In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
– Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut (1953-1994), computer scientist and educator. This has also been attributed to Yogi Berra.
I just stumbled upon a great essay by Philip K. Dick, written in 1978, a few years before he die: How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later. It is longish, but an entertaining read. Here are some excerpts:
It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
…In Plato’s Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?
…Just about the time that Supreme Court was ruling that the Nixon tapes had to be turned over to the special prosecutor, I was eating at a Chinese restaurant in Yorba Linda, the town in California where Nixon went to school—where he grew up, worked at a grocery store, where there is a park named after him, and of course the Nixon house, simple clapboard and all that. In my fortune cookie, I got the following fortune:
DEEDS DONE IN SECRET HAVE A
WAY OF BECOMING FOUND OUT.I mailed the slip of paper to the White House, mentioning that the Chinese restaurant was located within a mile of Nixon’s original house, and I said, “I think a mistake has been made; by accident I got Mr. Nixon’s fortune. Does he have mine?” The White House did not answer.
…The summation of much pre-Socratic theology and philosophy can be stated as follows: The kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it probably is, at its deepest level, is exactly that which the human being is at his deepest level—call it mind or soul, it is something unitary which lives and thinks, and only appears to be plural and material. Much of this view reaches us through the Logos doctrine regarding Christ. The Logos was both that which thought, and the thing which it thought: thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we are part of it, we as humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those thoughts.
Early afternoon yesterday, before the news broke about the plane ditching into the frigid Hudson river, I made this larger drawing from a chunk of words I first entered in the small book on Jan 7th (click the pic for a larger version):
Is it megalomaniacal of me to think that I might be God, controlling fate with my words?
Friday, January 16th, 2009 - 1:20pm |
disasters + field reports + phenomena + works in progress |
Comments (0) In a feat of amazing piloting by heroic captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III, All 155 Escape Jet’s Plunge Into Hudson after a flock of geese take out both engines of the Airbus A320.
Here’s a great cell phone photo snapped moments after the jet hit the drink by a tourist who was Twittering away at the time on a ferry bound from Manhattan to New Jersey that was one of the first on the scene to help rescue passengers (click for a larger version):
Here is the photographer, Janis Krums’ succinct caption: “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”
More evidence that the world has gone crazy, in the form of a major, seven-site coordinated terrorist attack on Mumbai, India. Here is the five-star Taj Mahal Hotel on fire, from CNN.com:
Super geeky, but a beautiful image — click on it for a larger version:
Image created by Perry Hung, who explains:
This is a visualization I made for funsies of a linux boot sequence where each function is a node and each edge represents a function call, direct branch, or indirect branch. Nodes are laid out using an unweighted force-directed layout algorithm, where each node is simulated as if it were electrically repulsive and had springs between nodes.
The little “lobe” on the left is made up the interrupt processing routines (irq vectors, irq_svc, etc). The tail at the top is the bootloader. The main thing in the middle is the linux boot sequence.
The entire graph represents a call chain from the bootloader up until it jumps into userspace to a shell prompt
edit: this picture was intended to be “art” and not something with a whole lot of utility. yes, you can zoom in and see individual nodes and control flow. yes, there are better layouts for this information. I have collected much of this information to find commonly executed parts of the kernel to optimize aggressively.
My irq vectors are in a tizzy!
Here is a funky phone cam view looking back from the front of the studio of some new work in progress (click to enlarge):
Here’s a great shot from English Russia (click the pic to enlarge):
Says English Russia, which posted a series of pictures and a video of this smokestack collapse:
After the Soviet Era too much of objects stay abandoned in Russia and with the modern rise of development of new business and residential areas more and more are need to be removed from the terrain. Many controlled demolition companies act on this market, sometimes they have some nice objects to remove like those two old factory chimneys.
Time for another edition of Newsmash, a mashup of headlines taken from CNN.com over the last 24 hours. For added fun, guess which of the headlines below was NOT altered in any way, but appears just as it did on CNN.com (*answer following):
Amish invade Florida town
Baby squirrel to help count California rats
Best dressed sheriff loves house standing
Blind masseurs jump from bridge
Candy may prevent attack
How to avoid places that are good for teeth
How we got into this meltdown
Is boutique passenger jet worth the price?
Japanese glasses caught in submarine
Man finds dead satellite
Medicine gains in mass popularity
Mystery of bloody money mess
Orbiting shark scrambles for safe milk
Parents you’ve never heard of
Reality warned to back off
Rescuers free giant lizards from toilet
Russian roulette takes center stage
Squealing cat beats pig to death
This administration allegedly survives hurricane
Who gives better answers, people or miracle cat?
*And the winner is… Blind masseurs jump from bridge. Sometimes you just can’t beat reality, so… Reality warned to back off!
Ike Wavewall, a future persona of mine. Currently the title of this great image of Hurricane Ike making his presence felt on along the Texas coast. Ike has already innundated Galveston Island. From CNN.com: Sea floods Texas island; get out or ‘certain death’. I don’t recall ever hearing a warning as definitively dire as this one from the weather service:
“All neighborhoods … and possibly entire coastal communities … will be inundated during the peak storm tide,” the weather service warned. “Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single family one- or two-story homes will face certain death.”
That’s quite a guarantee. Apparently the last time such language was used, three years ago, a hurricane named Katrina was bearing down on the Gulf coast.
Now, if just by not evacuating and remaining at or near the coast makes you eligible for “certain death”, what exactly is this guy on the left getting set up for? Immediate certain death? No, I got it: Sudden Death. Sudden Onset Death Syndrome (SODS). Or, Hurricane Induced Denial & Elimination Syndrome (HIDES).
Get out of there, people. Get out.
If you want more proof that physicists are the best sculptors working today, beyond the Large Hadron Collider about to come online in Switzerland, look no further than the Large Helical Device Project in Japan — click the pic to see a larger version:
Whatever this thing does, it does it beautifully.
The Centre Pompidou in Paris is currently showing an exhibit of the Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý. Here is the Pompidou’s introduction, illustrated with images I found online:
This is the first exhibition in France of the photographic work of the Czech artist Miroslav Tichý, now more than 80 years old. Only recently discovered, his work reveals the distinctive talent of a marginal and somewhat monomaniacal figure who steadfastly refused the social, political and personal values of the Communist period, form its beginning in 1948 to its end in the late 1980s.
Tichý took up photography in the mid-1950s, reinventing it as it were from scratch and building his own cameras and enlargers from shoe-boxes, tin cans, recycled glass and other waste materials.
His timeless and uncategorizable images, shot instinctively or carelessly on handmade cameras with makeshift optics, offer an extraordinary vision of a fantastical, eroticised reality, half real, half dream. Women on the TV screen : these are his single, obsessional subject.
Rescued from neglect by his neighbour, the film director Roman Buxbaum, in 1989, Tichý’s work was first shown at the Sevilla Biennale in 2004. This exhibition at the Centre Pompidou brings together a number of cameras and some hundred photographs, mostly from the Foundation Tichý Ocean.
Tichý made one of the all-time greatest comments about art (quoted here), which I’ve followed below with a photo of his that perfectly illustrates the idea:
Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you’re doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.
What a great line: If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you’re doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.
