Science yearly gives out awards for the best science images and visualizations. Here is one of this year's runners up:



This is “Visualizing the Bible” by Chris Harrison and Christoph Romhild. So they started at the left with Genesis, and put each bible verse along the white line toward the right. If any bible verse refers to a previous one, they draw a half-circle connecting them. The circles are color-coded by how far apart the verses are.

So it's very pretty, but I don't feel like I learn anything new about the Bible by looking at at, and that annoys me. Okay, so scholars have found lots of places it refers to itself, but I knew that. It seemed like you could get a lot more interesting information with this technique.
( this post is so wide you will never forgive me )

insomniac_tales says:
I'd like to read about your writing process. I get to read a lot of the finished products, but I'd like to know what goes into creating them (the strange little details: do you research or do you use things you already know about?). When do you usually write? Pen and paper or keyboard (or both)? And any other little thing you can think of that relates to you and writing.

That might be the single most direct invitation to be pretentious I've ever read. :) Here is five thousand words describing, in excruciating detail, everything that went through my head while writing a thousand-word story.
( You don't want to read about my writing process in tortuous length )
Skip that long mess, and vote in this poll:
Poll #1184202 And now for something completely different!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 39

Do you agree with the author of this article (you don't have to read the article, just the title: American Kids, Dumber than Dirt) that the people who are currently in primary education are stupider or less useful than the generation of which you are a member? (If you're not American, answer for your own country)

Hawaii is what you'd get if some far-future historian read a bunch of livejournal posts written by Americans and decided to try and reconstruct this "America" place. He gets the general shapes of things right, but the details are very wrong. Right melody, wrong words.

Take policemen. Our historian knows about policemen; he saw an old documentary on China once. So when he puts policemen in his slice of America, they're the sort that wear white gloves and blow incessantly on whistles.

He fares a lot better with that strange thing called "diners". He knows they server combination plates! He can do that: spam and teriyaki fried chicken is a combination plate, right? Also pies- dobash (chocolatey thing) and haupia (coconut custard). He knows there's a side dish that comes with every single meal, but nobody actually explains what "fries" are, so in his reconstructed Americana, all the diners and fast food joints offer rice instead.

His "chips" are shrimp flavored, and he knows that there are stores selling sweet tasting "candy" to eager children, but not that "candy" isn't pickled mango with preserved plum powder (bless his ill-informed soul; that stuff is great). Birds are particularly troublesome. He reads that all the city streets are beset by 'pigeons' and 'sparrows' who travel in huge flocks and defecate on statuary, and he picks out some likely species from a genetic bank: spotted dove, zebra dove, java sparrow.




And yet, somehow every time I come back to this place, it seems a little more like home.

So ages ago, caladri and I applied for a spot on the Mongol Rally. The general idea there is 'start in London, get a car, drive to Mongolia, raise money for some useful cause or another'.

We didn't get a spot and were waitlisted, waaaaaay down on the list.

A couple of weeks ago, they emailed us. Did we want a spot? They'd emailed us, of course, because nobody on the waiting list wanted to drive on nonexistant, radioactive, bandit-ridden "roads" fundraising for various Mongolian charities with less than a month's notice. Of course nobody took them up on it. That would be silly.

The shuttle comes to take us to the airport in three hours.

If you would like to hear about London, Prague, Chernobyl, Ulaan Bataar, Kazakhstan, or our miserable failure to get there: teamalala. Especially if you want to give us money. :)

Packing now. *panic*

Current Mood: scared

There's another city here, a ghost thing laid over New Orleans like fog and carnival.

You can look at any door and see how many living, and how many dead walked there, animals and waters and flame, shadows of the city that was. You can see where the water was, the intricate stained-glass lines it scrawled on the walls. After a week here, it's all second nature, to look around and see the City That Was, that one day in August frozen here forever.

When we got here, it was Babel to us, jumbled rubble and spraypaint and sidewalks that unravel into nothing. But it's like learning to read. One day you look around and realize all those wierd black shapes mean something, amke letters and words and music; one day you look around and realize you can see the people and the light and the waters, the City That Was curled around your shoulders.

When we're clearing a house, I find myself absent-mindedly turning mirrors to the wall, like I'm not quite sure which I'd see in them, the ghost city, or the city that goes on breathing. caladri finds a note behind a mirror, some long-forgotten prayer from the City that Was.

We're done now, and back on the road towards home. Working here was painful and uplifting by turns, transcendant and ashen.

