A Good Photo

What a good photo of Ian Jewitt this is!

A Colorful Hilbert Something or Other

A nice image from the Ogre's Gallery.

"The Mom Song Sung to William Tell Overture"

My wife showed me the good YouTube video, "The Mom Song Sung to William Tell Overture".

Is The World Evil?

Three Hierarchies quotes Newman thus:

One literature may be better than another, but bad will be the best, when weighed in the balance of truth and morality. It cannot be otherwise; human nature is in all ages and all countries the same; and its literature, therefore, will ever and everywhere be one and the same also. Man's work will savour of man; in his elements and powers excellent and admirable, but prone to disorder and excess, to error and to sin. Such too will be his literature; it will have the beauty and the fierceness, the sweetness and the rankness, of the natural man, and, with all its richness and greatness, will necessarily offend the senses of those who, in the Apostle's words, are really "exercised to discern between good and evil."

Newman's hostile admiration to secular literature is perhaps in the same spirit as ascetism generally: if it feels good, don't do it. This has both Protestant and Roman Catholic versions. I suppose it's like the gnostic view that the body is bad. The other, correct, view is that God gave us the world to enjoy rather than as a damning distraction.

http://haloscan.com/tb/catwood/1080069888189988950

A Good Photo from Mr. Lileks

A prettty picture

From DAS's doodles page.

M.R. sent me a link to a page describing a $125,000 bicycle. It looks like it lacks fenders or kickstand, so I'm not enthusiastic. My other question is this:

What kind of lock does it come with?

Reuleaux Triangle

This Reuleaux Triangle from Wolfram/Mathematica is a nice idea for a shape. It is the shape a Wankel engine takes, perhaps because you can rotate this triangle inside a square as shown at the Wolfram site.

Some Math Graphics

Dean Anton Sherwood has lots of good math graphics at http://www.ogre.nu/doodle/#chainmail. Here's one.

Hebborn: An Example of Why Libel Laws Are Bad

Eric Hebborn's career gives us an example of why strict libel laws are bad. Wikipedia says:

In 1978 a curator at the National Gallery of Artin Washington DC , Konrad Oberhuber, was examining a pair of drawings he had purchased for the museum from Colnaghi a seemingly reputable old-master dealer in London, one by Savelli Sperandio and the other by Francesco del Cossa. Oberhuber noticed that two drawings had been executed on the same kind of paper.

Oberhuber was taken aback by the similarities of the paper used in the two pieces and decided to alert his colleagues in the art world. Upon finding another fake "Cossa" at the Morgan Library, this one having passed through the hands of at least three experts, Oberhuber contacted Colnaghi, the source of all three fakes. Colnaghi, in turn, informed the worried curators that all three had been acquired from Hebborn.[1]

Colnaghi waited a full eighteen months before revealing the deception to the media, and, even then never mentioned Hebborn's name, for fear of a libel suit. Alice Beckett states that she was told '...no one talks about him...The trouble is he's too good'[4]. Thus Hebborn continued to create his forgeries, changing his style slightly to avoid any further unmasking, and manufactured at least 500 more drawings between 1978 and 1988.[2]

Reproductions in Museums

I like it that the Victoria and Albert Museum and the London Natural History Museum both have lots of items that are reproductions rather than originals. At the VA there is a room of medieval sculpture reproductions.

Eggs

At the Natural History Museum there are lots of casts of fossils from other collections. I think of the marine animal fossil hall in particular-- the pleiosaurs and mosasaurs.

Banfield in his book The Maculate Muse called for this.

The Ugly Environment. Steve Sailer points us to the NY Times article, "Why Are They Greener Than We Are?". The article is about how architects are trying to design buildings that are ``green'' and "sustainable", if I may use the misleading buzzwords. What struck me, though, is how uniformly ugly they are. (The buildings, not the architects). They are eyesores, insults to their environment.

"Historically, Germany’s industrial waste flowed down the Rhine to be deposited in Rotterdam’s harbor. “We are the main collecting point for all of Europe’s pollution, its garbage dump,” he said with a smile.

Like many of his contemporaries, Neutelings doesn’t see this landscape as ugly. Nor does he see the creation of bold industrial forms and a sustainable environment as necessarily in conflict. Neutelings and Riedijk’s recently completed Shipping and Transport College, which rises at the edge of an aging industrial pier, looks perfectly at home. The building’s cantilevered top evokes a gigantic periscope; its corrugated metal skin brings to mind the stacked shipping containers still scattered around the port."

Giclee (pronounced "zhee-clay") reproductions were originally developed in 1989 as a plate-less method of fine art printing. The word Giclée is French for "to spray " and is a registered trade name of The 'IRIS' Printer. ... www.artloft.com/terms.htm

Alpha Course. My son wanted me to take a picture of this Alpha Course pamphlet, which is indeed striking.

An Alpha Course Pamphlet

Penmanship. A good page on penmanship, featuring scans of old instruction books, is "Lessons in Calligraphy and Penmanship" . I was looking for a cursive alphabet page for my daughter and couldn't find any page that had all the letters in cursive upper and lower case in beautiful handwriting. "ALPHABET PRACTICE - WRITING WORKSHEETS" has good dotted worksheets for all-caps or all-small and for individual letters repeated over a page that are at least acceptable in quality.

Free Classical Sheetmusic Downloads. This is harder to find than I thought it would be. For page-by-page GIF files, try the Indiana University Library Variations site. It has the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, which is what I was looking for. The largest classical site seems to be Sheet Music Archive, which says it allows two free downloads of pdf files per day. I only succeeded with one, a fine file, and then for the next two days it's said Download Limit Exceeded. For $20 you can get a membership, though. Zimmusic is a smaller site where I found some small-size Beethoven bagatelles. None of these are entirely satisfactory, but they are better than the many other sites I came across.

A Grand Stone Head. From inside Dore Abbey in Herefordshire. Click the image to enlarge it.