Stars And Bugs

I’m all bit up.

At the end of last week we had three or four days of cloudless skies and I got the urge to do some star-gazing. So I spent an hour or two each night in my backyard under the stars with my telescope. And billions and billions of bugs.

I was looking for this thing:


The Ring Nebula, M57, in the constellation Lyra.

Of course, that’s a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s beautiful, but it’s nothing at all like what you see in real life.

Through a medium-size (12”) amateur telescope the Ring Nebula looks like this:


So-called “planetary” nebula like the Ring Nebula actually are colorful. They are made of gas near a star and, typically, ultraviolet energy from the star causes the gas to glow, something like the gas in a neon sign glows. But nebula are so far away that the light is very weak by the time it gets to Earth. There’s not enough energy there to ‘activate’ the color sensors in our eyes, so even through large telescopes we—typically—see nebula as white, or white with just a tint of color.

Of course, many amateur astronomers devote lots of money and uncounted hours to taking time-exposure pictures of nebula to capture the beautiful colors.

But even through small telescopes the ‘simple’ white images are amazing.

Some people have reported seeing the Ring Nebula in good 10x50 binoculars. I’m guessing they were under perfect skies and the binoculars were either solidly mounted on a tripod or new, image-stabilized binoculars. I’ve never managed to see the Ring Nebula through my 10x50 binoculars, but I’ve never checked under good skies.

Here south of Chicago even our best nights are pretty bad. Unimaginable (to rural folks) light pollution and almost constant haze.

Last week was a good example. We had cloudless skies, but the seeing was terrible. There was some kind of haze or smog from horizon to horizon. I could see Vega and Arcturus as naked eye stars. But they are two of the brightest stars in the sky. Almost everything else required binoculars. Even the Big Dipper was almost impossible to see by eye.

Jupiter is in Scorpius, to the south, and Antares—also one of the brightest stars in the sky—was just barely visible without binoculars.

Since Vega was visible, I decided to give my small telescope a work-out and see if I could view the Ring Nebula.

My telescope is a small refractor, a 2.4 inch (60mm) Unitron on an altazimuth mount. The focal length is 900mm. That’s f/15—not fast, not a wide field of view, and with a small objective, not great at gathering light for higher powers. But it’s a well-made scope with a rock-solid mount. Unitron made good optics. If you think of a scope like this sort of as half of really great binoculars, it sets your expectations to a reasonable level. You keep the power low and you get reasonably wide fields of view (for a telescope) and dark backgrounds and bright images.

I did most of my observing last week with eyepieces that were 25mm, 20mm and 18mm, for powers of 36x, 48x and 50x. I now and then checked things with up to a 9mm eyepiece for 100x, but under poor skies high power just magnifies the glare.

Because Lyra is almost overhead this time of year, I spent most of my time in the dark kneeling in the grass, or just sitting on the sidewalk next to my lawn. A Newtonian reflector lets you stand up to observe because the eyepiece is opposite the scope’s mirror. A refractor has the lens up front and the eyepiece at the ‘bottom’ of the tube. Even with a right-angle adaptor you still have to be willing, with a refractor, to get into weird positions to accommodate the scope. And, under bad skies, it’s always a good idea to keep the light path straight, so I was doing my observing without a right-angle adaptor.

The bugs in my backyard apparently were thinking, ‘Cool, an all-you-can-eat buffet!’

Lyra is a fun constellation because Vega is always easy to find, and there really are only five other stars to know. The stars make up a simple triangle-on-top-of-a-rectangle shape most binoculars can take in with very little ‘sweeping’ necessary. My wide-angle 10x50s can show the entire top or entire bottom of the constellation at once.

The Ring Nebula is easy to find because it is between the ‘botttom’ two stars of the lower ‘rectangle’ of Lyra. In fact, there is a sequence of dim stars you can ‘hop’ along with a narrow view telescope like mine and M57, the Ring Nebula, falls just between them and off to one side. With a ‘normal’ amateur scope—a 6” or 8” scope—the Ring Nebula is easy to see and can be impressive even at high powers.

Last week I did not quite see it. The seeing was too bad, the skies were too poor.

I could just barely see the dim stars between β Lyra (Sheliak) and γ Lyra (Sulafat). Using averted vision—looking off center at the eyepiece field of view—I could make out a white ‘smudge’ where I knew the Ring Nebula was, but I couldn’t make out any structure at all.

But the summer isn’t over. We’ll have better nights.

I’ll see it. If I can survive the bugs.

Rembrandt, Magic And Constructing Reality

To put it at its most extreme, I sometimes think of many Rembrandt paintings as kind of neurological construction kits, images that are not just artful images, but also artfully arranged collections of cues which activate autonomic visual constructions in our brain and overlay an even more artful mental construct image over the paint image in our consciousness.

Rembrandt images like this often have a wide, dark surround. This separates the internal image, arranged by Rembrandt’s aesthetics, from ‘normal’ reality framing it. There are areas of extreme dark and extreme light to activate the areas of our brain which construct a light source and surfaces for the light to fall on. There are areas of high contrast, well-defined edges to activate the areas of our brain which construct edges and forms to contain edges. There is an area of bright color to activate the area of our brain which constructs hues on surfaces. And there is an encompassing arrangement of smooth gradients and soft, soft transitions which link all the visual areas without sending our brain the cues to switch off the other construction projects in progress—the light, the surfaces and forms, the colors...

No matter how seemingly jumbled-up Rembrandt’s arrangement of oddly placed lights and darks might appear, no matter how seemingly arbitrary Rembrandt’s arrangements of grays and browns with just one or two touches of color might appear, once our neurology goes to work, once our autonomic visual system constructs the coherent dynamic solution to Rembrandt’s cues, we have much more than a static image: we have a living piece of art, alive in our mind, given life by Rembrandt’s profound skill, sparked to continuing life by the mechanisms of our seeing, our own thinking.

... And this, we shall find, is typical of your visual intelligence. Its nature is to construct, and to do so according to principles. Without exception, everything you see you construct: color, shading, texture, motion, shape, visual objects, and entire visual scenes.

... This construction process is multistaged. You don’t construct a visual scene in one step, but rather in a multiplicity of stages. Typically the construction at one stage depends upon, and takes as its starting point, the results of constructions at other stages. Your construction, for instance, of the shape of a book in three dimensions might take as its starting point the results of your constructions of motion, lines, and vertices in two dimensions.

With this multiplicity of stages is associated a multiplicity of rules of visual processing. These rules of visual processing, and their many and varied interactions, are central to your visual intelligence. They work so quickly and effectively that normally you are unaware of them.

Donald D. Hoffman
“Visual Intelligence”


(What Is Paraprosopia?)

Donald Hoffman is professor of cognitive science, philosophy, and computer science at the University of California, Irvine. His book is an amazing tour through our visual system with examples at every stage. (He has a website, which contains some examples and links to others.)

Beyond, however, simply discussing vision, Professor Hoffman concludes his book with a discussion of how research is strongly suggesting that all our senses are constructions. What we see, hear, feel, taste... There are remarkable similarities to how all our senses interact with our conscious awareness.

And Professor Hoffman doesn’t hesitate to follow these intriguing threads deep into to their philosophical tangles and knots: Is our awareness itself a construct? What is the nature of reality within which these constructs occur? What or who exactly is doing the constructing?

It is philosophy and science and art, and maybe even religion. And it can all start simply, just by looking at a Rembrandt painting:

Rembrandt, Magic And Retinex

Many, many artists before and after Rembrandt used heavy chiaroscuro—effects of shadow and light—for dramatic purposes. No artist before or after Rembrandt, however, used shadow as intimately as did Rembrandt, used light as idiosyncratically or to such profound effect.

Other artists use light and shadow, one might say, sensibly. Bright light, bright colors call attention to this or that aspect of an image. Dark shadows create recession, depth and engulf areas which might be distracting.

Rembrandt often reverse such thinking. The brightest part of a Rembrandt painting might be lighting shining on somebody’s shirt cuff to the side of the composition. Shadows often engulf the actual features of a person’s face, the very subject of the painting is typically half-lost in darkness. An image of grays and browns might appear sparkling with colors only to be seen upon examination to have just one or two patches of pure color. Yet the overall effect of a Rembrandt image is often so powerful a viewer gets the impression that Rembrandt has somehow magically reversed cause-and-effect, a viewer gets the impression that Rembrandt has somehow twisted painting techniques which should confuse an image and forced those techniques somehow to actually clarify the image.

I used to suspect Rembrandt belonged to some painters’ guild which passed along secrets of image manipulation from generation to generation. Reading a book like “Secret Knowledge,” by artist David Hockney made such a suspicion seem plausible. Many secrets of art technique have been lost because painters hesitated to write down or share their methods—after all, there was simple commerce at stake: if other painters could duplicate a painter’s images, they could compete for the same sales, the same patrons.

I discounted this conspiracy-oriented thinking, however, because although painters before and after Rembrandt have made use of chiaroscuro, no painter, not even Rembrandt’s most skilled students, ever used chiaroscuro in the same oddball manner as Rembrandt.

I now believe that Rembrandt worked the way he did because he had a deep, intuitive empathy for what laymen in the modern world call the Retinex theory of vision, what cognitive scientists call the constructive nature of vision.

Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid process of instant photography, was one day doing an experiment that involved projecting images onto a white screen. Some images were black and white, some were full color and some had been photographed through special filters which only imaged certain wave lengths. Land noticed that when certain combinations of single-color images were displayed he perceived the images as appearing in full color. That is, human vision “saw” colors in certain images that laboratory instruments would completely fail to meausre.

Land did further experiments and eventually concluded that normal human vision involves not just the retina reacting to light but also the cortex of the brain somehow processing impulses from the retina. Land combined “retina” and “cortex” and created his “Retinex” theory of vision.

Retinex has become more of a curiosity than an on-going field of study. The amazing musician Wendy Carlos has experimented with Retinex for many years. There are websites here and there which discuss Land’s work.

But mainstream science seldom uses the phrase, and I think there are two reasons. First of all, it turns out that long before Land became interested in vision, philosophers speculated about how the brain may play a very active part in what we see. Secondly, cognitive scientists who study vision have discovered that the effects Land observed are only tiny aspects of a vastly larger system of visual constructions.

The human visual system constructs not just colors but also lines, areas of light and shadow, surfaces and complex forms themselves. Everything we see, in fact, is a construction in our brain.

And that’s just the beginning!

Rembrandt, Magic And Substance Becomes Mind

Although historians tend to see Rembrandt’s method as an attempt at naturalism, it goes much farther than portrait conventions have ever gone, then or since. Consider what is happening in the paint, aside from the fact that it is supposed to be skin. Paint is a viscous substance, already kin to sweat and fat, and here it represents itself: skin as paint or paint as skin, either way. It’s a self-portrait of the painter, but it is also a self-portrait of paint. The oils are out in force, like the uliginous oozing waters of a swamp bottom. The paint is oily, greasy, and waxy all at once—even though modern chemistry would say that it is impossible. It sticks: it is tacky and viscid like flypaper. It has the pull and suction of pine sap. Over the far cheek, it spreads like the mucilage schoolchildren use to glue paper, resisting and rolling back. On the nose—it’s rude, but appropriate—the paint is semi-solid, as if the nose were smeared with phlegm or mucus. On the forehead, it looks curdled, like gelatin that is broken up with a spoon as it is about to set. There is drier paint around the eyes, and the bags under the eyes are inspissated hunks of paint, troweled over thin, greyish underpainting. The grey, which is left naked at the corner of the eye and in the folds between the bags, is the imprimatura, and the skin over it is heavy, thick, and clammy. The same technique served for the wings of the nose, where dribbles of paint come down to meet the nostril but stop short, leaving a gap where the grey shows through. Of course, the nostril is not a hole, but a plug of Burnt Sienna with Lamp Black, and it also lies on top of the grey imprimatura. Rembrandt’s thin moustache is painted with wiggles of buttery paint, almost like milk clinging to a real moustache. Over the eyes and eyelids there are thick strips of burned earth pigments—Lamp Black and Burnt Sienna—covering everything underneath. The tar spreads up and inward, and then falls into the hollows between the eyes and the nose in dense pools like duplicate pupils.

There is no limit to this kind of description, because Rembrandt’s paint covers the full range of organic substances. It is more fully paint, more completely an inventory of what can happen between water and stone, than the other examples in this book. And that means it is also more directly expressive of qualities and properties: it is warm, greasy, oily, waxy, earthy, watery, inspissate. It is not dried rock, like Monet’s cathedral, nor water, like his marine paintings. The thoughts that crowd in on me when I look at this paint have very little to do with the underlying triad, or with the named pigments or oils. They are thoughts about qualities: I feel viscid. My body is snared in the glues and emulsions, and I feel the pull of them on my thoughts. I want to wash my face.

This is how substances occupy the mind: they congeal it into their own image. The painter’s face comes a portrait of the substances that filled his mind.

For the alchemists all this was usually terribly literal. They often wanted to eat what they had made, as if the ingestion would transport the qualities into their bodies where meditation would not. Edible gold was a common goal. Some recipes are genuinely edible, even if they wouldn’t be good for you (there are mixtures of gold and honey, and gold and salt). Others are poisonous. Joseph Du Chesne, a late sixteenth century physician and alchemist, tells how to make edible gold by pouring blue vitriol (copper sulfate pentahydrate) over tin powder, resulting in “the most beautiful yellow water in the world.” It is left overnight, and then the next day the alchemist pours it over gold leaves and adds “very fine brandy” (tres-excellente eau de vie). If it is heated long enough, the gold will turn to oil, and can be taken internally for “all diseases of the lungs, the stomach, and the heart, in short, for all kinds of illnesses and infirmities ... It is also excellent for the prolongation of life and the prevention of all kinds of diseases.” This is the quackery that eventually hurt the alchemists, but it also has its deeper truths. There is something beneficial about seeing gold turn into yellow water, and then to oil, just as there is something eloquent and unanswerable about Rembrandt’s pastes. It could even be said this way: substances not only occupy the mind, they become the mind.

James Elkins
in “What Painting Is”



Negotiations Between Water And Stone


The Deliriously Beautiful World Of Unnamed Substances

Rembrandt, Magic And Colors Beyond Words

Rembrandt’s restricted palette excludes several of the brightest pigments available in the seventeenth century. His blacks (charcoal and bone black) and browns (including Cologne earth, as it would have been called) are supplemented by most of the earth colors: ochers, siennas, and umbers. His red lakes were mainly madder and cochineal. Blues, too, he used with restraint—mainly smalt but sometimes azurite, as in Saskia in Arcadian Costume (1635). His principal yellow was lead-tin yellow, which was never the brightest of colors. Rembrandt used chalk as an extender, to add translucency to glazes (it is almost transparent in oils), and to give body to his medium. His thick impasto gained some notoriety, evident from Arnold Houbraken’s remark in 1718 that a portrait by Rembrandt had colors “so heavily loaded that you could lift it from the floor by its nose.”

But this limited palette had advantages, for it consisted largely of reliable, stable colors that have aged well. This was no mere good fortune: Rembrandt knew which materials would last and how to combine them safely. And that is just as well, for his mixtures attain an almost comical level of complexity. Lurking at the threshold of visibility amid his deep shadows are concoctions of truly baroque proportions. In An Elderly Man as St. Paul (c. 1659), the deep, warm brown of the dimly seen book cover is no mere umber but consists of a semiglaze of lakes, red and yellow earth, and bone black. In Portrait of Jacob Trip (c. 1661), a deep orange-brown is mixed from red and yellow lake with smalt. And for Portrait of Margaretha de Geer (c. 1661), the incidental dark gray-greenish wall in the background on the left has an unbelievable subtlety of pigmentation lavished on it. The lighter part is made up from a dark brown underpaint of red, orange and yellow earths mixed with bone black and a little lead white, which is then glazed with a mixture of smalt, red ocher, and probably a yellow lake. For the deeper shadow, a glaze of bone black with red lake and red ocher is used instead. Yet this wall is hardly distinguishable from black shadow!

One cannot help but wonder whether these elaborate mixtures were systematically blended or whether Rembrandt was merely making use of the random remnants daubed on his palette. In any event, they bring to mind Monet’s determination to mix even the murkiest of shadows from strong, pure colors. The consequence is that Rembrandt’s colors are often almost indescribable—beyond tertiaries, beyond words. What is the color of Hendrickje’s dress in Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels (1654-1656), the woman who effectively became Rembrandt’s wife after the death of his beloved Saskia? Some might say a pale lilac. Yet once again, there is no blue on the canvas—if there is a violet tint, it comes from the slight blueness of the mixture of lead white and charcoal black, blended with a little red lake.

What better articulation of Rembrandtian color can we find than the Self-Portrait with Maulstick, Palette, and Brushes (c. 1663), painted some six years before his death? Convention focuses on the enormous expressivity of the artist’s careworn face. But what is there on the palette cradled in one arm? Nothing but a bare expanse of ruddy brown, so loosely sketched that the dark coat remains visible beneath. And one can almost believe that no more color than this, deftly lightened and darkened, was needed to convey all the introspection, the frankness, and the gravity that the portrait reveals.

Philip Ball

Rembrandt And Magic

My suspicion is that Rembrandt inspires talk of magic and wizardry more than any other painter in history. I’m going to talk about this all week.

Of course, since the Industrial Revolution, division of labor and production lines and the compartmentalization of society in general, today many people have never seen an artist at work, many people have never seen an oil painting in real life. It is almost understandable the average consumer of images in the modern world would look at many Rembrandt paintings and find the painter’s aesthetic sensibility and technical facility to be out-of-this-world. They are. However, one of the infinity of remarkable things about Rembrandt is that for hundreds of years even other painters have stood in front of Rembrandt images and marveled, resorted to rhetoric of magic.

Here is Van Gogh speaking of two Rembrandt paintings, “The Jewish Bride,” and, possibly, “Portrait of Saskia:”

“The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild is perfect: it is one of the most beautiful Rembrandts; but The Hebrew Bride ... never has there been a painting so intimate, brimming with infinite understanding, painted d’une maire de feu. You see, in Syndics, Rembrandt is faithful to nature, although, even here, as always, he is soaring high, toward the highest summits and infinity; but Rembrandt knew how to do more ... when he was free to idealize, to be a poet, that is to say Creator. And this is what he is in The Hebrew Spouse. ... As for the paintings of Frans Hals—he will always remain mortal—to those, words can be addressed. Rembrandt is so full of mystery to say things that cannot be expressed in any language. Rembrandt is quite rightly defined a magician ...”

“Yesterday I saw a large photograph of a Rembrandt that I hadn’t known, and it struck me very deeply: it was the head of a woman, the light was falling on her bust, neck, head, on the point of her nose and on her jaw. He forehead and eyes were in shadow because of her large hat, with feathers most likely red. Perhaps there is also red in her low-necked jacket. A dark background. The expression is the same mysterious smile of Rembrandt found in his self-portrait in which he is seated with Saskia on his knees, and a glass of wine in his hand. These days my thoughts are continually turning to Rembrandt and Frans Hals, not only because I am seeing many of their pictures, but because among the people here I see many types that remind me of their time. I am still going often to those popular dances, to see the heads of women of the sailors and soldiers. ... I know that you are rather convinced of the importance of being realistic, so I can speak to you freely. If I paint farmers, I want them to be farmers; ... if I paint prostitutes, I want that they have a prostitute’s expression. It is for this that the head of one of Rembrandt’s prostitutes struck me so much. Because he grasped their mysterious smile in such a marvelous way, with an earnestness that only he, wizard among wizards, possessed.”

Van Gogh quoted in:





Rembrandt’s Wiki Page

Mischievous Girls: A Cautionary Tale

Once upon a time there was a Mischievous Girl named Joni. ¹

Joni did all the things Mischievous Girls do.

She wrote songs (at the very least!) about using heroin. ² She posed naked for the cover of one of her albums. ³ She stole away the famous boyfriend of a pop star who had a better voice, greater fame and more beauty than she did. ⁴

What happened to Mischievous Girl Joni?

Did she die in a tragic car accident? Did she pass out on her back and drown in her own vomit? Did her musician boyfriend stab her to death to silence her plaintive cries begging him to put her out of her misery?

No, no and, ummm, no—that last one was the romanticized [!] death of a different Mischievous Girl named Nancy. ⁵

What happened to Mischievous Girl Joni?

She lived happily ever after. Her new album comes out next month ... on the Starbucks label. ⁶

“America drinks and goes home” — FZ ⁷

* * * * * * *

Notes on this tragic tale of woe:


1) Joni Mitchell is probably my favorite woman performer. To be honest, however, I’m a folk-jazz guy. After she became too hip for the folk part and became just a jazz performer, she left me behind.

2) “Cold Blue Steel And Sweet Fire” is one of my favorite songs. It’s on “For The Roses.”

Cold blue steel out of money One eye for the beat police Sweet fire calling, “You can’t deny me Now you know what you need” Underneath the jungle gym Hollow-grey-fire-escape-thief Looking for sweet fire Shadow of lady release “Come with me I know the way,” she says “It’s down, down, down the dark ladder. Do you want to contact somebody first Leave someone a letter You can come now Or you can come later...” A wristwatch, a ring, a downstairs screamer Edgy-black cracked sulphur sky Pin-cushion-prick Fix this poor bad dreamer! “Money,” cold shadows reply Pawnshops criss-crossed and padlocked Corridors spit on prayers and pleas Sparks fly up from sweet fire Black soot of lady release “Come with me I know the way,” she says “It’s down, down, down the dark ladder Do you want to contact somebody first Does it really matter If you come now Or if you come on later?”

Red water in the bathroom sink Fever in the scum brown bowl Blue steel still begging But it’s indistinct Someone’s hi-fi drumming Jelly Roll Concrete concentration camp Bashing in veins for peace Cold blue steel and sweet fire Fall into lady release “Come with me I know the way,” she says “It’s down, down, down the dark ladder Do you want to contact somebody first I mean what does it really matter You’re going to come now Or you’re going to come later...”

3) “For The Roses,” one of my favorite albums of all time. The naked pic is on the inside cover. It’s still there on the CD version, but everything is so small there’s nothing to be shocked about.

4) Joni got James Taylor away from Carly Simon. Carly has Joni beat hands down in almost every category, except the one that really counts: Joni writes great songs, and Carly goes the Tin Pan Alley route and buys great songs. Just about every women I’ve talked to about this says, in public, “Oh, poor Carly...” and then, in private, laughs maliciously and says, “Ha, ha, ha, beautiful Carly Simon lost her boyfriend to a horse-faced girl like Joni!” Apparently in the tradition of Harrison and Clapton, however, Joni and Carly remained friends, because when Carly had her infamous ‘fight’ with Chrissie Hynde it happened at a Joni Mitchell concert.

5) “Sid & Nancy” is a great movie, but apparently bad history.

6) Nobody, of course, wants Joni Mitchell to go back in time and arrange to die young so that she never becomes pathetic in her old age. However, nobody wants her to release albums on the Starbucks label, either...

7) from “Absolutely Free.” “America Drinks” and “America drinks and goes home” were Zappa sound collages, tributes to the vacuous ‘socializing’ America used to do in neighborhood bars and lounges. In those days, however, at least there was live music and the coffee didn’t cost ten bucks! It’s amazing and bizarre that a comment from more than a quarter century ago would be just as fitting (or more so!) today as back then.

Mischievous Girls: A Paragraph Re-Write

One tricky part of blogging is that it is a day-to-day activity.

Although some of the stories and poems I put up are things I’d written a long time ago (indeed this blog itself, “Impossible Kisses,” takes its name and topic from the title and topic of an unpublished novel I wrote a decade ago), most of what I put up is material I write the day I put it up or the night before.

Little things, however, sometimes slip past my awareness. I don’t want to go back and change, edit, material that’s already up, so mostly I just live with a glitch here or there.

However yesterday’s post, “Mischievous Girls—Hard Times,” contains a ‘structural’ error that bugs me and caused me to not put in some interesting references I certainly should have included.

So today’s post is just a re-write of yesterday’s fourth paragraph.

Yesterday, in my mind I was mainly interested in the similarities and differences between Lindsay Lohan and Victorine Meurent.

I also mentioned the 60s as a comparable time to Meurent’s. The 60s were a time when women who liked music could hang out with musicians who were playing a very active role in shaping pop culture. However, instead of referencing specific examples of such women from the 60s, I simply brought up today’s examples of such women—Britney, Lindsay and Paris—and hot-linked to them.

That fourth paragraph from yesterday’s post should have looked something like this:

Two generations ago in America a Mischievous Girl who liked music—Pamela Des Barres, Cynthia Albritton, Linda Eastman, so many others!—could hang out with guys like Jim Morrison, Jimmy Page, Todd Rundgren, Frank Zappa or so many other energetic, talented guys from that sub-culture who were really contributing to the much larger pop culture around them.

That’s better.

I actually lost a little sleep last night, I was so annoyed I wrote that paragraph the way I did and wondering what I should do about it...

Mischievous Girls—Hard Times

After my Monday post to the blogosphere, “Mischievous Girls Make The World Go Round,” I talked to some people in the REAL WORLD about how Jack Odell’s mischievous daughter sparked him to create Matchbox cars. I talked about how a Mischievous Girl often provides the spark, the passion, the magic that ushers in real fun, real art, real magic to the day-to-day world around us. Somebody laughed and brought up the quote, “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” from historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. That made someone else frown, and the frowning person brought up the fact that Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton are mischievous but they’re making the kind of history nobody wants to see. That set me off on a monologue, the gist of which I’m turning into today’s post.


It must be hard, these days, to be a Mischievous Girl.


A hundred and fifty years ago in Europe, a Mischievous Girl who liked art—Victorine Meurent, Suzanne Valadon, so many others!—could hang out with guys like Édouard Manet, Auguste Renoir, Toulouse Lautrec or so many other energetic, talented guys from that sub-culture who were really contributing to the much larger pop culture around them.

Two generations ago in America a Mischievous Girl who liked music—Britney, Lindsay, Paris, so many others!—could hang out with guys like Jim Morrison, Jimmy Page, Todd Rundgren, Frank Zappa or so many other energetic, talented guys from that sub-culture who were really contributing to the much larger pop culture around them.

What these sub-cultures had in common is that individuals within them had an opportunity to contribute not just to the sub-culture, but also to the larger, encompassing culture. For the last two generations or so, it has been difficult to see if similar opportunities still exist for individuals.

Both pop culture at large and all its sub-cultures now are so defined by corporations that—typically—individuals only appear at all if they’re playing some corporate appointed, corporate anointed role.

I’m not sure any individual in any sub-culture can make significant contributions even to that sub-culture let alone the larger culture around us.

What place is there for the spark, the passion, the magic of a Mischievous Girl in a world not of individuals emergently shaping “the scene” around them, but a world defined, dominated and so very well defended by corporations, each with their own agenda?

Sharp-eyed folks saw this coming.

The writer Trevanian lamented the fate of the Mischievous Girl in the modern world twenty-five years ago in his novel “Shibumi,” seeing her as condemned “to mating with merchants and giving birth to advertising executives,” condemned “to a life of plans and possessions.”

In the last quarter century things have not gotten better.


It must be hard, these days, to be a Mischievous Girl.

* * * * * * *

I’ve touched on some of these topics before
(including one or two Mischievous Girls I’ve known)
during Marianne Faithfull week:


Get Well Soon, Marianne Faithfull! #1: A Groupie Metaphysics

Get Well Soon, Marianne Faithfull! #2: Groupie Totems, A Brief Introduction

Get Well Soon, Marianne Faithfull! #3: The Architecture Of The Groupie Landscape

Get Well Soon, Marianne Faithfull! #4: The Twenty-Six Muscles Of The Human Face

Get Well Soon, Marianne Faithfull! #5: The Monkee And The Fox

Mischievous Girls In The News—Lindsay!

My informal plans for this week were for me to talk about painting and image-making for a couple of days and then, Friday, return to the topic of Mischievous Girls for a final note. But yesterday out in the REAL WORLD a couple of people made some comments about yesterday’s title, Mischievous Girls Make The World Go Round, and this morning’s breaking news provided an underscore to one of the comments I heard yesterday. So, today I’m going to do another news post and tomorrow I’m going to revisit the Mischievous Girls topic for a kind of summing up.

Lindsay Lohan arrested again


From Jim Roope
CNN Radio Correspondent


LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Five days after being booked in connection with a May drunk driving charge, actress Lindsay Lohan was arrested early Tuesday morning on five charges -- including drunk driving and possession of a controlled substance, Santa Monica police told CNN.

Police spokeswoman Calisse Lindsey said police stopped Lohan as she tried to drive out of a parking facility around 1:30 a.m. as she was leaving a party.

The officers smelled alcohol and administered a field sobriety test, which Lohan failed, Lindsey said.

When taken to the police station, the 21-year-old actress registered 0.12 and 0.13 in another test for alcohol levels, the spokeswoman said.

Officers also found a white powdery substance in Lohan's possession which tested positive for opiates, Lindsey said.

Lohan, whose film "I Know Who Killed Me" releases Friday, was charged with two counts of driving under the influence, possession of a controlled substance, bringing a controlled substance into a jail facility, and driving on a suspended license, according to Lindsey.

As of Tuesday morning, she was still in the Santa Monica jail, waiting for her $25,000 bail to be paid, she said.

Last Thursday, Lohan was booked into the Beverly Hills jail on charges of driving under the influence of alcohol and misdemeanor hit and run stemming from an incident in May.

Lohan's stay was only 45 minutes long. She posted a $30,000 bond and was released, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Web site.

The actress is scheduled to be back in the Beverly Hills Courthouse on August 24 to face her charges.

Early on the morning of May 25, Lohan lost control of her 2005 Mercedes Benz convertible and struck a curb. She received treatment for minor injuries at Century City Doctors hospital, where police cited and arrested her, but then released her on the misdemeanor charges.

Lohan checked out a Malibu rehab treatment center two weeks ago.

Mischievous Girls Make The World Go Round

Jack Odell, 87, Designer of Matchbox Cars, Is Dead

By DOUGLAS MARTIN


Jack Odell, a self-trained engineer whose daughter’s mischievous habit of taking spiders to school in a matchbox prompted him to make her a tiny steamroller as a substitute — an invention that led to Matchbox Toys, maker of 3 billion Lilliputian vehicles in 12,000 models — died on July 7 in London. He was 87.

His son-in-law Josh Walsh, who announced the death, said Mr. Odell had had Parkinson’s disease.

The steamroller, made of brass and painted shiny red and green, satisfied Mr. Odell’s daughter, Anne, and so impressed her friends that Mr. Odell raced to meet their demand. It seemed a dandy toy: just right for a child’s hand but hard to swallow, no batteries, violence-free, quiet and costing just pennies to make.

By the next year, 1953, the steamroller and vehicles like it were rolling off a production line in a small factory that Mr. Odell and a pair of partners had set up in a former London pub, The Rifleman. After the steamroller came a Land Rover, a London bus, a bulldozer and a fire engine. In 1954, the 19th vehicle in the series was rolled out: a dainty MG TD roadster, the first Matchbox car. The toys quickly spread to the United States where they typically sold for 49 cents.

They were finely wrought things. Mr. Odell designed one machine to spray-paint tiny silver headlights on the models and another to mold interiors. All the dashboard dials were in precisely the right place. Some cars had more than 100 die-cast parts, including windshield wipers and ceiling hooks.

By 1962, he told The New York Times in an interview, Matchbox was knocking out a million toy automobiles a week, more than the number of real ones made by all the world’s major automakers combined.

“We produce more Rolls-Royces in a single day than the Rolls-Royce company has made in its entire history,” he said.

John William Odell was born into a poor family on March 19, 1920, in north London. He was expelled from school at 13, and later said he could not remember the reason.

“Let’s just say I was a bloody rebel,” he was quoted as saying by The Daily Telegraph, a London newspaper. He took a succession of jobs, including driving a van and selling real estate. Hired as a movie projectionist, he was fired after he put the film in backward. During World War II, he served with the Royal Army in Africa and Italy, working as a mechanic.

After the war, he found work at a small die-casting firm, sweeping the floors. Deeming the engineering work there mediocre, he figured he could do better, his son-in-law said, and decided to open his own shop.

His mother, however, refused to let him do so in her house, so he joined two war veterans at their shop. They were Leslie Smith and Rodney Smith (unrelated). They had named their company Lesney Products by combining the first syllable of Leslie’s first name and the last one of Rodney’s.

Mr. Odell and Leslie Smith soon found themselves running the shop after Rodney Smith, seeing no future in it, left. They initially made small products for cars like door handles and dashboards. Their first toy was a toy gun.

Mr. Odell made his historic steamroller in 1952. It had to fit into a matchbox because of a school rule barring any bigger toy. (Spiders fit quite nicely.)

Vehicles kept coming, in both number and kind. A milestone came in 1953 when Mr. Odell designed a model of the coronation coach of Queen Elizabeth II. More than a million were sold.

Mr. Odell visited automakers throughout the world to copy their new designs. The automakers appreciated the free publicity the ubiquitous little vehicles represented. What many consider Mr. Odell’s triumph, his 1956 collection of turn-of-the-century classics, involved deep historical research.

At its peak in the late 1960s, when it released its Superfast line of toy autos to compete with Mattel Incorporated’s Hot Wheels cars, Lesney operated more than a dozen factories. In 1982, it fell into receivership and was sold to Universal Toys. It was later picked up by Tyco Toys, which was acquired by Mattel in 1997.

Mr. Odell is survived by his wife, the former Patricia Hilsdon, two daughters, three stepdaughters and a brother.

His passion for detail was suggested by an oft-told story of how he had swooped down on a young engineer working on a tiny Ford Model T to say that the driver’s seat, a centimeter wide at most, was not padded enough to be realistic.

“In my obituary,” Mr. Odell said in 1969 as quoted by The Daily Telegraph, “I want it said I was a damn good engineer.”

Matchbox Wiki Page

“How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion”

In this uncomfortably humorous survival guide, Wilson, a Ph.D. candidate at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, reminds readers that "any machine could rebel, from a toaster to a Terminator," and though the forms our future robot enemies may take are manifold, they each have exploitable weaknesses that, fortuitously, match our natural human strengths. So, if a two-legged android gives chase, seek out a body of water, as "most robots will sink in water or mud and fall through ice." It also may be a good idea to carry around a pair of welder's goggles, as lasers will likely be robot attackers' weapons of choice, and even a weak laser can cause blindness. Options for fighting back are plentiful, though not everyone will be relieved to learn the standard kitchen microwave can be retrofitted into a radiation gun that can destroy electronics and "cook human flesh." (Instructions for such a project are not included.) Humorous and informative-Wilson drops robotics history trivia nuggets and includes brief descriptions of current robot research-this nifty little guide to surviving the inevitable robot apocalypse may have you reconsidering purchasing that "smart" (read: insidious) refrigerator.

Copyright © Reed Business Information

Official Robot Uprising Website

I learned about this book in an odd way.

One afternoon I was walking through my local library and I saw this book featured on a display shelf. I was a little surprised because I hadn’t seen the book on the new release shelf and I hadn’t seen the book in the robotics section of the non-fiction area. (Yep, I know where the robotics area is and I know it well enough to recall what’s in it and what’s not. [sigh])

So I flipped through “How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion,” thought it looked interesting and checked it out.

It is interesting.

It’s not only entertaining speculating about future troublesome robots and troublesome robotic devices, but it is very insightful about various kinds of high-tech tracking devices already in use today.

The odd thing happened a few weeks later.

I wanted to re-read some section of the book, so I went back to the feature shelf where I’d first seen it. The book was no longer on display. No problem, like I said, I know where the robotics section of the non-fiction area is. But the book wasn’t there, either. So, I buckled down and used the computerized card catalogue to look up the title.

It turned out our local library doesn’t even own the book. The book had been returned to our library by someone who had checked it out at a different location. Then, by mistake, someone had put the book onto the wrong cart and routed it to be re-shelved at our library. And someone else had decided that the book looked interesting enough to put on a display shelf. And then I had seen it and found a great new, entertaining, informative and thought-provoking book.

When I returned the book the title got trapped properly and delivered back to its home library.

But—too late!—I had already learned how to survive a robot uprising, and now you can, too!

A Resurgence Of Things Wagner

There seems to be a resurgence of things Wagner lately. I saw an essay in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago that spoke, I thought surprisingly, approvingly of the music in general. And I’ve seen news stories popping up here and there as if there were something contemporary, something Britney Spears-like, about the music.

Recently I saw this piece, which brings the Britney Spears metaphor to life by linking the music with a hot, young blonde babe [!] —

High drama as Wagner family rides into battle

By Harry de Quetteville in Bayreuth
Last Updated: 2:58am BST 17/07/2007

In the darkened auditorium of an opera house almost as mythical as the themes set to music by her great-grandfather, Katharina Wagner stares intently at the action on stage. This is Bayreuth, touchstone of Wagnerian opera, and with it the German nation. Everything must be perfect.

Katharina Wagner is determined to become the director of the Bayreuth festival

But despite the flawless harmonies wafting from the boards and the orchestra pit sunk well below them, something is rotten in the house of Wagner.

In a family feud that could rival any operatic showdown, the prima donnas of the Wagner family are fighting for the right to be named Richard Wagner's artistic successor.

The keeper of the Wagner flame is the director of the month-long festival of Wagner operas at Bayreuth that began in 1876 and is due to get under way next week. The post has been filled since 1967 by 87-year-old Wolfgang Wagner. But his frailty has provoked a bitter battle to succeed him amongst the Valkyries of the Wagner line.

They are Wolfgang's niece, Nike Wagner, and his daughter by a first marriage, Eva - both 62.

The third candidate, and Wolfgang's reputed favourite, is his blonde-haired, denim jacket wearing 29-year-old daughter, Katharina. "It is a huge ambition for me," she said backstage at Bayreuth just days before the festival starts.

Laying down the gauntlet to her rivals, she added: "I've been working here at Bayreuth for a decade and I'm very well qualified."

Standing in her way, however, is the festival foundation's committee on which Wolfgang Wagner holds a single vote.

Despite his determination to see Katharina succeed him, the board could deem Nike more experienced. She runs the Weimar festival and has acidly criticised Wolfgang's Bayreuth as a musty institution.

The board has also identified Eva Wagner, who works at the Aix-en-Provence festival in France, as successor material.

At Bayreuth, Katharina has already been directing operas for three years, spicing up the 131-year-old festival with a controversial and innovative style.

"It's very traditional here," she said. "But you have to take risks to build something new. In Germany there is a problem that people always have tradition on their minds, like folk dress and lederhosen. Of course I break with that."

Katharina, whose husky voice betrays months of drilling singers in epic rehearsal sessions for this season's seven operas, including the complete Ring cycle, has the fearlessness of youth.

"You have to keep it out of your mind," she said of Bayreuth's world renown, and the expectations of Chancellor Angela Merkel and the rest of Germany's great and good, who are always in attendance.

For mere mortals, seats are near impossible to get hold of. This year 53,900 tickets, costing between £8 and £150, were issued despite 460,479 requests.

"I have friends who applied 10 years ago who are getting their first tickets this year," said Alexander Busche, a festival spokesman.

But just directing operas at Bayreuth is not enough for Katharina. She is determined to run the whole festival once her father steps aside.

Indeed, this year she is displaying her credentials for Bayreuth's top job with a production of Wagner's most controversial opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

More than any other work by Wagner, whose scores illuminated Germany in the 19th century just as it was being united by Bismarck, the opera was adopted by and associated with the Third Reich.

Hitler was a regular visitor to Bayreuth and with its nationalist themes, Die Meistersinger was the only work performed after all Germany's theatres closed down in 1943, mostly for soldiers on leave from the front.

In some productions, SS banners were unfurled on stage. But it is the opera's finale, in which the lead calls for German culture to be kept pure of foreign influences, which is particularly sensitive.

In rehearsals for Katharina's staging, to which The Daily Telegraph was given exclusive access, the nationalist themes are deliberately perverted. "Katharina's idea is that the stage is filled with statues of Germany's great thinkers Goethe and Schiller carved in a monumental Third Reich style," said Mr Busche.

"But during the finale they deform and collapse, symbols of what happens when thinkers are trapped in such an extreme ideological system." For the performers however, neither the opera's tarnished history nor the Wagner family feud has dimmed the magic of the festival.

"Katharina has gained all our respect," said Edward Randall, an American tenor who plays one of the Meistersingers. "She has a much older soul than a 29-year-old. We've worked on every detail, every glance and every movement, for weeks.

"This is the Olympics of opera," he added. "It's amazing."

Katharina Wagner is well aware of that. "I've been born with this name," she said. "I'm not like Britney Spears who went out to be a star. In Germany, if you're born with this name you can't escape it. You just have to get on with life."

I’m not much of a Wagner fan. And I’m suspicious of any media campaign that seems to be, so to speak, scattering seeds of Wagner onto global pop culture. Those seeds have been scattered before. And some pretty awful things sprouted up from them.

I never listen to more than about six minutes and fifty-two seconds of Wagner at a time. The only Wagner I recommend is Chuck Jones’ “What’s Opera, Doc?” It’s in the Looney Tunes - Golden Collection, Volume Two.

It’s about the best production of Wagner there ever could be.

Richard Wagner’s Wiki Page


“What’s Opera, Doc?” Wiki Page


“Chuck Jones' Wiki Page


Looney Tunes Wiki Page

Nessie Monster Spotted In Chinese Lake

Legendary lake 'monster' is captured on camera

Nessie monster spotted in Chinese lake

By Sophie Freeman (Telegraph Media Group)
Last Updated: 1:00pm BST 18/07/2007

The Loch Ness monster has been the stuff of Scottish legend for centuries - and now China has its own version of the much-hunted Nessie.

A rare video, filmed by a tourist in remote Western China, has captured what appears to be several huge creatures swimming across Lake Kanasi.

State-run television station Chinese Central Television described the footage as the clearest yet seen of a legendary beast rumoured to live in the depths of the lake.

Two years ago, two 10 metre-long black creatures were spotted on the surface of the lake, swimming from the shore to the centre - but this is the first sighting since that time.

Chinese Central Television did not attempt to identify the animals seen in the video, simply saying: “This time a large number of unidentified creatures emerged, bringing more mystery to Lake Kanasi.”

Yuan Guoying of the Xinjiang Institute of Environmental Protection, has been on the trail of the unknown creatures since 1980 and experienced his first sighting in 1985.

He said: “They looked like reddish-brown tadpoles because I could only see their heads on the surface. They opened their mouths to breathe and their length was about 10 to 15 metres.”

Professor Yuan spotted the animals again on May 28, 2004 when he was standing looking down at the lake from a nearby hill.

“I thought there was a huge piece of black plastic in the lake and that someone had been polluting it. But then I released that it must be the back of a giant fish. I was shocked because they were just too big. Looking at them was like looking at submarines.”

Local residents have long believed that the sea animals have been responsible for missing sheep, cows and even horses, blaming them for dragging the livestock into the deep water to devour them.

The animals that roam Lake Kanasi live in an area about 24 kilometres by two kilometres and in depths of up to 188 metres.

But researchers in the 1980s dismissed the Chinese Nessie as a huge member of the salmon family.

Watch the Chinese Nessie on You Tube

Is Bigfoot In Michigan?

Team Arrives in Michigan's Upper Peninsula to Begin Bigfoot Search

Thursday , July 12, 2007



MARQUETTE, Mich. —

Researchers hot on the trail of the fabled creature "Bigfoot" have arrived in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

About a dozen members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization will be in the woods of Marquette County this week, with more extensive exploration planned for the weekend.

