Last week on November 29th the Grand Canyon experienced a rare temperature inversion where cool air began to rise from the bottom of the canyon and met warm air above creating low level clouds. Apparently this type of thing happens once or twice a year, but almost never with clear skies which provided an unprecedented once-in-a-decade view of the canyon filled to the rim with fog. Several photographers were on hand including Ben Mayberry who captured some amazing panoramic shots, and Paul Lettieri managed to shoot a timelapse of the event.
Elinor Wrobel, eighty, isn’t your typical collector. At home, rooms are filled with art, costumes and objects, but in the heart of Sydney, Australia, Elinor spends her days preserving hundreds of human body parts collected from the Sydney Hospital Morgue. The Morbid Anatomy museum, housed in Sydney Hospital, is lined with glass jars showing the disease and suffering of bygone generations.
A former nurse, art collector and curator, Elinor recovered the collection from a musty attic crawling with cockroaches and fought tooth and nail for the specimens to be restored and exhibited to the public. Several times, hospital administrators have sought to transfer the specimens elsewhere, or convert the museum into office spaces, but so far Wrobel has prevailed. She believes the hundreds of unique anatomical specimens from people dating back to the 1890s are not only an important resource for medical students, but also a “beautiful” reminder of our own mortality.
Rock climbing is not a well known sport and it receives little media attention outside its own inner circle. But among climbing fans, it does have its professionals... and then it has its superstars. Chris Sharma is easily the most well known rock climber in the world and he deserves it. There are only a few people who have sent the hardest routes that he has climbed. Apple - Chris Sharma from Corey Rich on Vimeo.
This is the work of an engineering genius. The automaton was made by a clock maker 240 years ago. It is built from over 6000 moving parts and its hand actually dips a quill pen into ink and then moves over and writes a complete sentence onto a piece of paper. It could be thought of as a mechanical predecessor to the modern programmable computer.
Do you remember that devastating tornado this past Spring in Moore, Oklahoma and the VERY awkward CNN interview where Wolf Blitzer asked the woman who had survived the tornado but lost her house, "You've got to thank the lord, don't you?" And she replied, "I'm actually an atheist"... Well this video is a very moving interview with her months after the tornado and the Wolf Blitzer interview that went viral and changed her life.
What I didn't realize at the time of the original CNN interview is that up until that point she was in the closet as an atheist to her family, her extended family and many of her friends. So her decision to say, "I'm actually an atheist" on national television meant that now all of those people knew about her lack of belief in god, divine intervention, the afterlife, etc... And in a place as conservative and religious as Oklahoma (my entire extended family lives in Oklahoma, so I know), that is a truly brave thing to do given the potential fallout of relationships with friends and family.
I've recently come across two unexpected and possibly revolutionary inventions for bicycles as the mode of transportation becomes a more and more viable way to commute around cities that are becoming increasingly dense.
The first is an "electric bicycle wheel", which fits on most bikes and turns any regular bicycle into a motorized rechargeable electric bicycle.
And the second invention is an "invisible" bicycle helmet. How it actually works came as a complete surprise to me, so I won't spoil it by describing. Just watch, it's amazing.
What if every light bulb in the world could also transmit data? At
TEDGlobal, Harald Haas demonstrates, for the first time, a device that
could do exactly that. By flickering the light from a single LED, a
change too quick for the human eye to detect, he can transmit far more
data than a cellular tower -- and do it in a way that's more efficient,
secure and widespread.
This guy is doing with photography and digital manipulation whatRené Magritteand M.C. Escher did with drawing and painting. Pretty interesting stuff. I wish they didn't cut off his talk at the end, he was just getting around to explaining how he actually created these images.
The tower was designed to house high end luxury condominiums but has since fallen into a state of complete neglect and is now a vertical ghetto. The original intent for the architecture was to allow light into both the exterior and the interior sides of the condos, but so little light actually reaches the bottom that it feels like a dystopian nightmarish bottomless pit. At the ground level trash has accumulated over the years and has become a garbage pit almost three stories tall.
A good Halloween post... Do you remember the satanic panic of the 1980's? Dungeons and Dragons, heavy metal, Lord of the Rings and anything that even smacked of the fantasy genre was automatically associated with Satanism. This video shows how it was taken to the level of complete absurdity on evangelical talk shows.
I hadn't heard of this process. This sounds like an interesting alternative to fossil fuels in the cases of powering large vehicles such as trucks and airliners where wind, solar and electric are not feasible alternatives.
