Writing about art, technology, food, and other benefits of being human
I had never heard of the Cornwells before finding this gem of a film on archive.org, but I am glad I know about their work now. The film shown below is from 1977, and does a good job of explaining congruent triangles. It is a bit slow at first, but the last 90 seconds really are beautiful. It is like Leger or Seurat had an opportunity to make a film for your high school geometry class.
I usually browse the films in the AV Geeks collection looking for the unintentionally artful – educational films about cafeteria manners or sensible food shopping can be be high-camp entertainment. Democracy has that 1945 look and feel, but the didactic content is still very relevant.
The companion film, Despotism, is also worth watching.
The train station in Barstow California is rather lonely, like most train stations in the US. It is, however, the home of the Route 66 Museum, so if you find yourself in Barstow with a little bit of time to spare, make the drive through town, over to the station, and take a look at some artifacts of the Great American Highway.
Local eggs, nice colors.
Please let the omelet be worthy.
It was a gorgeous day in San Francisco, almost too nice a day to spend indoors.
Luckily the time indoors was spent listening to engaged and engaging people talk about interesting things. How to build support for right-to-left languages when coding themes for WordPress, or how an exploratory learning model can be a better approach to software design.
WordPress 3 is going to be the bomb, no doubt.
The Cook’s Illustrated team came up with a very effective bagel recipe for the home kitchen. When I use it, I deviate from the instructions in two ways. I knead the dough by hand since I don’t have a KitchenAid mixer, and I don’t use high gluten flour, instead concocting my own by adding some Bob’s Red Mill vital wheat gluten to King Arthur’s bread flour.
Eight bagels doesn’t seem like a huge reward for the effort involved, but once you have been through the process two or three times, it is fairly simple. A mixer would help, since the dough is very stiff.
Since the formed bagels are refrigerated for eight hours before the boiling and baking, the work is divided into two short sessions. That means you can have freshly baked bagels for breakfast in about thirty minutes.
Dagmar Krause is simply one of the best. I do like her earlier work with Slapp Happy, Henry Cow, and the Art Bears, but albums like Supply and Demand or Babble (a collaboration with Kevin Coyne) are more to my taste now.
This video is from 1984 according to the notes on youtube. I haven’t heard anyone perform a finer version of the song.
November 5 2010: I removed the link to the video because the YouTube user’s account was suspended….
I like this because:
1. It’s a nice example of how form is emphasized when color is uniform
2. The robot has four eyes.
His photostream has more like this one.
Due to some last minute changes, we had to postpone our going-out-of-California vacation, replacing it with a stay-at-home vacation. Today was the free day (3rd Wednesday of the month) at the California Academy of Sciences, so we drove to Golden Gate Park to finally see the new building. There is a lot to like, certainly. Though it was filled to capacity, it was comfortable.
I took the photo above with my iPhone, using the Pano application for stitching together panoramic photos. I enjoy using Pano for building these quirky, bent-perspective montages. The ghosts of people add a nice touch too, I think. This links to the full size, 6929 pixels wide image.