They plan to meet with witnesses Thursday near the Gitche Gumee Campground.

The members have brought with them high-tech gear like night vision goggles, thermal imaging cameras and digital audio recorders.

Search organizer Matt Moneymaker says The public can help in the search for "Sasquatch" by sharing the stories of their possible encounters, said Matthew Moneymaker, the search organizer.

Most experts consider the Bigfoot legend to be a combination of folklore and hoaxes, but some authors and researchers think the stories could be true.

In all but three of 30 expeditions in the United States and Canada, BFRO investigators claim to have either glimpsed Bigfoot or got close enough to hear the creature, Moneymaker said.

Dr. Grover Krantz, a scientist specializing in cryptozoology, believes Bigfoot is a "gigantopithecus," a branch of primitive man believed to have existed 3 million years ago.

But mainstream scientists tend to dismiss the study as pseudoscience because of unreliable eyewitness accounts and a lack of solid physical evidence.

Batteries And Bunnies And Bras—Oh My!

Energizer to buy Playtex for $1.2B

Deal builds battery maker's personal care product range to better compete with Procter & Gamble.

July 13 2007: 6:23 AM EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Battery and razor maker Energizer Holdings Inc. said Thursday it would buy Playtex Products Inc. in an all-cash deal worth about $1.2 billion to grow Energizer's personal care product range.

St Louis-based Energizer (Charts) will pay $18.30 a share - and assume the debt - for Playtex (Charts), which makes leading sun-screen products like Banana Boat and Hawaiian Tropic. Playtex also markets a range of other feminine care and infant care products.

The deal offers shareholders of Playtex a premium of 17.9 percent to Playtex's closing price of $15.52 on Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange. The deal value of $1.16 billion is based on 63.46 million shares outstanding as of April 30, according to a recent regulatory filing.

An Energizer and Playtex combination would create a more formidable opponent to the much larger Procter & Gamble Co. (Charts, Fortune 500), better able to compete in the battery, razor and feminine care product market.

Procter & Gamble owns Duracell and Gillette which compete against Energizer's namesake batteries and Schick razors. Procter & Gamble also own the tampon brand Tampax which competes against Playtex's namesake tampon brand.

Playtex trades at a multiple of about 29.6 times forward earnings while Procter & Gamble trades at about 18.1 times estimated earnings.

"We see Playtex as an exceptionally great fit with Energizer, with similar customers and distribution channels in the U.S. and Canada, and the opportunity for geographic expansion," Energizer Chief Executive Ward Klein said in a statement.

Energizer said the deal will boost its fiscal 2008 results and it expects to the deal to close in the fall of 2007. The company plans to finance the acquisition through cash and credit facilities.

But Energizer warned that the deal could dilute earnings in the first quarter and possibly the second quarter.

"There are significant integration and cost reduction opportunities for the combined businesses," said Klein.

The deal, which was approved unanimously by the boards of both companies, has an enterprise value of about $1.9 billion.

Banc of America Securities acted as advisers to Energizer, while Lehman Brothers acted as advisers to Playtex.

The End Of The Renaissance

Today I’m going to talk about two events that happened in Italy just as the Renaissance was drawing to a close.

The first thing is that the Catholic Church commissioned the fantastically talented and fantastically flawed painter Caravaggio to paint “The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew.” The second thing is that at the same time Caravaggio was wrestling with the composition of his painting, in fact, right around the corner from where Caravaggio was wrestling with the composition of his painting, the Catholic Church was making a martyr of an entirely different kind of a former priest named Giordano Bruno.

This is what happened with Caravaggio’s commission:


Church legend is that the apostle Matthew went to Ethiopia and converted the people and royals to Christianity. The king, however, eventually wanted to take his own niece as a second bride. When Matthew told him that such a thing was forbidden by Christianity the king had Matthew put to death. Caravaggio’s remarkable masterpiece—a kind of gay bath-house tribute to Saint Matthew—is typically read as having Christian converts in the foreground waiting to be baptized by Saint Matthew in Caravaggio’s invention of a pool under the altar, Saint Matthew himself knocked to the ground in the center about to be run through by the buff assassin, and just visible in the background the king of Ethiopia looking on at the carnage he has caused, perhaps shaken by the scene of his own making. Tellingly (of something) Caravaggio has painted the king as a self portrait.


This is what happened with Giordano Bruno:

In 1599 Bellarmino the Jesuit ideologue gave [Giordano Bruno] a final list of eight things to abjure. Bruno said no. It was a bad moment to say no.

Bruno told his interrogators about

infinite individual worlds similar to this earth ... they constitute the infinite universe in an infinite space ... I call nature the shadow and vestige of divinity ...

None of it, he insisted, touched on religious faith. It was just philosophy. It was an idea of an infinite universe that seized on the same Copernican astronomy that Galileo was developing as science. Bruno was no scientist—he’d rather sharply remarked that Copernicus’s fixed and finite sun centered universe wasn’t so new, whereas

we who look not at fantastical shadows but at things themselves, we who see an airy, ethereal, spiritual, liquid mass, a space containing movement and stillness ... we know it to be infinitely infinite.

He imagined the universe as infinitely many bodies in infinite space—it was tactile and visual, like his notion of the mind. In The Shadows Of Ideas he’d written that

nature doesn’t move from one extreme to another except through the mediation of shadows ... shadow makes the sight ready for light. Shadow tempers light ... shadows ... don’t dissolve but keep and protect the light in us, and lead us toward knowledge and memory.

Things themselves, shadow tempering light—[Caravaggio] was doing this in paint.

... In January the pope ordered Bruno’s death. In February they took him to piazza Navona. His sentence was read to the crowd and Bruno handed over to the governor of Rome for execution. His books were burnt in piazza San Pietro and put on the Index. Making fun of the pope was one of Bruno’s crimes—Clement had decided he was Circe’s pig in one of the satires, though the inquisitors got the book wrong. Another crime was maintaining the existence of innumerable and eternal worlds. Bruno glared at his inquisitors and said

you may be more afraid pronouncing the sentence against me than I feel receiving it.

He was probably right—taken at dawn to the campo de’ Fiori, he was stripped naked and tied to a stake and burnt to death

with his tongue in a clamp, on account of the very ugly words he used to speak.

Somebody waved a crucifix at him as he burnt, but Bruno averted his gaze.

Peter Robb

I started this week, this sequence of posts, with Robert Sungenis and his conspiracy theory, his belief that attacks on geocentricity were really attacks on the Catholic Church.

I don’t believe Sungenis needs to worry. (If in fact he does worry.)

I believe that any real conspiracy theory targeting the Catholic Church of necessity would have more to say about the simultaneity of these two episodes than it would about whether or not Cynthiae Figuras Aemulatur Mater Amorum.

Caravaggio’s Wiki Page


Giordano Bruno’s Wiki Page

“One Of The Hardest-To-Imagine Tenets Of Ptolemaic Astronomy”

When I read stuff like this I always have to take a time out:

5. Whatever motion appears in the firmament arises not from any motion of the firmament, but from the earth’s motion. The earth together with its accompanying elements performs a complete rotation on its fixed poles in a daily motion, while the firmament and highest heaven abide unchanged.

This axiom, which marks what is usually called the rotation of the earth, dealt a coup de grâce to one of the hardest-to-imagine tenets of Ptolemaic astronomy: the claim that the entire immense stellar sphere makes a full revolution every twenty-four hours.