The Holy Grail in the renewable energy sector has been to create a
clean, green process which uses only light, water and air to create
fuel. Valcent's HDVB algae-to-biofuel technology mass produces algae,
vegetable oil which is suitable for refining into a cost-effective,
non-polluting biodiesel. The algae derived fuel will be an energy
efficient replacement for fossil fuels and can be used in any diesel
powered vehicle or machinery. In addition, 90% by weight of the algae is
captured carbon dioxide, which is "sequestered" by this process and so
contributes significantly to the reduction of greenhouse gases. Valcent
has commissioned the world's first commercial-scale bioreactor pilot
project at its test facility in El Paso, Texas.
Here is another video on an algae bioreactor that is hooked up to to the smokestack of a fossil fuel power plant and not only captures 80% of the smokestack's CO2 emissions, the algae actually use that CO2 as food to grow and the result can then be refined into clean-burning biofuel... Unbelievable.
I'm adding this to my Netflix queue right now. Gregory Crewdson is arguably the most famous living American photographer today. His work is both dreamlike and hyper-real in a very unsettling way. Every tiny detail in his photographs has been fussed over and, behind the scenes, the sets for his photographs often look like the film sets for major motion pictures. Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters Trailer from Benjamin Shapiro on Vimeo.
I haven't seen a takedown like this in a congressional hearing in a very long time. She breaks down the basic mathematics of the situation and makes it painfully clear that the actual increases in food prices at restaurants would be almost zero compared to the doomsday scenarios put forward by CEO's like this one who don't want to see any increase in the minimum wage.
I am finally getting around to posting some photos from a rock climbing trip last weekend at a little known gem called McGee Creek state park near Atoka, Oklahoma. It's only about two hours from the DFW area and we couldn't have asked for better weather. A cool front had moved through the day before, so it was nice and dry with a high temperature in the 70's.
This was a nice overhanging arête climb. It's a hard 5.10 grade below and then much easier past the lip.
We pretty much had the entire park to ourselves.
The first long sleeves day of the Fall is always reason for celebration in my books.
Found a Walking Stick!!!
View from the overlook. The crag is down below.
This 35' foot corner crack was actually the harder climb. Not much for hand holds. It was a pretty sustained 5.10 climb throughout with almost no rest spots. My feet were about ten feet off the ground at this point.
The rock in this park was good quality sandstone with lots of interesting features.
There is something entirely satisfying about setting this Smiths song to a mashup of badly acted infomercials. I think it may have something to do with the fact that so many Smiths songs are about teenage longing and depression, which always seems so laughable to everyone EXCEPT the teenager in question. For them, no one has EVER experienced the depths of the misery they are experiencing.
A nineteen year old inventor has come up with a method that he says could clean up the great pacific garbage patch in just five years time, and at a profit.
I had heard about the discovery and exploration of this cave five or so years ago. It's nice to see it documented so beautifully in this National Geographic film. It kind of brings together a whole host of personal interests of mine: nature, exploration of the unknown, caving and rock climbing.
"Starting with a straight line, I draw each following sequence by
copying the character of the previous. I concentrate on breathing and
focus on drawing the successor. Again and once more. Again and again. In
the process of drawing, my lines evolve into a kind of logarithmic
pattern and layering, steered merely by aberrances and anomalies of
human failure in contrast to the precision of a machine."
I've seen aerial footage of the 2011 tsunami in Japan, but that doesn't do much to show the catastrophic damage on a human scale. This video is taken with a hand held camera in a town that straddles an inland river. The first few minutes of the video show the river as very peaceful and people are almost nonchalant about the warning sirens and loudspeaker announcements. Around the three minute mark the first bit of rising tide starts to push upriver and from there it grows into something that I could only describe as a Bosch-like vision of hell. I am trying to break my habit of overusing words like 'incredible' and 'amazing' on this blog, but it's hard to believe that anything this horrifying actually occurred and was not the set of some Hollywood doomsday movie.
You might think that this beautifully dark version of 'Jolene' was done by some obscure freak-folk band, but it is in fact the 45 RPM single of Dolly Parton's original version of 'Jolene' slowed down to 33 RPM. The vocals almost sound like Nina Simone.
At long last!!! A decent copy of the severely underrated film, 'Rubin and Ed', has finally been posted on youtube! This 1991 film starring Crispin Glover, Howard Hessman and the recently deceased Karen Black has been out of print since the early 1990's. My deep gratitude to the uploader!
The Strawbs were one of those psychedelic folk bands that slipped through the cracks. This song definitely shows the darker side of psychedelic music. In this anti-war song I can hear elements that I think the Pogues probably picked up on.
Detail upon detail upon detail... It would probably be overwhelming to actually live in a house such as this... One of those incredible life-works of an eccentric mind.
'Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why'
is a book by Bart D. Ehrman, a New Testament scholar at University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The book introduces lay readers to the
field of textual criticism of the Bible. Ehrman discusses a number of
textual variants that resulted from intentional or accidental manuscript
changes during the scriptorium era. This book made it to the New York
Times Best Seller list.
Cameras mounted on the booster rockets of the space shuttle take you on a ride through the launch, the detachment and the touchdown. I was amazed that the two booster rockets landed so close to one another.
I hadn't heard of this technology! It is still very much in the theoretical stage, but is still interesting to think about. Elon Musk, the man behind Space X and Tesla motors, wants to build an ultra fast transportation system based on vacuum tubes and the magnetic levitation system already in use on high speed trains. Capsules containing four to six people would travel through these vacuum tubes completely free of both metal and wind friction as speeds up to 4000 MPH! It sounds like a great idea... I'll reserve my judgement until I see if they can get it to work.
It's amazing to see that these aren't animated at all, but recorded in real time with only the person's hand pushing the transparency across the page to create the Moiré patterns.
Ancient Chinese texts and social media meet in a new giant light show at the Beijing National Aquatics Center. "Nature and Man in Rhapsody of Light at the Water Cube," an installation created by artist Jennifer Wen Ma and lighting designer Zheng Jianwei, uses a computer program to translate I Ching and the collective mood of the Chinese people into a stunning real-time light display on the building's exterior.
It's interesting to hear Richard Dawkins sit down in conversation with biblical historian, John Huddlestun, a scholar who studies biblical myths from an evidence-based historical approach. It seems that Dawkins was trying to keep the discussion brief, but I would have loved to have heard more from the historian on the questions posed by Dawkins. I could easily see this 30 minute conversation expanded into a more meaty 2 hour discussion.
I'm looking forward to getting outdoors this weekend at Paradise on the Brazos. It's about 2.5 hours west of Dallas near Possum Kingdom lake and it's some of the only natural climbing we have in the north Texas area. The walls are about 40 feet high, so it's almost twice as high as most climbing gyms. It's always nice to climb outdoors because natural rock is such a different experience from the plywood walls and plastic holds at the gyms. At the gyms you have these pre-set routes that are designed for climbing, but outdoors the rock has no such design and you have to have to adapt yourself to it instead. This will be my first lead climbing experience outdoors, so that will involve a bit of a learning curve. Having to clip your rope in as you go up is a whole different experience from top-roping where the rope is anchored at the top.
We'll be camping out in a tent the night before, then we'll wake up early and climb while it's still cool. This is a video someone filmed on a climbing trip to POB where I'll be going. Pardon the Guns and Roses (use the mute button if necessary).
I thought I would post this after the Texas GOP passed a monumentally bad law yesterday restricting women's already restricted access to safe abortion services. The blueing of Texas can't happen soon enough and I can't wait to see fucking Rick Perry and the rest of the Grand Old Jackasses kicked out of office.
...And I thought V15 was as hard as bouldering problems got. I guess I was wrong. I've personally done a few V5's and those just about killed me. Imagine something literally three times as hard.
This guy's technique is so flawless that he makes these incredibly difficult moves look easy. The toe-hooks and heel-hooks are what I am fascinated by. But equally interesting is his creativity in finding spots to rest, for example the knee-jam where he hangs hands-free or the spot where he grabs his own shoe for a jug hold to rest on.
Commentary from Chris Parker via Rock and Ice magazine:
Repeating a 70-move, V15 roof climb was not quite enough for the
Australian boulderer James Kassay. In fact, he wanted to make the
problem harder! The line Kassay envisioned was a direct finish to Dai
Koyamada's 2004 testpiece The Wheel of Life (V15), which climbs
through the belly of the Hollow Mountain Cave in the Grampians of
Australia. In 2011, Kassay repeated Koyamada's original problem, and
then set to work on adding a more difficult finish. A year later,
Kassay's links became longer and longer, until one November day, he sent
TheWheel of Life Direct. Could Kassay's creation
warrant the coveted V16 grade? Decide for yourself as you watch the
video below and marvel at Kassay's flawless technique and unique rests
such as grabbing his own climbing shoe!
Another great video from The Creators Project. I personally know a few artists who work in this manner, but I don't think any of them have taken it quite this far.
Using sensors to detect and track visitors in the room, the piece lets you enter a downpour. As you timidly move forward, the rain around you ceases to fall overhead, allowing a glimpse into what it might be like to control the rain.
DNA Portrait is a lovely short documentary shot by TED's own Kari
Mulholland. It features the work of the artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg,
who spent time collecting hairs shed in public spaces... and then
sequencing the DNA therein to print 3D sculptures of what those hairs'
owners might look like. Whoa. The film is also the secret story of the
lab run by TEDGlobal 2012 speaker, Ellen Jorgensen. At Genspace, people
are able to experiment with DNA-based technology, regardless of their
scientific knowledge or experience. As Jorgensen comments in the film,
Dewey-Hagborg's work is super interesting, not to mention searingly
contemporary. "It's a very accessible way for the public to engage with
this new technology. It really brings it to light how powerful it is,
the idea that a hair from your head can fall on your street and a
perfect stranger can pick it up and know something about it," she says,
adding: "With DNA sequencing becoming faster and cheaper, this is the
world we're all going to be living in."
In 1927 Claude Friese-Greene shot some of the first-ever color film
footage around London. He captured everyday life in the city with a
technique innovated by his father, called Biocolour.
This is possibly the most beautiful cinematography of a weather event I have ever seen. It's filmed in super high definition and you can see every little nuance of the cloud formation. Purely by coincidence the storm was near Booker, Texas (no relation to me that I know of).
I may have to get this new album. The Boards of Canada's slightly wobbly synth lines have always reminded me of the soundtracks to 1970's film documentaries I watched in elementary school. The motors on the film projectors were never perfectly steady so the soundtrack of the film was always slightly wobbly. It's funny that I just realized that the group got their name from the National Film Board of Canada. This video from their new album is also so very reminiscent of 1970's documentaries and art films, complete with desert scenes, intentional lens-flares and grainy film dust.
I may have posted about this visual phenomenon a few years ago. There have been lots of Youtube videos that conduct similar experiments, but I think this one is really nicely done.
Friday was the opening reception for my two-person exhibition at the Anya Tish gallery in Houston. The show was called "Uncharted Waters". I focused completely on sculpture for this exhibition. I only had three months to prepare for this show so I've been doing nothing but artwork 24/7 lately. It's nice to finally get a break and catch up on housework, yardwork and maybe even pay more attention to my neglected blog.
Here are some works from the show:
Pink and Gold Hexagons #1, 2013, ink, lexan, steel pins
I've posted a lot about the Swans lately, but this is a really great mini-documentary about the band's recent work. Michael Gira is kind of a personal hero of mine for the way he has taken a project he started thirty years ago and re-formed it into something that is even better than the original conception.
I've seen the Swans play three times and it looks like they finally played their signature song, "Coward" on this past tour, which I regret to say, I didn't go when they came to Dallas (in the past they have always been particularly shitty about never playing that song live). I'm an asshole and I've been kicking myself since that night when I made the conscious decision to stay home. I would've had to drive 45 minutes into Dallas, go to the show alone and then get up the next morning and teach an early morning class... Blah, blah... But the older you get, the easier it is to talk yourself out of having to go to a club with a bunch of drunken testosterone fueled assholes in the audience late at night to see a band play... I'm not even sure they played "Coward" here in Dallas, but according to youtube there were quite a few stops along the tour where they did play it, so chances are that they did... Kicking myself in the ass...
This is a very percussion-heavy song, so here is another version filmed in Copenhagen which shows a better view of the interplay between the two drummers.
EVERYTHING WILL BE OK is the first chapter of a three-part story about a
man named Bill. It was released in 2006 and the following year received
the Sundance Film Festival's Jury Award in Short Filmmaking.
Tonight I raise a glass of Maker's Mark to one of country and western's greatest singers and songwriters. George Jones died today at the age of 81. I have to commend him for his longevity.
I remember first hearing the song "White Lightning" in a pickup truck in the middle of a cow pasture with my grandfather on his farm in southern Oklahoma. I couldn't have been older than ten at the time. That song was burned into my head and it was my favorite country and western song from then until this day. But it wasn't until my early thirties that I realized it was written and performed by none other than George Jones.
Allan Savory's solution to the problem of desertification runs completely counter to my intuition and everything I've been taught about why desertification happens in the first place, but his solution seems to be proven to work.
“Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,”
begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And it's happening to
about two-thirds of the world’s grasslands, accelerating climate change
and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos.
Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes -- and his
work so far shows -- that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and
even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.
This is from Ryan Teague's recent album, Field Drawings.
"The movements of a music box ballerina are reinterpreted in a
groundbreaking video for British composer Ryan Teague using
electromagnetic fields, sub zero temperatures and 2000 volts of
electricity."
I thought this was a very interesting discussion on the properties of color when it comes to projected light. When I give my color theory lecture in my design class I have to explain how the properties of color are completely different depending on whether you are dealing with projected light or reflected light.
When light is being projected from a light source such as a digital projector or a television the three primary colors are red, green and blue; hence the initials RGB. And when you mix those three primary colors together you get white light.
