, storing the wisdom of the hands.
Much of my life is predicated on this idea. When someone brings me an antique book for conservation work, I don’t see the notes and scrawls, the fingerprints and food stains, as something to be eradicated: they are part and parcel of the history of that book. They are scars, a record, a trace of the hands which have handled it, the lives which have loved it. We all carry our own scars, our own patina, and as long as we respect it, respect ourselves, for the record of our accomplishments, they give our age dignity. And depth.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 