orrery or keeping up appearances

Recognising elegance in simplicity—though the push to preserve the conceit that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe, convoluted as it is, displays a lot of genius and endured, placating our egocentrism for fifteen hundred years. Contrary to appearances, Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria, in contriving his model, even acknowledged himself in his introductory remarks that it would be far more straightforward if we orbited around the Sun.
Possibly astronomers and mathematicians of the time even derived a heliocentric arrangement, as a purely academic (if not heretical) pursuit. Insistence that the heavenly spheres must sweep out perfect circles—rather than degenerate ellipses, also was a major contributing factor in the overall refusal of the public and the scientific community to entertain any other sort of cosmology. Revolutionary as it was, the sun-centred solar system of Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei and despite the hard slog for acceptance, though ostensibly still true and accurate enough (when it’s not rocket-science), did not reign long itself before being toppled by Johannes Kepler, whose keen perception of the motion of planets—as the expression of gravity—displaced the Sun too, realising that it is not our star that leads in the waltz of planets. The principle of Ockham’s Razor does usually hold and these animations certainly impart a lesson in perceptive and relation but I wonder what else we might not be seeing for our clouded biases.

winterval or delogistics

It’s always a little sad to finally be packing up the Christmas decorations and decorously escorting the tree to the tree graveyard. We bid the ornaments a fond adieu until next year. With all that science can give us, however, one would think that they at least could genetically engineer Angels’ Hair (tinsel) to mature in that tatty green basket grass in time for Easter—or the municipal Christmas tree to shed down to a ready Maypole.  Maybe that’s how it used to be done.

6x6

nxnw: striking storyboard illustrations for Alfred Hitchcock films, from Everlasting Blort

baby grand: enjoy the musical stylings of this virtuoso of the toy piano

minifig: get a LEGO head made in your likeness

chewie lewis and the news: clever series of Star Wars album cover remixes—Rebel Rebel is my favourite

barons of industry: an appreciation of the bold and post-modern artwork of Fortune magazine

allemande, promenade: dinosaurs probably performed elaborate mating-dances like birds do—it would be funny to see a tyrannosaurus hoedown

sands of time

This wholly natural occurrence seems rather incredulous (especially if we were to encounter such a formation on Mars) but this “scratch circle” (Scharrkreise) happens when in windy wintertime a dry reed of dune grass is allowed to sweep out a perfect circle unimpeded, pivoting around its bent stalk.

tincture

Harvard University’s school of art conservation and restoration has amassed a formidable infirmary, medicine cabinet after medicine cabinet used to doctor and resuscitate faded works of art, in the form of a vast and unique collection of ancient and artisanal pigments from around the world. The public can visit this workshop and marvel and the chemistry of colour—an indispensable resource for revitalising damaged masterpieces with their true hues—and learn more about each sample’s provenance, like toxic green and the particular yellow derived from cows fed on an exclusive diet of mango leaves.

la mort et les statues

Correspondent Messy Nessy Chic documents, in a very well researched and composed article, the sad and little regarded fate of the avante garde statuary that peopled the avenues of Paris during the Third Republic.
With preservation of the many artful bronzes being the exception and not the rule, most were dismantled and melted down for scrap, lest the style or personages represented offend—or outright threaten—the occupying regime. The caretaker Vichy government of France was accused of giving into too many demands as it was, and of course the concessions that wartime France one did not solely hinge on removing controversial public art and did manage to avoid graver insult. The fact that this demolition was recorded and can be revisited presently, the figures still serve to represent all victims of war as all monuments and memorials do. Though of a vastly different character, these scenes parallel the time we visited the Citadel of Spandau to find a heap of displaced statues.

gestalting or pinky and the brain

Via the always engaging The Browser comes a fascinating investigation into the ethics of genetic experimentation and hybridisation. Such husbandry is just about marrying up the right DNA—which does present technical hurdles though brute technology is quick to obtain and accommodate pathways that are penitentially advantageous to humans as organ farms, a repository of spare-parts, but from some fronts bodes caution, lest these chimera achieve an animal-singularity.
Personally, I couldn’t say that there was some enduring uniqueness to modes of human consciousness that make us special or so horrifyingly privileged. Some ethically-minded individuals are expressing concern that a human mind trapped in a laboratory rat’s body (reading gestating as gestalting) would elicit outrage. I’d dare to submit that an unadulterated rat probably is thinking along those very lines without some imagined vital spark. What do you think? Perhaps humans ought to be spliced with some humanity.