Xmitter » 2010 » June

Earthquake data

Frank — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:30:29 +0000

There's a lot of pretty interesting data available at the USGS website, including maps of witness reported earthquake intensity. The 5.0 magnitude quake that hit the Ottawa area generated about 50,000 reports from people that felt it.

Star Trek: Tik Tok

Frank — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 15:32:24 +0000

This is pretty much awesome. Via at least three friends on the Facebook.

Summer is Here

Frank — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:31:28 +0000

Pale Blue Dot

Frank — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:14:48 +0000

Mostly, this is here for my own reference. Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot reading.

Velosynth

Frank — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 01:20:58 +0000

I really want one of these Velosynth devices to play with. It's a smart, hackable glitch noisemaker you can attach to your bike. It's like the super nerdy version of the playing cards in the spokes trick. Totally badass. Also, it came from Portland. OF COURSE it came from Portland.

Comments

Frank — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 02:58:00 +0000

The recent posts over on Daring Fireball about comments have gotten me thinking about just disabling them and throwing them all out here. Not on LJ or Facebook, that seems to be where comments are actually useful for me, but here it's all just spam on older posts.

I dunno, does it matter? Probably not.

[Edit: comments are turned off now. No big whup.]

Mammatus Clouds in Portland

Frank — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:16:24 +0000

Check out these mammatus clouds.

Botticelli and Jimsonweed

Frank — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:09:53 +0000

Rebecca pointed me at this article from NPR in which art historian David Bellingham posits that the Botticelli painting "Venus and Mars" depicts Mars in a state of intoxication from ingesting Datura, also known as Jimsonweed shown in the borders of the painting. Datura is a hallucinogenic and poisonous relative of Belladonna, also known as Deadly Nightshade. This sounds plausible, if in fact Datura use was known in Europe at the time of the painting. What sounds way less plausible to me is when Bellingham says that art historians overlooked the Datura in the painting because they thought that Botticelli was "probably just making a pretty frame to the painting."

I don't think any art historians thought that. Especially not about Botticelli or other artists of his time. Any art historian familiar with the period would know that any object, flora, fauna, person, deity, could be and are often used as symbols, puns, inside references, jokes, tributes, etc. The meanings of these various things might not be known exactly, but they are assumed to have been used for subtle or not so subtle symbolic purposes. In Art in Renaissance Italy an example is given of Botticelli's "Primavera" in which the figure of Venus is haloed by a laurel bush in the back

ground. This is thought by the authors to represent not just a "pretty frame" but to be a homophonic reference to Lorenzo di Medici of Florence, Botticelli's patron and financial backer. In Marjorie Stokstad's Art History the orange trees in this same painting are pointed out as a symbol of some kind representing the Medici clan. It's not fair to say that art historians somehow 'missed' the jimsonweed hanging out in this painting. I think it's more likely that this interpretation was passed over because it's not known if datura use was even present at the time and place when this painting was completed. It's definitely provocative, though. Mars certainly looks like he's stoned, but I think more research would be needed to really say for certain.

The Forest

Frank — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 02:42:33 +0000

I finally got around to uploading some pictures from our last couple of camping excursions. These are all from the Hood Forest.

This one I think is crazy how green it is. Rowan practically blends right into the forest with his florescent green shirt.

So then this one is a close up of these weird rows of holes that went all the way up a tree in the campground we were staying at. I guess they were from some insect that burrowed in and ate the tree, but it's pretty weird how regular the rows of holes are.

And here's some dew on a plant from the middle of the river. There are others in flickr, but these are some that stuck out to me.

Locals vs Tourists

Frank — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 02:18:57 +0000

Laughing Squid posted about a project that's mapping geotagged photos taken by tourists vs those taken by locals.

Here's Portland. The blue dots are locals and the red are tourists: