See my post from yesterday on the art of Rich Holoch, KY6R.
See his photos directly on Flickr for even more.
Here is the second of his photo sets that I promised I’d feature:
KY6R Art Gallery (1)
Some weird and wonderful physical-art photos from KY6R. Rich Holoch has been by profession a database administrator (DBA), now an amazing physical-and-photographic artist, and for a long time an amateur radio operator (thus the “KY6R”). At one time I suffered the amateur radio thing myself, and although still licensed, I am far less an afficionado than Rich is. His interest is DX meaning distance and low power [QRP] amateur radio operation. A couple of watts of power and contacting someone on the other side of the globe. (Or maybe bouncing a radio signal off the moon and listening for an echo.)
I particularly like Rich’s approach of using found objects, which trigger nostalgia, and positioning and lighting them creatively. Some might describe his work as spooky or weird as well as completely intriguing.
I’m going to feature two sets of KY6R photos, one set today and one set tomorrow – here is the first:
John Francis- Walking the Earth, Silently
John Francis is a really motivated learner and educator. He walked the world for 17 years silently. Yes, without speaking. And today he is most definitely talking about it. What he says contains a lot of messages—there’s certainly one in there for you. [I heard him speak at the Digital Earth Symposium, held at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007.]
In 1971 he witnessed two tankers colliding, creating an oil spill in San Francisco Bay, and decided to give up riding in motorized vehicles. He began walking everywhere he went. “I thought that if I started walking, everyone would follow.” So on his 27th birthday, he decided he would stop speaking for just one day “to give it a rest.” “I have to tell you it was a very moving experience…for the very first time I began listening.” He realized that (as a regular speaking human) he listened to only the first few words or sentences when someone was talking, and then “my mind would race ahead” thinking about what “I was going to say in response.” He decided to do this for another day, and another day, and this stretched to a year, and then lasted 17 years. [Continue reading and you can also view the TED talk given by John Francis in 2008…] [Read more…]
The Buddha gets ready for ski season
Wow — I was flying down some intermediate (meaning “easy”) alpine ski run at Squaw Valley early this year when I noticed a pair of colorful skis flashing in front of me. At the top of the lift I stopped the guy who was wearing them and inquired because I noticed they were branded Lhasa skis and had a drawing of the Potola Palace on their tail.
Hmm… Tibet, mountains, snow… very cool, and this looked like fun. These are fat (also phat[1]) skis in two senses — first, they are wide and work well in deep snow and conditions where there’s piles of snow all over the runs — and second, phat in the sense that they’d let you ski with great exhiliration and joy all over the slopes in varying conditions. [Read more…]
We await a galaxy-rise – a morning filled with 400 billion suns
During my lifetime I have gone from viewing stars thorough binoculars, and once through a 40-inch refracting telescope (Yerkes Observatory was just miles from my home – I viewed once as a child) to the amazing deep-space digital views provided by the orbiting Hubble Telescope. I watched Halley’s comet in 1986 from the deck of my home in San Francisco, through 10x binoculars. During my lifetime, scientists dealing with cosmology have advanced our thinking about how the universe (and possible 10^10^10^7 parallel universes — oh, sorry, must not forget I am actually a mathematician and the correct notation is 1010107) may have gotten to its current state and where it might be going. {the photo is Phil Plaitt, the “Bad Astronomer” — thanks, Phil, for pointing me to the video which you can play below}
This music video is a trippy artistic rephrasing of how two thinkers talked about the meaning and inspiration of all of this.
[youtube zSgiXGELjbc]
Please also continue reading for footnotes and a second video where Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan discuss the universe…