Tichý’s comment about “blurs, spots and errors” reminded me of The Smudge, as described by Rebecca West in her epic masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, recounting her travels through (then) Yugoslavia in the late 1930s. West writes of Manichaeism and the concept of The Smudge, an idea that stain-happy me has embraced for years. So I went and searched through BLGF and compiled all of the “smudge” (1) and “The Smudge” (3) references, interspersed below with more Tichý images:
Thereafter the snow was so thick on the wooded hills that the tree-trunks were mere lines and the branches were finer than any lines drawn by a human hand. No detail was visible in the houses of the villages at the base of the hills. They were blocks of soft black shadow edges with the pure white fur of the snow on the roofs. Above the hills there was a layer of mist that drew a dull white smudge between this pure black-and-white world and the dark-grey sky. (BLGF p. 71)
Manichaeism – for these heresies might as well be grouped together under the name of their parent – represents the natural reaction of the earnest mind to a religion that has aged and hardened and committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, which is to pretend that all is now known, and there can now be laid down a system of rules go guarantee salvation. In its origin it was a reaction against the extreme fatalism of Zoroastrianism, which held that man’s destiny was decided by the stars, and that his only duty was to accomplish it in decorum. Passionately Mani created a myth that would show the universe as a field for moral effort: inspired by Christianity as it had passed through the filter of many Oriental minds and by a cosmology invented by an Aramaic astronomer, he imagined that there had been in the beginning of time a kingdom of light and a kingdom of darkness. This was the origin of the present world, which Mani very aptly called The Smudge. It became the duty of all men who were on the side of the light, which was identified with virtue and reason, to recover the particles of light that have become imprisoned in the substance of darkness, which was identified with vice and brutishness. (BLGF p. 171-172)
When the kingdom of darkness was existing side by side with the kingdom of light without any commixture, then it was committing no offence. That attitude can be traced in Radovan’s faithful reproduction of life’s imperfect forms, in Dostoievsky’s choice of abnormality as a subject. And there is yet another resemblance which is particularly apparent in the work of Radovan. The columns he carved with the representations of The Smudge are borne on the shoulders of those who are wholly of the darkness, Jews and Turks and pagans. It is put forward solidly and without sense of any embarrassment that there are those who are predestined to pain, contrary to the principles of human justice. Calvin admitted this with agony, but there is none here; and Dostoievsky never complains against the God who created the disordered universe he describes. This is perhaps because the Manichaeans, like the Greeks, did not regard God as the Creator, but as the Arranger, or even as the Divine Substance which had to be arranged. (BLGF p. 176)
In the belvedere Marmont must have found it difficult to keep his mind on his cards. In the end, we know, he threw them in and pushed back his chair and strolled away, to leave Dalmatia for ever. There was fault in him too. He was man also, he was a fusion of good and evil, of light and darkness. Therefore he did not want with his wholeness that there should be a victory of light; he preferred that darkness should continue to exist, and this universe, The Smudge, should not pass away…. The great men for whom humanity feels ecstatic love need not be good, nor even gifted; but they must display this fusion of light and darkness which is the essential human character; they must even promise, but a predominance of darkness, that the universe shall for ever persist in its imperfection. (BLGF p. 185)
I’m not really interested in the “good vs. evil” dichotomy, or religious interpretations of reality in general. My interest in smudges and stains is in their abject beauty, and in their being emblematic of uncertainty and things beyond our control. And not necessarily in a bad way, either, but often in a beautiful way, if we just retrain our perceptions to see the beauty in the unexpected, the translucent dream world between what we think we know and what we don’t know that we don’t know. Such is the zone that Tichý operates in.
Here are a group of my stain maps that wallow in and play with The Smudge in a non-dialectic way.
Here’s a great photo my lovely wife Betsy just took who knows where with her phone and sent to me — click on it to enlarge:
470+ examples of Swiss and German modern book design: Book (design) stories from new typography to Swiss style modernist book design in Germany and Switzerland 1925–1965 (and beyond). Here’s a nice example, #51 in the collection, a Swiss survey of Die Neue Architektur by Alfred Roth, first published in 1948, cover design by Max Bill:
View the full index of all titles in this collection.
Via Grain Edit.
Another interesting thing I saw at Stanford’s art museum, <a href=”http://museum.stanford.edu/news_room/NewOrleans.html”>Spared from the Storm: Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art</a>:
Image: Joseph Cornell (U.S.A., 1903–1972), Radar Astronomy, 1952–56, mixed media
Note how ol’ Uncle Joe applies his signature to the back of the box: reversed. It looks like he painted his signature on thin vellum and, when dry, glued it face down, leaving the signature reversed when viewed from behind, but “right reading” if viewed from the front of the box and you could actually see through the back of the box to see the signture.
Here mashed together are two details from paintings I saw last week at the small exhibition at
Stanford’s art museum, Spared from the Storm: Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art:
Raoul Dufy (France, 1877–1953), Window at Nice, 1923, detail
Right: Jackson Pollock (U.S.A., 1912–1956), Composition (White, Black, Blue and Red on White), 1948, detail
All images and other content on this site © 2009 Jay Jurisich, unless
quoted from other sources. All rights reserved.
Syndicate entries using
RSS and Comments (RSS).
