Doc Searls Weblog

Nature improvises with sculpture

March 10, 2008 in Art, Journalism, News, Photography, Places, problems, Travel | 8 comments

Yesterday we went to visit the De Cordova Museum in ~~Concord~~ Lincoln, where we were looking forward to seeing the museum’s iconic pink pig sculpture along with other exhibits in the museum and its Sculpture Park.

Rounding a curve on the road through the park heading into the museum, we were shocked and saddened to see that a tree from the center of a nearby grove had fallen squarely across the pig, smashing it right in the middle. No expert could have dropped the tree more squarely. It was amazing that, given 360 possible compass degrees that the tree might have fallen, it picked exactly this one.

Later we learned that the tree had fallen just that morning, no doubt because its rooting had been weakened by gound saturated with rain over the past few days.

Then this morning I was surprised to find no mention of the news in blog or the Boston Globe. So I just started uploading a bunch of pictures taken with my pocket camera. The lighting wasn’t good, but there are plenty of shots for anybody to use, should they like, up here at Flickr. If you’re a journalist of any kind, feel free to take and use them.

More about the pig. It is a work of Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades of Actual Size Artworks. Its title is Trojan Piggybank, and it is on loan from the artists. From the writeup two links back:

Originally exhibited in the 2004 Navy Pier Walk: The Chicago International Sculpture Exhibition, Trojan Piggybank comes to DeCordova Museum’s Sculpture Park with a playful warning from its collaborative team of artists, Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades, who caution, “Sometimes things are not what they appear to be.”

From a distance, the large pink wood piggybank appears friendly. A closer look reveals military camouflage colors painted around the snout, suggesting a recent wallow in filth, while imparting an additional and foreboding meaning. The artists intend this familiar military pattern to represent the greed associated with our ever-expanding military industrial complex. This visual stratagem is furthered by grates protecting Trojan Piggybank‘s eyes, and a hatch door on the underbelly hinting at hidden invaders inside. A large silver coin waits at the ready in the piggybank’s slot. As Simpson and Georgiades observe, “The pleasures of consumer culture are accompanied by less desirable social consequences. When we impose one way of life onto another, the bad goes along with the good. The playful piggybank has a hidden agenda.”

No wonder our first thought was that the tree across the pig was itself a sculpture, or an improvisation on the original.

Well, in a way it was, no?

Looking grand

February 26, 2008 in Art, Photography, Places, Travel | 1 comment

That’s a shot of the Lava Falls section of the Grand Canyon. It’s one of my favorite scenes: of lava from the Uinkaret Lava Field slopping down into the canyon over the north rim. Atop Lava Falls itself is Vulcan’s Throne, a volcanic vent about 73,000 years old.

This may seem old, but the lava is among the newest features of the Grand Canyon. The Kaibab Limestone over which the lava flowed was laid down in early Permian time, around 290 million years ago. All the rocks below are older, on down to the Vishnu group at the bottom of the canyon, around 1.7 billion years ancient.

That set is one of many that came out of my most recent trip out west by plane. I’m in London now, and still getting them up.

Shootings

February 24, 2008 in Photography, Travel | 3 comments

Getting this one up quickly from my seat in a London-bound 777 before taking off. It’s a set of shots heading westbound from Comb Ridge to Monument Valley in southern Utah during the trip west I’m ending now. The shot above is of Red Lake, a dry lake in the midst of an only slightly less rutilant desert south of Comb Ridge, the town of Bluff, and the San Juan River. The colorful parts of Utah are among my favorite places on Earth. Even though I haven’t been to most of them.

Someday I’d love to take a rafting trip down the San Juan River, through Goosenecks, which are also featured in this series.

The whole trip is here — a long series of shots running from Boston to Los Angeles. I don’t have all of them up yet. All my connections have been too slow. Maybe I’ll finish them in London. We’ll see. In any case, it was the clearest view I’ve had coast-to-coast in many trips.

The Grand Canyon series is pretty good too.

Fractal footprints

February 10, 2008 in Art, Photography, Travel | Permalink

The interesting thing to me about the footprints above, aside from their nature as photography fodder, is that they resemble the layout of the two intersecting paths at Winthrop Park, where I took the shot.

You can see the paths on Google Maps if you look for the intersection of JFK and Mt. Auburn in downtown Cambridge — one block south of Harvard Square (which isn’t), or you can hope that clicking on the “Link to this page” link for the park itself will work; but for some reason Google Maps (on this laptop, at least, in two different browsers) shows you the park while it’s loading, then jumps to another part of Cambridge. It’s 2:33am, however, and I’m not going to try to debug whatever I might be doing to cause that.

In any case, the pidgeon prints drew a map of the park paths.

The park is also Wintrop Square. Unlike most squares in Boston, it actually has corners that are right angles. It was the city’s original marketplace, and therefore dates, as does the city, from 1630. It was called Newtowne then. It became Cambridge eight years later.

Snow ‘nuf

January 31, 2008 in Photography, Places, Travel | 1 comment

The link behind that picture leads to a small set of shots I took with my new little inexpensive Canon pocket camera (with a name like a license plate, so I don’t remember it). Takes some getting used to, but I like it.

One of the pleasant discoveries I’ve made since moving (at least temporarily) Back East (as we, or they, say in California), is that I enjoy the winter. Nothing is prettier than New England under a fresh snow. That’s what I was trying to shoot there.