Dennis Danielson

If something is “hard to imagine” should we find it suspect? Should we seek to replace it with something that isn’t hard to imagine?

Is this a general principle?

If we accept this even as a working principle and use it to weed out kook-ish beliefs—like geocentricity—what happens when modern science itself is measured against it?

• If I put my Sea Monkeys in a box and cover the box, is it easy to imagine the shrimp enter a state of quasi-existence, neither dead nor alive, until I lift the cover and look at them? Does any book about physics not try to ‘wow’ people with a discussion of Schrödinger’s Cat?
  
  
• What about tunneling? Is it easy to imagine that a particle can be here and then—magically—be over there?
  
  
• What about relativistic time dilation? Is it easy to imagine that a particle’s half-life correlated to higher energy levels is equivalent to time itself slowing down?
  
  
• And entanglement? Is it easy to imagine that a photon three thousand miles away will become polarized if this photon in front of me passes through a filter?
  
  
• Is there anything at all easy to imagine about arbitrary dimensions and branes and other string theory kinds of thoughts?
  

Kook-ish beliefs often involve one or two howlers, bizarre aspects which must be accepted on faith, but then they typically surround those bits of the bizarre with rigorously logical and acceptable, common-sense thinking. “Mainstream” science in the modern world, however, seems almost entirely composed of howlers, with none of that messy “common” sense to trouble it.

It’s interesting that the Establishment—whatever and whenever that is—always seems to create a fringe, a kind of conceptual Siberia, defined largely by appeals to common sense and the every day imagination of the hoi polloi. But at the same time that Establishment always expects everyone to clearly understand that its own activities, its own pronouncements, its own conclusions, must never be judged by common sense or the imagination of the masses or any other such bourgeois triviality ...

Has Science Proven That The Earth Is Stationary?

Maybe the most startling (and amusing) claim of the believers in a geocentric cosmos (geocentrics? geo-eccentrics?) is that “mainstream” science itself has already proven that the Earth doesn’t move. (For instance, at GEOCENTRICITY AND CREATION.)

They mean the Michelson-Morley experiment!

This experiment is so well-known that there is a Michelson-Morley Experiment Wiki Page, so I’m not going to review the details of the experiment here. But I do want to discuss some of that experiment’s assumptions because looking at the experiment backwards—the way geocentrics do!—is an example of the intriguing logic and creativity kooks employ to further their beliefs.

It’s not crazy, it’s just weird!

The designers of the Michelson-Morley experiment wanted to test for the existence of the “aether.”

In the 19th century scientists believed that throughout space and even permeating our atmosphere was a mysterious, ephemeral fluid-like substance called the “aether.”

Because this belief was built on a “common sense” metaphor, it has never really gone out of fashion with people who rebel from Establishment beliefs.

In a nutshell, the thinking goes like this: Ocean waves manifest in a medium called water. Sound waves manifest in a medium called air. Light waves, therefore, must manifest in a medium of their own since we know light waves travel through outer space and there is no air or water in outer space. Scientists called this proposed medium for light the “aether.”

The designers of the Michelson-Morley experiment accepted axiomatically the belief that the Earth moved around the Sun and attempted to use the Earth’s motion to prove or disprove the existence of the aether. They designed equipment to measure the compression and attenuation of the aether which would occur ahead of the Earth and behind the Earth as the Earth moved around the Sun.

The Michelson-Morley experiment didn’t find any compression or attenuation of the aether and that was pretty much the beginning of the end for belief in the aether. The motion of the Earth was the key factor in disproving the existence of the aether. Of course, disproving the aether has created the need for all manner of modern theories to explain how light propagates without a medium. Instead of common sense metaphors we now have relativity and the whole quantum mess and beyond...

Geocentrics reverse the logic of mainstream science and say, well, if you accept axiomatically (based on the buttoned-down logic of the metaphors of known wave propagation) the existence of the aether then since the Michelson-Morley experiment didn’t find any compression or attenuation of the aether, that proves the Earth is not moving! It also spares physicists from having to create convoluted and counter-intuitive mechanisms for the propagation of light since the aether is still accepted.

Parsimony!

The Windmills Of PHYSICS TODAY

It is very tempting to regard someone like Robert Sungenis as a kind of ersatz Don Quixote, a Don Quixote who not only sees imaginary monsters in windmills but whose imagination first conjures up imaginary windmills and then converts those fantasy windmills into imaginary phantoms. But the surprising truth is someone like Sungenis actually can find real windmills waiting to be transmogrified by a suspicious imagination.

Take, for instance, the current (July) issue of a science magazine called “Physics Today.”

If you look through this month’s issue of Physics Today you’ll see articles with titles like, “Whiskers Of Tantalum Trisulfide Twist In Response To An Electric Field.” That’s certainly the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a physics magazine. You’ll also see an essay titled, “The Case For Extra Dimensions,” describing how the new Large Hadron Collider will help string theory investigations. Again, the kind of thing you’d expect in a physics magazine. But in the book review section you’ll find a review of Dan Hooper’s, “Dark Cosmos: In Search Of Our Universe’s Missing Mass And Energy.” The review is written by Daniel Holz, an astrophysicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and contains the following passage:

“The study of cosmology has led to a steady diminution of humanity’s importance. We’re not at the center of the solar system. We’re not at the center of the galaxy, and our galaxy isn’t even unique. We’re not at the center of the universe, because there is no center. And now we’re even entertaining the possibility that our universe is only one of many—and a grossly atypical one at that. As if these indignities weren’t enough, cosmologists are now confident that everything we touch, see, or feel is a tiny fraction of what’s out there. All the stars and planets and people are just a minor frosting on the true elements of the universe: dark matter and dark energy.”

Now that’s a pretty weird thing to say.

I don’t live or work within the world of modern science, but when I was younger I often spoke with astronomers and I still, now and then, speak with physicists and other science professionals and I’ve never heard even one science professional speak of his or her emotional response to science as “diminution” of their importance, or of the results of some investigation as “indignities” visited upon them. Quite the opposite, if there is one commonality among the science professionals I’ve known it’s the sense that understanding the world around us is energizing, that figuring out how something works or why something is the way it is, is the coolest thing a person could do. In fact, the physicist who wrote the essay about the Large Hadron Collider in Physics Today (the physics babe Lisa Randall) once characterized her own emotional response to science this way: “As I learned more science, I grew to love it. ... Engaging with the unknown is irresistibly exciting. I found it thrilling to find connections between apparently disparate phenomena and to solve problems and predict surprising features of our world.” [from “Warped Passages”]

Scientists, in general, in real life speak of science using words like ‘excitement’ and ‘fun’ and ‘thrilling,’ not words like ‘diminution’ and ‘indignities.’

However, in the media, in contexts defined by editors and publishers, this other rhetoric is actually not uncommon. Editors and publishers seek out the tiny minority of scientists who for psychological reasons of their own use such rhetoric or, more likely, are willing to use such rhetoric to fulfill the constant academic imperative of getting published.

People whose only experience of the world of science comes through the media—magazines and books—react to this media creation rather than to the real world of science. Media fashions, range-of-the-moment demographic appeals, convenient cliches—these kinds of things create an artificial reality and some people live immersed in the artifice. For people interested in science and religion, the unreality is every bit as unreal. It is almost understandable that people like Robert Sungenis might come to envision dark machineries of pernicious conspiracy theory ticking away behind the scenes.