jhzzzzzz: July 2007

Sunday, July 22, 2007

The Art of Blueberry Picking

Just pick whichever blueberries look interesting. I picked those that looked ripe, those that came off easily as you brushed against the bush (cos it means that the plant is willing to relinquish those berries). And guess what? Some of them were actually very tasty!

Others around me had huge, humongous berries. Why pick the large ones? They don't necessarily promise much flavor.

In any case, I ended up with a huge container of lovely blueberries, and then proceeded on to get some peaches (I didn't pick these myself). The peaches were gorgeous, bursting with summery, light yet rich, flavorful rays of stunningly sweet flesh. Golden orange, with coral red streaks patterned in a spidery crawl all over its smooth surface. Yummy and fantastically ephemerally beautiful. YUM.

In any case, I'm happy now! I just hiked for 3 hours at Sleeping Giant yesterday! Thought very little, and just concentrated on putting my next foot in front of my current foot. My hiking compatriot seemed to be nonchalantly hopping around, but unlike most people, I do not possess dextrous feet (have you seen how many scars I've collected over the decades??!).

So, life is very much like that. Just walk, stomp, crawl, hop, slither, or fly on, depending on your mood. Oftentimes, it doesn't even give a hoot about your mood. You just have to go with the times, change accordingly, be flexible, and try your best to move on. Woohoo!

My lab experiments are working! YAYYAYYAYYAYYAY.

Sunday, July 8, 2007

I sniff, therefore I am

Few things in this world evoke memories more vivid than that triggered by the sense of smell.

Smell can trigger evil – in the case of the protagonist in Perfume: the Story of a Murderer, his exquisite sense of smell and quest for the perfect fragrance drives him to commit 12 murders. Such an impassioned plea for perfection overrides justice, as it turns out that his executioner, the papal state, and the masses fall for the promise embedded in his fragrance-loaded handkerchief, which he had flourishingly swept through the air at the gallows.

When I opened the medicine cabinet in the 2^nd-floor bathroom this evening, I smelt a familiar smell: had I been here before? I knew exactly where I had smelt it – when I was around 13, and in my grandmother’s house. Kind of makes sense, given that these folks are true blue Asians and my grandma’s cabinet is rather Asian, except that I don’t see how Indian and Chinese items can smell similar. Perhaps this represents globalization on the run.

In any case, have you ever suddenly “lost” your sense of smell such that you cannot smell anything around you? No, it is not the flu or black gold. Rather, as you inhale, you get intoxicated with a very strange déjà vu sensation. This happens around twice a year, and I have come to treat this as a sort of hint that something major is about to happen in my life.

That is just a short diatribe on the sense of smell. It might seem unimportant, but imagine, if you worked in a lab, and were surrounded by phenol-chloroform fumes, wouldn’t you be glad to know in advance that you are being poisoned or choked by those fumes? Without smell, by golly, you’re dead meat. And for mosquitoes, the sense of smell is essential: you smell living flesh, criss-crossed with huge veins through which delicious nutrient-rich fresh blood rushes. Imagine the joy surging through each mosquito as it pierces through the thick epidermis and reaches the *exact* spot where the optimal blood pressure for sufficiently inflating its little belly lies. The sense of smell (and of course, the ability to monitor heat distribution) matters a lot. Unfortunately, you cannot help but curse evolution, and the resulting selection for better mosquitoes with more efficiently blood-searching mechanisms, when you’re the victim, as I was. I am now nursing huge lines of mosquito bites – these lines delineate the blood vessel distribution of my entire circulatory system.

Now of course, I am exaggerating. Don’t worry, mom & dad!

Saturday, July 7, 2007

French vs. German

References:
http://www.centrelink.gov.au/internet/internet.nsf/languages/fr.htm (French text)
http://www.centrelink.gov.au/internet/internet.nsf/languages/de.htm (German text)
http://people.westminstercollege.edu/faculty/mmarkowski/212/5/colis.html (Roman Coliseum)
http://faculty.evansville.edu/rl29/art105/img/greek_paestum.jpg (Greek Paestum)
http://www.josephkaynephoto.com/ (for the photograph)
http://mollishka.blogspot.com/2006/05/universe-chandelier.html (the amazing, gorgeous, and scientifically-accurate aluminium/glass sculpture of the universe; of course, it's limited by science itself.)