What I missed was taking some shots the day before the snows came, when the ponds were both frozen and clear. I bought some skates and went out on one of the local ponds with The Kid, who with a total of hours on skates was far better than his old man, who hadn’t been on the things in at least three decades — and hadn’t skated on a pond or a lake since his teens. So we’re talking, like, 45 years ago, give or take.

Now it’s warmed up and about all that’s left of the snow is gray glaciers of former slush along the sides of roads. Still, it’s pretty to me.

This weekend we’ll go skiing with friends up in Vermont. My first time skiing there. Looking forward to that, here at midnight in Toronto (at the moment).

How Microsoft could kick some Google ass

January 25, 2008 in Business, Ideas, Places, Travel | 14 comments

It’s amazing to me that Microsoft doesn’t make live.com search any easier. Take the maps side of live.com. It beats the crap out of Google Maps in at least one hugely helpful area: “bird’s eye” views — from four different direcitons.

But man, what a frustrating UI. Maybe it’s better for Windows/IE users, but if so, why? (Except for lock-in, which lost the appeal it never had, a long time ago.) It can start vague (on which line do you enter… what?)…

… and get worse from there.

For example, if I plug 42° 15′ 27″N, 71° 01′ 44″W into maps.google.com, I go straight to a real x/y place on a map. Live Maps doesn’t know what to do with it. But If I use Google Maps to help guide me to the same spot on Live Maps, switch to Bird’s eye, and look at what’s there, I see what I’m looking for — WUMB’s transmitting antenna — and find it: a two-bay thing sitting atop a castle turret next to a ball field on Reservoir Road, near Furnace Brook Country Club in Quincy. (I guess the castle is actually a kind of water tower… clever.) I can even see the antenna itself, which appears to be a two-bay affair, encapsulated in radomes to keep ice off the elements. When I look at it from all four directions (N,S,E,W), I can make out lots of details on the tower, count the notches in the cornice, count the seats in the ball field bleachers, and make out features less than a foot across. It’s amazing. Here’s the Google Maps version. Doesn’t begin to compare. I’d show you the Live Maps views, but there’s no way to link to them. Not that I can find, anyway. Is that sucky or what?

The maps come from Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. For what that’s worth, which is a lot. Looking around the VE site, it seems far too deeply linked to Windows-only stuff. That’s retro, folks. Stop it.

Maps, and Geo in General, is one place where Microsoft could open up and leapfrog Google in features and usability. Hey, why not?

[Later…] I’m looking for a way to show the birds-eye view to another person here at the Berkman Center, and I’m failing to find it. So are they. And they’re using a Windows workstation, even. So we’ve got maps.live.com flunking not just the Obviouness Test, but the Easiness Test too.

Or pretty much anywhere but Chicago

January 24, 2008 in Places, Travel | 6 comments

There’s nothing like this in Santa Barbara.

Sez du day

January 18, 2008 in Art, News, Travel | 1 comment

As a shameless fan of the Lolcat language, the Lolcat Bible (including the Ceiling Cat Prayer) and the Lolcat blog (I Can Haz Cheezeburger?), I find myself seeking translation to Lolcat of this fine quote from Don Marti:

Becoming a blog-friendly company by chattering on blogs is like becoming a cat person by clawing your own couch and crapping in a litter box.

Perhaps,

Wantingz ta mak blahs purr wit sef purringz et blahs iz lak sharpeningz da sleeping playz or poopingz in da howz soil.

Feel free to add your own.

Haze set

January 14, 2008 in Art, Life, Photography, Science, Travel | Permalink

There’s this great haze effect you sometimes get in the mountains of Southern California in the evening. It’s not smog, though sometimes that’s involved. It’s just enough moisture in the air, nicely layered, to give you these amazing silhouettes that look like Japanese paintings. Or something.

And that’s what I saw whille driving from Las Vegas to Los Angeles last Thursday evening, right after CES, when I passed through some low mountains between Barstow and Victorville on I-15. Google Earth is woefully deficient in the mountain-naming department, so I’m not sure what these are. The near ones are close to the road. The far ones are probably in the San Gabriel Mountains, which frame the Los Angeles basin on the north, and the Mojave Desert on the south. At this point I’m on the Mojave side, facing southwest. In any case, I got some nice shots in the set behind the picture above.

And here’s the same effect, in the San Gabriels, shot from an inbound plane.

The polymathematics of curiosity

January 12, 2008 in Art, Geology, Ideas, Journalism, Life, Science, Travel | 2 comments

While trying to make sense of some of what I saw out the window while flying from Los Angeles to Boston yesterday, I ran across Physical Geography of the U.S., an online summary of its subject that is so deep, interesting, well-written and well-sourced that it is hard not to keep reading it, and to follow its many links.

And it is not alone. It is one subject among seventeen at Bob Parvin’s Website, which is dedicated to literacies that range from the celestial to the household. Here they are:

Tutoring for Mastery of Reading and Writing and Arithmetic

Tutoring English Grammar and Composition

Finding and Reading eBooks

Beginning Urban Skywatching

Physical Geography of the U.S.

Economic Literacy

Global Warming and Warning

Approaching the Bible

Islam: One American’s Findings

DNA: Life’s Common Denominator

Nutrition: What should we eat?

Help for Microsoft Windows XP