We'll be back. You should come too.

Current Mood: tired

Five minutes before the housewarming, it was an unmitigated disaster. We had trouble getting the regulator on our last-minute oxygen tank, cooking half the food we wanted to, the firebrick for the furnace had cracked, the copper ore was lost in the mail, the interplanetary magnetic field chose to deny us the auroras we'd been hoping to show our guests.

Five minutes after the housewarming, there's a line, like ducklings, of homemade misshapen shotglasses on the windowsill. The furnace is full of melted copper in knobbly coral growths (even if we don't know it yet), the whole house smells like naphtha and cryptocrystalline and corn roasted in the smelting furnace, pumpkin curry and smoke.

Pictures (of which there are very many) are by either wazm, flicker site or caladri, gallery, or robogock, whose gallery is here.

( glassworking )
( furnace )
( the house )
House: warmed.

If you wanted to make a shotglass and didn't because the oxygen tank ran out, consider this your free shotglass coupon. Email us and schedule a time to come do it. :)

Whee!

caladri and I need to warm our (Seattle) house! Please come help us make glass beads, cook in the fireplace, make pyrex shot glasses, play with naphtha, make s'mores, (and possibly smelt copper or sinter silver, depending on interest - there are only two of us, and we do want some social time), bake fall foods, drink cider, and generally be exothermic!

A long mellow affair, starting at noon on October 21 and going into the night til we're done. Show up and leave whenever you like.

Bring your own body heat; we'll provide the rest of the entropy. :)

Come?

Poll #832340
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 59

Will you you help us increase the entropy of the house?

I now have internet at home! I can spam livejournal with hundreds of trivial "what I did today" posts! Mwahaha!
What I did:
( fire )
( ice )
( boom )

Current Mood: it's a good life

Last night I missed my bus, and had the longer-than-usual walk home, though the wildlife refuge. Sometimes the universe turns inside out, when I've been at work too long, or just long enough, perhaps. I work with structural ecologists, people trying to understand the shapes trees make. The walls in the lab are covered with pencil sketches of the spaces between trees, the soaring columns of the cathedral of wind, the fine threads of emptiness around individual leaves where sunlight curls catlike. And some nights, picking my way along the marsh, I can see empty space laid amoung the douglas fir and cedar like stained glass or silk, fractal and frond and fastness.

Very clear night, all the spaces between branches filled with stars thick as fireflies, come home to roost. There was a single wisp of cloud, a long pale bluegreen line, maybe 30 degrees of altitude, visible now and then coiling amoung the branches.

Until I noticed stars visible through it. Not a cloud. Called caladri, asked her to check the magnetic field for me. Before she'd even answered, I'd seen it spike and arch, fan out like unfolding wings. Aurora. It looked like someone had grabbed a handful of sky and braided it- trailing green strands coiled around eachother but fading to starfleck at the edges.

(I am kind of wondering if there were black aurora defining the intricate interior edges of the lacework, given how very sharp they were. I've never seen one! It was like the trick of looking at space between trees, or that optical illusion with two people and a cup - you could flip a switch in your head and see the gaps as a seperate aurora, a clawed shimmerblack thing. Space between flame, breath.)

I love living here sometimes.

PS, if you were one of the people who would like a text message when there's aurora in the sky, I didn't do so because my old cellphone is dead and gone, and with it those names. Sing out if you want re-added and I have your cell #.

There have been three interesting public posts on my friends list about synaesthesia of late. (1, 2, 3), plus two interesting friends-locked ones. Far be it from me to do anything other than mindlessly follow the cool kids!

I think "synaesthesia" as the official medical definition goes is reasonably uncommon, but most people I've talked to have some strange conceptual/sensory associations - letters or numbers or sounds or colors or personality, whatever.

Tell me about it?

I have been taking scuba diving classes. There's some long rationale involving becoming certified as a scientific diver for a project that's building a submarine (whee! submarine!), or maybe making our next robot an underwater explorer, but really, it comes down to: I'm underwater and I can breathe! Whee!

I've done a good amount of diving: In Hawaii where the ocean is clearer than glass, so that you're twenty feet under and can see all the way up to the cathedral arch of cloud and mountain and you're never quite sure whether this thing you swim through is sea or sky, or if it even matters. In San Maartin where the sand is made from translucent black obsidian and annelids in their ivory shells unfold chrysanthemum tentacles scarlet as silk and drag at your shadow, a strange shimmering three-dimensional thing caught in the glass sands. In Bermuda where the coral has a jellyfish sting and touching it unwary leave puzzlebox lines on your skin for weeks.

