The will to win is meaningless...

<Tunes>

Today's soundtrack, suggested by friend Ray, is Dysnomia by Dawn of Midi.

Colin Edwin reports that recording the next Metallic Taste of Blood album is coming along nicely.

You can pre-order Eraldo Bernocchi's Omnipresence which is due out this month. (Or just stream it from the website.)

And all the videos from Harold Budd's Jane 1-11 are now on YouTube (in playlist form).

</Tunes>

How about a heat map of the world showing where the most photographs are taken? (Sorry, South Dakota.)

<Football>

On the eve of the Super Bowl (screw you NFL, I refuse to write "the big game") it's nice to read about the intellectual side of football.

I'm probably the last person to have seen this: more NFL from bad lip reading.

And there's these Super Bowl Haiku. So I too must give it a shot.

Final score unknown.
But I'll bet you real money
that halftime will suck.

Where football players come from.

</Football>

Enjoy Markus Reuter's solo ambient performance from 2010. 

<Abstraction>

What do we know to be true? I don't enjoy going to the dentist. And I'm not a huge fan of photography.

Despite that, an unscheduled dentist visit with its precursor waiting room time (thank you, National Geographic magazine) resulted in me finding a photographer whose work revealed something to me about abstract painting.

Kacper Kowalski's aerial photographs (see below) reveal the abstract in everyday life. We often think about the abstract as unreal or even contrived. Yet abstraction surrounds us. It is all a matter of perspective, literally so in Kowalski's work.

We all use abstractions everyday. An architect's drawings and renderings are abstractions of a real structure. An engineer's models of a system are abstractions of the physical reality. And these professional abstractions come in various levels from the hyper-realistic to the crude approximation. But these abstractions allow us to frame and express complex physical ideas in the same way that a painter's abstraction (pick one - impressionism, cubism surrealism, expressionism) allows them to express complex human ideas.

Too often I explain my lack of interest in photography by pointing at its realism as though it's diametrically opposite from abstraction. But Kowalski's work shows that the real can be made abstract simply by allowing us to see through another perspective.

From Polish aerial photographer Kacper Kowalski's Tracklog series.

And coincidentally, this week I came across the work of Carlos Sequin, a comp sci prof with expertise in computer aided design (CAD) who is also a sculptor. He observes "Often [science and art] are about intense observation and abstraction to obtain a deeper understanding of complex ideas and systems."

</Abstraction>

On the other hand, this amateur takes a stab at making modern art himself.

As does a Syracuse student, who makes rather nice Rothko-esque paintings on his iPhone.

Here's an interesting idea: don't buy, rent your fine art from Art Remba.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Claude Monet painted The Cliff, Etretat, Sunset on 05 Feb 1883 at 4:53 p.m.

<Lift>

Aviation nerds should enjoy reading this article about the competition between Convair's Kingfish and Lockheed's A-12.

Here you will find 26 previously unreleased photos of the Challenger disaster, found in someone's grandparent's house.

You've heard about first flights but have you heard about a zeroth flight? Watch this brief video of the unintended first flight of the F-16 which turned 40 years old today.

</Lift>

You're looking at possibly tens of millions of dollars: a nearly 30 carat blue diamond, found recently in South Africa.

I have mentioned here before the 8th incarnation of King Crimson. This article reveals that KC8 will be a touring band, playing "reconfigured" versions KC material rather than new stuff. So we must pin our hopes on a live album.

<Film>

How is funny made? Watch Louis CK, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais talk about funny.

Explore something darker: The Awareness, a short film about the eve of launching a self-aware computer.

Speaking of film with a dark edge, here's an interview with David Lynch.

And the ultimate in difficulty - understanding women. Because it's not about the nail. [Update: 01 Feb 2014] Someone else feels the same way.

Hopefully you have never seen any of these films that made less than $400 at the box office. 

The news that a new adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas is due in 2017 fills me with dread.

</Film>

There's still time to order this for your favorite Star Wars geek and have it delivered in time for Valentine's Day. Someone's been a naughty princess.

Yes indeed, this really says Spend the Night in a Giant Anus. (Note, this is not the same as spending it with a giant anus which my wife does all the time.)

...without the will to prepare. ~Knute Rockne (or many others to whom this quote is attributed)