These are just a few of the pictures of crocuses I posted on my Facebook page. They've been much cropped and sharpened to hide the grubby ground they are sitting on. As of this morning the real flowers were also covered with snow but they are starting to peek out again.
March 31, 2009
Signs of Spring
March 22, 2009
MIT World
The subtitle for MIT World is "Distributed Intelligence". And that is truly what it is. It is the kind of thing that more universities and other centres of learning should be doing. As stated on their web page, "These free, on-demand videos, available 24/7 to viewers worldwide, reflect and extend MIT’s educational mission—to provide the best education in science, technology, and related fields—to engaged learners anytime, anywhere."
As of today, there are 626 videos covering a variety of topics from arts and science and eighteen other topics. The presenters include Nobel Laureates, authors, and artists, among others. The videos can be watched online at the site (Flash needs to be installed on your computer), or they can be placed on a website for viewing.
The video I'm watching now is Fractals in Science, Engineering and Finance (Roughness and Beauty), a lecture from 2001 by Benoit B. Mandelbrot and it should be showing below. Mandelbrot is sort of a hero of mine so I was delighted to find this site, and to be able to include the lecture video in this blog entry.
For more information about this lecture, here is the URL.
March 02, 2009
Adding Twitter to the Digital Stage
... or is it vice versa? In any case, I decided to use Twitter while checking links in old blog posts. So instead of going back and editing the posts, I'll just post the updates to Twitter and they should show up in the link at the bottom of this page. Or at least you can follow me on Twitter.
February 23, 2009
"About a million images"
The Prints & Photographs Online Catalog at the Library of Congress is one of those marvellous websites that have a great deal of content if you know what to search for. In one of my rambles through an essay on the history of photography, The Machine in The Garden Revisited (PDF, author's website is here), I found a reference to Ansel Adams’s Manzanar photographs.
So I did a Google search, found the Wikipedia entry on Adams, found a photo from Manzanar, followed the link from there to Ansel Adams’s Manzanar Photos, clicked on 'new search' and then previewed all the images. From there, I could look at thumbnails of the 244 photos in the collection, and also see a larger jpeg copy.
The main online catalogue has "about a million images". You can browse by collection, or do a search. I did a search for Dorothea Lange and found that some records had no images, some had only a thumbnail, and some had a link to a larger image. Not all collections have viewable photos but those that do are quite marvellous.
February 21, 2009
Ceramics Points of View at the V&A
The Victoria & Albert Museum has a set of podcasts, although I found their podcast page more than a little confusing. It's just easier to go to iTunes, search for Victoria & Albert, and go from there. If you want to hear just the episodes for Ceramics Points of View, this is the link, sort of.
I did the direct iTunes route, listened to the podcast for each piece, while going to the Ceramics Points of View website to see each piece in a larger format. Then I figured out that if I clicked on the Quicktime/video link below each speaker's photo I could see what they were doing while they were speaking. I like listening to the commentator's voice in the iTunes podcast, hearing the snarky remarks of some of the speakers, and then seeing them handle the ceramics in the video as they spoke. In most cases, all six experts had a wide range of criticisms or praise for the ceramics they commented on.
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