My parents were divers, and while this is my first adult cert (and the murky Puget Sound, with its downed airplanes and sea stars two feet across and haloclines drawn in sunset-colored curtains across the deeps, and currents that wind like moebius-strips and eight-degree water is very different), I held a kids' cert until I was too old for it.

So I'm lucky to have first-timer gfish with me, to remind me of the sheer, "I'm breathing underwater! Wow!" wonder (and because, frankly, he's much less likely to absent-mindedly forget to turn his air on than I am, despite my experience. :) ). It's the sort of thing one should never take for granted, no matter how young one might have been when one first tasted regulator air.

( random philosophical rant )

See also: gfish's post.

From a 1969 interview with Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, by Alden Whitman of the New York Times, found here:

Q: How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?

A: I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile-- some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.

Vladimir Nabokov invented emoticons! :) :) :)

(Linked from Language Log, but I thought it was too entertaining not to repost.)

Current Mood: :D

I'd bought gfish a printing press as a Christmas gift. It's over a hundred years old, and spent the last eighty or so sitting in a barn getting rusty. Self serving gift - someone, and I have no idea who, of course, will have to help him restore it. So Thursday we went and rented a truck, and wandered to the shipping depo to pick up our twelve hundred pounds of printing press. Shipping has been an adventure; I've never had to deal with a freight company before.

( a thing of beauty )

I was playing with gfish's atlatl (a gift from the wondrous keen vixyish), and it is neat. I will now proceed to gush about it. :)

( physics and photos )

I have now been mushroom collecting with tylik several times. By which I mean I tagged along while she conjured mushrooms from thin air, and put them in bags. You look at a patch of perfectly plain grass, and you turn around to look somewhere else, and when you glance back over your shoulder, she has pulled four pounds of mushrooms from your square foot of plain grass and is already nibbling on one of them.

After the most recent time, the universe came all apart at the seams: suddenly there are mushrooms everywhere! I can see them now. Little slatey purple deer mushrooms. The pale frost-ringed lactarius glyciosmus that flakes like glass and smells like peppermint. The russulas with their broken magenta caps, and inky caps unwriting themselves in long black streaks. Sulfur tufts pale and yellow-green like malachite in a fire, suillus slimy and wider than my handspan, luminous pale gold honey mushrooms, and fairy-ring mushrooms marking out their circles underfoot.

It's like learning to read a new language, where all the words are written in the lacy skeletons of fallen leaves and the hidden feather tracks of tree roots and the ghost-pale smudge of spores against dark red earth.

There's this oft-quoted study - they were testing how well people could remember the placement of pieces on a chessboard, and - surprise! - chess players were much better at it than non-chess players. Which seems obvious, but it means that the chess players aren't just memorizing combinations of piece and location. They're looking through the crackle-glass depths of the board, to where meaning lives. They're reading it, like the rest of us take irregular ink blotches for love letters and limericks and livejournal posts.

So: somehow I have learned to read the gospel of the small - the way light curls around a leaf, the way soil catches between your fingers, the bone-pale carven labyrinth of daedalea gills. This makes me very happy, even if I suddenly have to be terribly careful where to put my big, clumsy feet. :)

Current Mood: happy

Metalwork is such a strange, fantastic thing. I'm used to metal being solid, the bones of cities, buildings with rebar skeletons and bridges strung with coiled steel, steam pipe and railway and ship hull. So there's some part of me that's always surprise at the way scale flakes pearly and grey, like eggshell, away from a blade on the anvil, or the way welding heat feathers along metal in sunset-colored fractal tributaries, the rainbow scars of tempering upon a new-hardened tool, at copper left in by vapor deposition in thin butterfly-scale lines in translucent new-formed marble. Bone, yes, but sometimes breath and heartbeat too.

Yesterday, I attended a casting party. I hadn't done any casting myself yet, but it was neat.
( pictures )

( This post guarenteed to be too geeky for half of you, and not geeky enough for the rest, but too long for everyone! )

Current Mood: it works!

Here's the summary: photos, mostly of various shades of black. It was very dark and my camera is cheap.

( here's the lj-cut )
See also: adularia's post and gfish's post.

I'm sure you're all already sick of seeing this sweep across your friends list, so I'll keep it very short:

Me too.

iridium