Saturday, May 21, 2016

We are perishing for want of wonder...

Excerpts from a live performance by J. Peter Schwalm, Eivind Aarset, and Sophie Clements.

What do physics and jazz have in common? More than you might think, starting with Pythagoras of theorem fame who also created the Western music scale. But Coltrane and Einstein?

How Fort Worth got its name.

How much money you need to live comfortably in Fort Worth is $51,759 which corresponds nicely with $52,492, the city's median income. (While the precision of those figures is doubtful, the article's criteria of income uses (50% necessary expenses, 30% fun, 20% savings) is perhaps the more thought provoking factoid.)

Fort Worth is also the 21st best city in the U.S. to start a career. Madison, WI is lucky #13.

How loud is it where you are? Get a rating between 50 (loud) and 100 (quiet) using Soundscore by just typing in your address. (Work got a 70, home got a 78.)

Frank Stella 

Frank Stella, Chodorow II, 1971. source


An article about the Frank Stella retrospective at The Modern. Frank's body of work makes younger artists think "Man, I hope I can still piss people off when I'm 80 years old."

Fort Worth Texas magazine includes this quote about Stella: "I would argue that they are the most physical paintings made in the 20th century."

The WSJ wrote about Stella's retrospective at it appeared at the Whitney.

A Stella-inspired floral arrangement.

Frank Stella was interviewed on the Modern Art Notes podcast.

A bit about Michael Auping, curator of the Stella retrospective.

Recording of Auping interviewing Stella at The Modern.

End

Space Geeks: a photo essay on the evolution of spacecraft cockpit displays. Sci Fi geeks: fold an origami Tie Fighter.

The periodic table of typefaces. See this one and more here
Eric Schlosser's excellent book Command and Control, about a 1980 incident in Arkansas that had the potential to detonate a 9 Mt nuke, has been turned into a film that I would really like to see. Since it's one of those American Experience films, I'm hoping it'll end up on PBS some day.

In 1956, the U.S. nuke target list included over 1,100 targets in Europe, Russia, and China. See them here.

Physicists tell us our universe only has three spatial dimensions because of the laws of thermodynamics. Interesting, but the article is a bit hard to follow. What would be more interesting to me is why our fourth dimension, time, is the only one in which we can't travel backwards.

Sleeping Beauty, long exposure photograph by Jason Shulman. See more at his site.
A new outfit for the Predator's 2018 movie?

This video series is from 1999 but it's still good. This is Modern Art by Matthew Collings.

  1. I Am a Genius
  2. Shock! Horror!
  3. Lovely Lovely
  4. Nothing Matters
  5. Hollow Laughter
  6. The Shock of the Now


Can deep learning help create The Next Rembrandt?

If we can create the next Rembrandt, will CaptionBot recognize it?

Of these 16 body language mistakes that make people mistrust you, I do seven. Crap.

Why do old statues have small penises? (Answer: they really don't relatively speaking.)

...not for want of wonders. ~G.K. Chesterton

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I thought answer to the statue question was that the models were Jewish

John said...

Oy. Folks these days see everything thru a pr0n filter.