But when white light is reflected off of an object that does not itself emit light, such as a painting, the primary colors you would use to mix the colors on that painting would be red, yellow and blue. And when you mix all three of those primaries together you end up with black or dark brown paint.
And then to complicate matters even further, I explain that the three-color printing process has still it's own set of primary colors. If you've ever had to replace ink cartridges in your printer you know that the three primaries for printers are magenta, cyan and yellow.
I've always been a goth at heart. Medical oddities are prominent in my darker macabre interests.
"Disturbingly informative," is how museum director Robert Hicks describes Philadelphia's Mütter Museum--items of interest include a gangrenous hand, wax models of extinct diseases, deformed bones and body parts. Now imagine what's in the basement. Science Friday got a behind-the-scenes tour.
This is one of the most persuasive lectures I have seen discussing the possibility of a multiverse, which is the idea our own universe may be just one among a boiling sea of universes. This lecture is more action-packed, but on a very similar subject to a lecture I posted a few years ago by Lawrence Krauss.
Here is John Cleese explaining the human brain as only he can do it. After you've watched it once, turn on the closed-captions and watch the Youtube translator self destruct.
Wow!!! Talk about an odd pairing, but John Paul Jones, the legendary bass player for Led Zepplin has teamed up the un-categorizable 'deathjazzambientavantrock' ensemble known as Supersilent. I knew that Jones was responsible for some of the more experimental leanings of Led Zepplin, but it's great to see him still out there pushing the boundaries at age 67.
KCRW Presents: Matmos
April 3, 2013. The crazy-smart producers Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt join Jason Bentley on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic to play songs from their new album as Matmos, The Marriage of True Minds. Watch them perform "Aetheric Vehicle."
I've always thought that requiring an artist to write an "artist's statement" is a bit like requiring a writer to illustrate their own book.
William Powhida, “Artists Statement (No One Here Gets Out Alive)”
(2009), graphite and colored pencil on paper, 18″x15″ (Image courtesy
the artist and Charlie James Gallery)
Apparently, moshpits and heated gas molecules have a lot in common. Play with the controls on the flocking simulator to get different levels of chaos.
From: http://mattbierbaum.github.com/moshpits.js/
Listen to the news story about the science behind the simulator on NPR.
One of the most amazing TED talks I've seen in a long time.
Can we use our brains to directly control machines -- without requiring a
body as the middleman? Miguel Nicolelis talks through an astonishing
experiment, in which a clever monkey in the US learns to control a
monkey avatar, and then a robot arm in Japan, purely with its thoughts.
The research has big implications for quadraplegic people -- and maybe
for all of us. (Filmed at TEDMED 2012.)
I love looking at antique views of how the future was supposed to be. This one was pretty damn close. The main thing he didn't predict is the fact that all of these communication machines are combined into a single machine... and that machine can fit into your pocket.
Although Kronkite's "kitchen of the future" is so far off the mark that the entire thing is laughable.
Legendary news anchor Walter Cronkite’s regular half-hour CBS
documentary program “The 21st Century” was a glorious peek into the
future. Every Sunday night viewers of the late 1960s were shown all the
exciting technological advancements they could expect to see just 30 or
40 years down the road. The March 12, 1967,
episode gave people a look at the home of the 21st century, complete
with 3D television, molded on-demand serving dishes, videophones,
inflatable furniture, satellite newspaper delivery and robot servants.
I thought this was an excellent critical dissection of the book, Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy... If you haven't read it, consider it an imperative to go out and pick up a copy and read it immediately.
In my opinion, the Judge is one of the most interesting characters in the entirety of modern fiction... I love the comparisons of the Judge to Milton's version of the Devil in Paradise Lost... I don't like many books, but I don't hesitate to put this book among the top ten works of fiction I have ever read.
The sound on this is pretty awful, but this is the legendary Dallas Trees show where Kurt Cobain jumps out into the audience and the bouncer, who is named Turner, is trying to pull him back to the safety of the stage and Cobain clocks Turner on the head with the butt of his guitar and then Turner clocks Cobain with a right hook and a boot to the ass... and then chaos ensues... The action starts around the 43:00 minute mark... I just thought I would post this one for posterity.
Only in Texas can a car get buried windshield deep in blowing tumbleweeds. Although, to be fair, tumbleweeds are apparently not native to Texas, but an invasive species of plant.
The ultimate full moon shot. Dean Potter walks a
highline at Cathedral Peak as the sun sets and the moon rises. Shot
from over 1 mile away with a Canon 800mm and 2X by Mikey Schaefer. mikeylikesrocks.com