Teach me.

Humanities class: Roman architecture vs. Greek architecture

Lang class: French vs. German

Art class: Photography vs. Sculpture

I can't decide!
What do you think? Tell me which to take. All seem equally exciting!

I found this very interesting article/blog entry at:
http://mollishka.blogspot.com/2006/05/universe-chandelier.html

An article on the sculpture "The End of Modernity" (an awful title) appeared this past Sunday in the New York Times art section. The sculpture, currently on display in New York City the Andrea Rosen Gallery in Chelsea (no clue where that is), is basically a sculpture of the universe. The article tells the story better than I can, but basically, the artist, Josiah McElheny, was in residence at Ohio State, and decided he wanted to make a scientifically sound sculpture of the Big Bang. So he called up our resident cosmologist, David Weinberg, and once David realized that this guy was serious, they began to design the thing.

The astronomy department took a bit of a field trip over to the Wexner Center sometime during winter quarter when the sculpture was still on display there. David and Josiah were both there to explain and discuss it. I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the whole thing. I'm not usually one for art; I often find myself wanting to feel something, but simply not being as affected as I'd like to be. Then there are the times when I feel as if the artist is trying to hard to add meaning that just isn't there; they know I should be strongly affected by good art, but they just can't get me there. They're trying too hard. Anyhow, I was highly impressed with Josiah. At a first impression, he's a stereotypical artist in many ways; he's short, speaks with a bit of a high-pitched voice, and kind of "off" as compared to normal people. Whereby normal people, I mean, astronomers, which isn't a fair comparison at all. But he had actually learned a great deal of cosmology, actually poured himself into this project, and was quite clearly deeply passionate about art and beauty and, most importantly, trying to leave an impression on people through art. I respect that, and, somehow, having respect for the artist helped me love the sculpture even more.

The sculpture itself is more representative of the Universe than of the Big Bang. Structurally, it's based on chandeliers from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Made entirely of aluminum and blown glass, the central aluminum sphere hangs from the ceiling at about 5 feet above the floor (approximately my eye level). This sphere represents the "surface of last scattering," or the time at which atoms first formed in the universe and light wasn't banging into charged particles left and right anymore, and so could stream freely throughout the universe for the first time. When you hear people talking about the cosmic microwave background, it is the light that has been going along its merry way until hitting our detectors that they are talking about. Basically, it's as far back as we can see in the universe, because before then, the universe was opaque. So that's the sphere in the middle. Distance from the center of the sculpture represents time; the further out from the center, the later the time. The lightbulbs represent quasars (incredibly bright found at the centers of some galaxies), and the glass pieces represent galaxies. The glass pieces come in groups at the end of the sticks, accurately representing the clustering of galaxies at different points in time. There are two shapes of glass pieces: the disks represent spiral galaxies (like the Milky Way) and the spheres represent elliptical galaxies. One of the really cool parts of this sculpture is that the number and clustering of lightbulbs (quasars) and glass pieces (galaxies) at different redshifts (distances from the center) is based on science. It's not just some guy saying, hey, it'd look nice like this, but rather, David's code saying, hey, you should put the pieces on like this. It became a difficult, and interesting, problem when the fact that this thing has to hang from the ceiling without falling over. Very cool indeed. Orginally, it was going to be made out of chrome (Josiah knew of some guys who like to make big sculptures out of chrome and glass---go figure), but, uhm, chrome is kind of heavy. The other fun part is the fact that you've got all these clusters of galaxies (okay, bits of glass) coming off of all of these rods, and you need to position them in such a way that they don't touch each other.

Personally, as art, I was fairly affected by this sculpture. It's huge. It's hanging in a room with plain white walls---there it is---the entire universe. That's the thing I want to understand, to know. One of the unexpected side effects of having all of the metallic parts be shiny aluminum is that you can see your reflection in it. And the central sphere? It curves away from you, so your reflection looks terribly small and far away. And insignificant. I liked sitting on the floor ten feet away from the sculpture, staring at all the bits, and my little reflections, until I felt as if I needed to scream or else I'd fall off the earth. Now that's being affected by art.