Be quiet the doctor's wife said gently, let's all keep quiet, there are times when words serve no purpose, if only I, too, could weep, say everything with tears, not have to speak in order to be understood.
This page renders best in Firefox (or Safari, or Chrome)
Pretty Pictures
Images I have found striking over the years.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
At Discover Magazine's Bad Astronomy blog, I find new pictures of Mars from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (Thanks for the link, cleek!) The pictures of Martian sand dunes make a beautiful desktop background, so think I: (To a first order approximation, this is formations produced by the interaction between sand storms and frozen CO2.)
(Clicking on the "Full image (grayscale, non-map projected)" to the right under "JPEG Products" will give you a very large image file which you can crop at your leisure...)
posted evening of January 14th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Wallpaper
Mary put out her hands to receive the earthenware bowl, which, through some extraordinary optical illusion, perhaps due to the light of the sky, was transformed into a vessel of the purest gold.
I started reading Saramago's Gospel According to Jesus Christ last night, the book which precipitated his self-imposed exile from Portugal. Taken aback by the grandeur of the heresy he lays out and by the subtle beauty with which he commits it. His voice describing Galilee and its denizens, and Mary and Joseph, has a familiar ring to it -- this book is very clearly written by the author of Balthazar and Blimunda.
By happy coincidence I was at the Brooklyn Museum today and got a chance to look at their collection of James Tissot's watercolors of The Life of Christ -- beautiful, meticulously researched and composed. Tissot is of course coming from a very different place than Saramago. But the commitment to a naturalistic rendering of Christ's life had me thinking of Saramago's work as I looked through this exhibition.
A few reading notes: The opening of the novel is a detailed description of a painting of the Passion, it had me wondering whether Saramago is describing a particular existing painting or a fictitious composite work. In the third chapter, when Joseph tells his tale to the council of elders, they send a delegation composed of Zacchæus, Dothan, and Abiathar ("names recorded here to forestall any suspicion of historical inaccuracy in the minds of those who have acquired their version of the story from other sources" -- ha!) to question Mary about her vision; I wonder where Saramago is getting this bit from. The three names are Biblical but I'm not finding any connection to the story of Jesus' conception.
A couple of videos for your viewing pleasure and enlightenment. From paledave at Orbis TerQuintus, an animated visualization of The Known Universe, from the surface of the earth to 5 billion light years away, and back. It is done by the American Museam of Natural History and the Rubin Museum of Art -- I have seen similar productions before, this one is really graceful and pretty.
I have seen a lot of links over the past few days to this story about the observation of tool use by octopodes in Indonesia -- today my dad sent me the link and I finally went and took a look. Thanks, dad! Pretty amazing to watch:
At Skytopia, Daniel White has written up a 3-dimensional extension of the Mandelbrot set, with extraordinary renderings of it at different levels of magnification, and with different parameters to the equation. I am finding it easy to imagine jumping into this, climbing around on it like a toddler on an endless jungle gym.
...And, there looks to be a whole lot of other engaging stuff on the site, I haven't really started to look it over yet. Thanks for the link, Russ!
Happy Armistice Day! (And to our Latvian readers, happy Lāčplēsis Day!) The guns of August have ceased their roar. A good time to hope that we will see an end to the wars that plague our world today.
In this week's NY Times Magazine, Negar Azimi takes a look at the Museum of Innocence Orhan Pamuk is constructing in Istanbul. Pamuk says, "My novel honors the museums that no one goes to, the ones in which you can hear your own footsteps."
Arthur Ganson specializes in kinetic sculptures. Thanks to Martha for pointing this out -- this is great, addictive stuff! I am sorry I'm not in Cambridge to see his show at M.I.T.
Besides the Magdalene to the right (who seems like a appropriate emblem for this site), I was really taken with this picture of Philippe de Croÿ, the right half of a diptych:
At A Journey Round My Skull (which looks in general to be a fantastic source for trippy imagery -- thanks for linking to it, badger!), Will posts several illustrations from Russian Fairy Tales (1945), drawn by Alexandre Alexeïeff; also, a link to the pinscreen animation work of Alexeïeff and his wife and partner Claire Parker. The Nose, adapted from Gogol:
posted evening of September 30th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Animation
